Ten souls walked from the Atlantic. They did not swim. They did not cling to wreckage.
They walked from a fuselage that, by all rational expectation, should have been their coffin. British aviation investigators now sift through the wreckage and the cockpit voice recorder for the precise cocktail of errors and luck that delivered this miracle. But let us skip the preliminary circus of officialdom and address the real story: a pilot did his job.
In an age where we celebrate the mediocre and elevate the incompetent, here is a man who, when the altimeter became a spinning lottery wheel, reached for the ancient virtues of coolness under pressure and technical mastery. We admire this as though it were a unicorn sighting. It should be the baseline.
The dull repetition of modern culture has trained us to expect collapse: the financial system will fail, the government will blunder, the plane will crash. We have become connoisseurs of catastrophe. Yet every day, thousands of aircraft land without incident because of people who still know how to think.
This survival is not a tale of luck. It is a quiet rebuke to our fashionable pessimism. The falling Roman Empire did not cease producing competent men; it simply stopped valuing them.
Let us hope the investigators find nothing more than a standard anomaly corrected by a standard response. That would be the most radical outcome possible: proof that competence still works.
