crashman

He’s head-down in the back watching the gauges rise into the red and the bright red and yellow system-failure lights blink ON while you’re up front and eyeballs OUT making that beautiful 13-mile curving swoop down and around to the runway heading. He’ll tell you anything important about the plane, and talk you through ONLY anything important you might overlook – this is not a time for chatter or distraction. It’s a scary, busy job just flying a flaming bird: any control or essential hydraulic/electric system might explode, damage adjacent systems and critical lines, or drop offline at any moment, or the stick might just freeze solid like it’s suddenly set in concrete. He’ll remind you that when flightspeed airflow thru the engine-fire ceases, the fire WILL “stagnate”, bloom UP and engulf the aircraft instead of being blown out past and thru the exhaust. Heat rises in still air…

And his wingman is telling him his R afterburner is OUT, and he sees fire…fire.. fire.. that’s NOT going out!

They had an arrestor-cable set out for him at the far end, but he couldn’t catch it and couldn’t risk overturning the burning bird.when he overran… no hydraulics, no brakes, no flaps! I’d punch too: sliding to a halt trapped upside-down in a mass of already- flaming kerosene and aluminum is not a good way to turn in your license…

So they punched and went for a little butt-rocket ride up and away, before automatic seat-separation left them floating gently back down. Maybe a little bit spine-shorter than when they boarded the aircraft for the flight… but alive and well and fit to fly again with a little rest – and the traditional double-shot of whiskey from the flight surgeon, after he/she has checked you out and determined you just need to lie down for a while. Stress medicine! Welcome to the Caterpillar Club!

This guy was good, he only even started breathing heavy when the runway threshold came closer.. and closer… any oscillation of the pitch attitude would be deadly at this point… steady now.. flare… touchdown.. hold her straight with rudder… aannd -nope! NO braking action, she’s going off the far end! Time to leave, and their heads are braced back and spine STRAIGHT, with 2 sets of hands already on the yellow- striped handles that will automatically blow the canopy, pull their ankles back out of the way of the panel, and safely boost them clear, FAST up and awwaaaayy…

And finally the comic relief when they’re out and the HUD-cam and the now-unmanned bird’s off into the far-end weeds – the feminine voice of the emergency annunciator (usually called “Bitching Betty”) says “bingo fuel!” – i.e. you’re critically low ‘cos the sloshing around in the crackup tripped the low-fuel sensor.. and yes, the LEFT engine is now also overtemp in the FTIT (Turbine Internal Temperature) – probably because its intake dug into the dirt!

Bitch all you want, Betty! They’re gone upwards FAST and floating down gently courtesy of some very fine ejection or “crew egress” systems design engineers, and looking forward to the truck ride back to debriefing lounge. Betty’s problems belong to the firetrucks and the salvage crew chief now. But she’ll get fixed up and fly again.

And so will the fine, fine men that flew her back home.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=8df_1205185501

Regards,

Dan

Awww, the hell with it! (puts gun down on table, seizes glass from atop Ian’s head, fills it to the brim with fine Scotch and hands it to him….)

Here Ian, you’ll need a little pick-me-up before we go flying today – drink it all down now, mate! You’ll be glad of it a bit later… and as we roar on down the runway, totally dependent on a pounding, shaking piston engine and its irregular series of internal detonations for our very lives, muse on this: William Burroughs died at a ripe old age, as a world-famous writer and visionary surrealist artist… but who grieves for his poor wife? Who indeed…?

Pass me that bottle, please, Ian. I’m sorry, there will be no flight today, you have made me think too much- always a risky act in itself, here among the Ballardians. And yes, I admit it: every time I buckle in, there is that lingering sense of woe in the back of my mind… it’s like an amnesia, an unknown grief for people I never knew. Yes, that’s it, – AMNESIA (Long-Term Memory Loss)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihih_XqeJv0

Would I take a car ride with JGB in 1975?

Would I do the William Tell routine with William Burroughs in 1959?

Pass me the glass, Crashman. But check your sights first….

On this site, (and hopefully in my little video experiment) you will always find my finger pointing in JGB’s direction -and may modern medicine lengthen his life! And so here I will step aside and move on, taking my cue from the Oracle himself: Here it is, take it as you find it: like it, dislike it, excoriate or condemn the work or me personally or praise the work – it really makes no difference now. Your opinions and choices are ALWAYS your own, and you are most certainly entitled to them. In all the interviews I have seen with JGB, he certainly never seems to take any criticism personally, but rather returns it with kindness, and a general desire to explain himself and make his own work understood better – by even those who condemn it in the sharpest and most personal terms. These personally condemnatory critics are merely confusing the man who created it with the work itself…

This Experiment, like a novel, has been written down in video-bits and words -in its intention and rather surprising results- to the best of my poor abilities and is now finished. Simon, our indefatigable Publisher of all things Ballardian, has accepted it according to his own Ballardian standards (he is a free Webmaster and quite a gentleman, and the only person whom I know of that has achieved a Doctorate in Ballardianism -remarkable indeed!) The writing, the videomaking, and all of this work is over and done, the “book” may be read by anyone interested and then laid aside. But I am VERY gratified to see that Simon Sellars found my poor offerings suitable enough to make accessible to us who sit at the Ballardian table… I can only imagine what Mr. Ballard went through in 1974, as critical reaction to his novel came in! And again in 1997, with the Cronenberg film.

Did he feel personally attacked by the critics who confused the work with the Man behind it? I think not… and is he a warm, kind, and friendly person who loves others and finds delight in their company? Certainly he is, he said so himself, and his every personal act, spoken word, or appearance is consistent with that. He had no desire that readers of *Crash* and the viewers of the film made of the work should take it upon themselves as some sort of license to drive maniacally and injure others. He in fact seems to have found it incomprehensibly ridiculous that the British Film Board would see it as such a thing. I can merely hope you would find me so as well. Like JGB, I seriously doubt that any relatively sane fans of violent movies and fiction about murderers would take them as an invitation run out and shoot or kill someone. Perhaps “relatively sane” are the key words here…?

And I can assure you that the liberation of mechanical atmospheric and Space-flight are purely joyous to me – and I am a human being like you, with all the faults and perhaps some of the few merits that go with being human. I wept openly upon witnessing the Challenger and Columbia spaceflight-disasters on television… those superb Astronauts died while lifting us all to the stars, and willingly took the great risks involved.

Like JGB, I’d like to think that I certainly take no sick, pathological pleasure in the sufferings of others – but it IS necessary to consider this technological violence, and even sometimes to personally witness it. JGB has expressly stated that the interpretation of this at all possible levels is the basic task of any serious modern writer – and who here would disagree?

(see: SWEET CRASH DREAMS http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aixfIcSm7U )

I know many people who have lost their parents, friends, and colleagues to serious disability or death in air and motor disasters, as most of us now -unfortunately- do.
Yet as pilots, as drivers, as participants in our society itself, we all must now witness -and sometimes even participate in- all of this. It is, as always, the obscure depths of the human mind, and our rapidly-evolving subconsciously-shaped society -at the often cruelly psychotic and anti-humanistic dissociative mercies of its own techno-environment, collective mass psychosis, and psychically disturbing design and architecture- that are the true fascination here. Again, Mr. Ballard guides us all. (And surely not with my own preceding long and syntactically clumsy sentence!)

I’ll close by answering your final question: because of the peculiarly invasive nature of the Internet and my desire, like Mr. Ballard’s, to keep at least some degree of personal privacy, I have found it necessary to write here and have my videos hosted rather anonymously: I must quite literally hide myself behind a pseudonym. JGB now finds himself -willingly or not- a public celebrity, a status that my own trivial work certainly does not merit and that I have no desire for.

But thanks to Simon, I am able to be granted a bit of a personal interview about this experiment by interested persons like you, with an opportunity to be asked questions and to respond freely here, among our fellow Ballardians. So let me answer your final question with a Socratically Ballardian one of my own. Should you take a plane ride with me? Well, I certainly don’t know if you would be comfortable: you have no way of knowing me or my level of piloting skill and dedication to flight safety personally. And my chosen pseudonym is indeed rather intimidating (and also deliberately designed to be non-unique to all the disturbingly-omniscient Internet search engines: it turns out that there are many “Crashmen” out there). But would you gladly have taken a long, fast car journey with Mr. Ballard at the wheel in 1975? I certainly would…. and I’d bet that you would too.

Closing now with best regards to all the thoughtful and kind commenters and fellow Ballardians above (and again with especial thanks to Simon),
I must remain,
the Crashman.

would it be wise to ask for a flight in a low flying aircraft from a man called crashman if i’m ever in your neck of the woods?

And the videos, for me, are too linear. They need to be slowed down to the point were they barely move, like wildlife footage of an unfurling flower filmed over days, only in reverse.

All that said, I’m glad your stuffs on the site. I’ve enjoyed reading the comments.

So, why do these videos have 1.3 million hits …? I in no way wish to denigrate what you’re saying – I consider you a fellow astronaut of inner space (an astronaut with a pilot’s license!) – but won’t videos of beheadings in Iraq have equal numbers of hits? Are they Ballardian? Is something other than blood lust at work there?

I don’t think I can sum up JGB’s work in the late ’sixties and early ’seventies here. I take it for granted that there will be a latent reason behind 1.3 million people viewing your videos. I don’t know … Flight is an erotic dream, so … flight-death = orgasm…?

There’s a book I’ve been wanting to read; I think it’s called black box recorder. JGB had it in his top ten books in User’s Guide to the Millenium. It’s comprised of edited transcripts taken from black box recorders recovered from fatal air accidents – the last words of pilots as they struggle to save their aircraft. I think this might be more my cup of tea.

Maybe I’ll watch the videos after dinner … don’t know.

ps. I’ve just bought a plastic lobster and an old telephone from two charity shops – saw them absolutely by chance – the miracle of the street. I’m more a diletante than a Vaughan.

Thank you Mr. Parkinson! Finally someone explicitly cuts to the core of the Experiment here -and why I called it an “Experiment” in the first place. And just for the record, I’ve been “beyond psychiatric help” ever since I read my first JGB short story… when I was about eleven years of age. Would it surprise you to learn that I also currently hold a major American university doctorate and a rather hard-to-get professional license to do other things than just pilot airplanes and make videos like these – just for the purpose of observing other people’s reactions to them? I thought it might. Try looking at the videos before you judge them; it’s quite definitely the crux of the experiment. If you’re just expecting to see dead bodies, you’ll be quite disappointed. But your insight into the Ballardian core of this little Experiment is unsurpassed, so far – except by Simon, and a few of the people at BoingBoing.

Please answer me this, I’m still puzzling over it – why do these videos now have well over 1.3 Million unique views on YouTube alone? Could it be.. that perhaps millions of others are seeing something there that you have chosen to refuse to watch? Why did they make such a choice in the first place – with so much else competing for their finite time and attention-spans? I am not at work here, sir. Something else is. What is it?

As Milan Kundera (not a fan) says: we’re afraid of heights because we want to throw ourselves to our deaths. And technology provides ever greater heights.

I didnt watch the videos. I think crashman is beyond psychiatric help. And I, too, won’t be taking a flight with him in a hurry. Maybe I’m wrong, but for what it’s worth I don’t think JGB would want to watch them either – I think he would want to watch you watching them…

et cetera.

There’s nothing at all modern, much less post-modern, about the urge to revel in death.

The Coliseum in Rome in a monument to how potent the urge is.

“Ballardian”? Balls!

I have a lifelong interest in and love of aviation, and certainly am much more attracted by the pure joyous freedom of mechanical flight in 3 dimensions and excitement of conquering Gravity – as Mankind has dreamed of for millennia now. Flying a plane is a joyous experience for me. The idea of safety and AVOIDING crashing the plane is obviously at the root of ALL aviation training – but as one of my friends said upon seeing these videos, “I generally enjoy flying, but every time I buckle in, there a lingering sense of woe in the back of my mind…”

Probably the oddest result of the experiment was when I posted links to these videos on some other pilot-oriented aviation sites I frequent – to my amazement, the feedback from other pilots was just about 100% positive and interested. They instinctively understand these films – they show what we must AVOID and learn from, upon pain of death. I expected the videos to be dismissed immediately as some sort of disgusting, ghoulish crash-fetishism – but that did not occur. Even from professional airline pilots and actual Government-agency aircraft-accident investigators.

I can assure you then, that very few real aviators dismiss these as mere ghoulish air-CRASH techoviolence for its own sake… and you may have noticed that there are about as many interesting nonfatal accidents and laboratory crash-safety testing videos interwoven into my vids as there are fatalities. The reality here is about the same as with cars – there are many more NON-fatal accidents that occur daily, rather than fatal and tragic violent crashes. Yet both airshows and car-racing draw huge crowds, possibly because of the sheer danger of dangerous maneuvers being performed at such speeds, and the ever-present possibility of witnessing a violent crash… who can say? It is easy to deplore the tragedy and human agony involved – but JGB never shrank away from the subject, and neither did I.

To enlarge on the statement JGB made in the film I referenced on the Ballardian YouTube channel above, I might say that from a simple examination of the technologies involved, the designs that suggest an extension of Man’s speed, power and sexuality expressed in steel, jet-power, chromium, and aluminum – we might be able to deduce every psychologically important aspect of our current society and culture from simply examining the structure and intentional design of a modern airliner or military fighter-jet.

Among pilots, your rank and status is certainly directly related to the power, size and design of the aircraft you fly, in the same way that people express themselves by their consumer-choices in automobile design… and MANY pilots express themselves and their relation to their aircraft in openly sexual terms.

Planes are always female, like ships, and Cronenberg’s film of *Crash* visually smacks us with the sexy curves of aircraft aerodynamic structures, how the smooth, elegant curves of a nose cowling or wing-surface suggest the sensuous curves of a beautiful woman’s body… and the film includes a rather explicit scene of a sexual encounter in an aircraft hangar. Who would dispute that speed, power, and deliberately sensually suggestive vehicle-design is sexy? I wouldn’t – to me the delightful sensations of a wild, rolling, diving, sharp-turning free maneuvering flight are second only to an actual sexual experience…and even after I land, I walk away with that kind of breathless exhilaration dominating my emotional state. It is a rare thrill indeed, and the future promises even better technology – the ability to fly free in Space itself, weightless and far above all Earthly concerns.

Tell you what, mate: Enjoy this computer-produced video of a rocketplane flight (this spacecraft has been built, and will actually fly before 2010 is over, google “xcor lynx”). Then tell me if the sheer rush of accelerating to Mach 2 and heading straight up into space on four thundering rocket engines doesn’t induce a quasi-sexual power and gratification-feeling. I think it’s an unbeatable thrill, as so many astronauts have already expressed.

See this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a-l1tb1rPg

Then try THIS – the European EADS Astrium rocketplane demo vid, beautiful women rocketing into Space in tight spacesuits – then weightless, dreamy suborbital flight:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7300000/newsid_7300600/7300678.stm?bw=nb&mp=wm&news=1&ms3=6&ms_javascript=true&nol_storyid=7300678&bbcws=2

(double-click on the 2nd video for full-screen, also hit the Full-screen control on the
YouTube Lynx Rocketplane video.. and for the FULL experience, also turn your sound UP!)

Thanks to all commenters! – Crashman

as for your bold assumption that “any mentality that thinks that people are only interested in aviation because of crashes is a naive and deluded and disturbed one projecting its own Rorschach blood-death orgasm pathologies onto the wider public”, as far as i can see the crashman is suggesting that’s a major, deep-seated and unacknowledged reason why people are interested in aviation, not the *only* reason. big difference, there. and he’s hardly in a club of one.

as it happens, i read a quote from ballard, and i think it was relatively recent in terms of publication, in which he suggests that people go to car races due to a latent desire to see the drivers burned alive in a gasoline apocalypse… i can’t find the quote right now but i’ll certainly have a good look for it.

I think it is clear that the same psychosexual and unconsciously violence-loving (Freudian death wish, anyone?) vicious id-forces are work here within a viewer’s brain as well as in the development of our technological world. Observe how air crashes immediately seize the attention of the daily news on TV, and the public at large, although they represent only a minute part of the various modes of technological harm done us – in America, the yearly automobile crash-death rate approaches that of the entire Vietnam war, yet we are oddly blind to this… You are cetrainly right to have your doubts about what Mr. Ballard’s own opinions might be, Mr. Rae – but I can find the same aviation-as -technodeath themes continuing though much of this work, long after *Crash* was written in 1973.

What surprised me about the experiment was that 1.3 million people chose to view these videos on YouTube alone… and few criticized them as sraarkly and clearly as you did, in calling them “People’s real-life deaths as entertainment. Sigh. Frightening and passe and disturbing and disgusting; choose a negative adjective….” Correct. I agree. Why should this be so? Why do people slow down at auto accident-scenes to view the details of the crash? Why were these violent, shattering aviation-death technopornographic films so popular? Why, indeed, do people go to airshows where pilots perform frighteningly dangerous maneuvers? I am searching for the answers myself.

YouTube only tells me that as of today,1,373,802 persons have chosen to view these videos and this YouTube channel now has 347 subscribers – in about the last 18 months alone. I myself wonder why people would even look at this stuff – but look at it they did, in droves of hundreds of thousands. Why would anyone read or view the Cronenberg movie of *Crash*? This experiment produced confusing data, that can be read on many levels… why would anyone look at an art exhibit that consisted of the smashed vehicles involved in auto crashes, with mannequins representing the victims inside…? Indeed. But it certainly touched something in the psyches of the viewers.

As for the accompanying music, what I tried to choose was music the public itself has chosen as popular at various times. Fitting or not? You’ll have to decide that for yourself. Perhaps it is “rather twee” for that reason, although I confess I had to look that term up – I have seen the word only in the novels of American pop-journalist Tom Wolfe, and the British writer Paul Theroux. And yes, most of the most critical remarks in comments under these YouTube posts had to do with the choice of music – my suggestion to those folks was that they were certainly free to turn off the soundtrack and watch them to the accompaniment of more appropriate music, according to their own tastes….

Because I think the fact is, there IS no music appropriate to awful tragedies like these, unless it would be an eternal slow requiem for the souls of Mankind and our too-fascinated media immersion in spine-chillingly dangerous technology and architecture . And as I said above “This is epistemology, a very question of identity itself: “Who are we?” “Who were you?”.”

I’ll leave you with the videos I myself specifically dedicated to Mr. Ballard, and as always, remain interested in the opinions – positive or negative- of all my fellow Ballardians. Thanks to Simon for publishing this, and I invite you all: let’s go flying now! (Worry not, Mr. Rae, in 28 years of flying myself, I have never even scratched an airplane, you can come for a ride with me anytime – if you care to. )

Thank you all for your perceptive comments, and please do see these two videos – in my admittedly non-objective view, perhaps they most clearly encapsulate the neo-Ballardian message I was experimenting with, the best of the lot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czwp2QMVi7Q BITTERSWEET CRASHING

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aixfIcSm7U SWEET CRASH DREAMS

Thanks to all commenters and viewers, and most especially to Simon -
Crashman

G.

People’s real-life deaths as entertainment. Sigh. Frightening and passe and disturbing and disgusting; choose a negative adjective. Even Ballard himself is now confused and creeped out by Crash and how confused and angry he was when he wrote it. I wonder if he would be truly apply to have inspired such a sociopathic experiment. I have my doubts.

But I would agree about this piece being well-written. For what that’s worth. And I hope I never get into a plane with this guy at the controls!

G.

This blog post was particularly well written though. The Crashman needs a regular blog if he doesn’t already have one