In a spectacularly grim twist on the adage 'what goes up must come down,' eleven skydivers and their pilot met their maker in eastern France yesterday, proving definitively that even the most joyous of human pursuits can be rudely interrupted by the cold, hard laws of physics. The aircraft, a veteran of a thousand daredevil journeys, apparently decided it had had quite enough of this 'up' nonsense and made its own unilateral decision to return to terra firma with a haste that can only be described as unseemly.
Witnesses report seeing the plane performing what aviation experts are calling 'an unscheduled descent with extra gravity.' One local farmer, who asked not to be named for fear of being interviewed, described the sight: 'It was like watching a majestic metal bird suddenly remember it was actually a very heavy brick. The silence afterwards was the loudest thing I've ever heard.'
Now, the mandatory hand-wringing over aviation safety protocols has begun. Bureaucrats with clipboards and the sort of spectacles that magnify both vision and pomposity will no doubt convene to discuss 'best practices' and 'standard operating procedures.' They will produce reports thicker than a politician's promises, filled with jargon that translates roughly to 'we have no idea what happened, but we'll pretend we do.' The real question, the one that tickles the part of my brain that has been marinating in gin since breakfast, is this: why do we insist on pretending that strapping ourselves to a metal tube and hurtling through the sky at 500 miles per hour is a perfectly safe form of transport?
Let us not forget the sheer absurdity of skydiving itself. These brave (or perhaps just extremely bored) souls willingly leap out of a perfectly functional aircraft in a bid to experience a fleeting moment of freefall before relying on a piece of fabric folded with the care of a Tetris champion to save them from becoming a human pancake. And we, the ground-bound masses, clap them on the back, call them heroes, and wonder why we feel so bloody ordinary.
The crash in eastern France is being treated as a tragedy, and it is. Eleven families are now missing a piece of their world. But let us also treat it as a mirror. A mirror held up to our own collective delusion that we have somehow tamed the skies. We haven't. The sky is a temperamental, capricious beast that occasionally decides to swat us down like annoying flies. And all the safety protocols in the world won't change that. They are merely the equivalent of a lucky rabbit's foot, a comforting lie we tell ourselves as we buckle our seatbelts and order another tiny bottle of wine.
Aviation safety will be scrutinised. Experts will opine. Regulations may (or may not) be tightened. But the fundamental truth remains: when a plane decides to fall, it falls. The rest is just theatre. As for the skydivers, I prefer to think of them not as victims, but as eleven people who spent their final moments doing something they loved, something that reminded them they were alive, right up until the moment they weren't. And that, dear reader, is infinitely more interesting than a bureaucracy's attempt to explain the inexplicable.
