Go to the stopwatch on your smart phone.
Press start.
Wait for 32 seconds.
Press stop.
Now ask yourself:
What could you do in that time?
Brush your teeth?
Have a shower?
Wear your clothes?
Have a cup of coffee?
None of the above?
Then ask yourself:
Would you be able to make a life or death decision in that time?
Would you WANT to make a life or death decision in that time?
Well, that is apparently the amount of time that the pilots on the Air India Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner, Flight AI 171, from Ahmedabad to Gatwick, had.
From take-off to crash.
32 seconds.
If one has ever peeked into the cockpit of a modern aircraft, then I guess one would comprehend the difficulty even more.
Because people have been talking about and analyzing the videos of that horrible crash.
Expert airmen and air women.
Flyers with thousands of hours of experience.
And they are still unable to definitively state what might have gone wrong.
After more than 30 hours.
They can’t figure it out.
Bird strike?
Dual engine failure?
Incorrect take-off configuration?
Flaps not correctly deployed?
Landing gear not retracted in time?
Hydraulics?
Nah, they just can’t say.
Not yet, not with certainty.
Not without the flight data recorder and the voice recorder, they can’t.
And yet, those poor pilots in that fated cockpit didn’t have 30 hours.
They had the luxury of a full 32 seconds.
To decide.
With certainty.
What in their modern, highly complex airplane, with millions of little knobs and gizmos and gadgets and dials, had actually gone wrong.
What should they do?
Not what should they speculate, but what should they actually do?
Because once they had figured out what had gone wrong, they still had to fix it.
All in a grand total of 32 seconds.
And not 32 seconds of peaceful thinking.
But 32 seconds of horrible frantic thinking, scrambling for ideas, running through mental checklists in the blur of seconds, racking through their brains for everything they had learnt in flight school and thousands of hours of flying, checking, scanning, altimeter, airspeed, stick shaker, what’s going on, why, why, why, with sirens and warnings likely blaring in the background, knowing that what they decide could impact their lives as well as the lives of another 240 souls on board, shit, 240 souls, why, what, how, will I see my baby.
I pick up my own smart phone.
Flick on the stopwatch.
Start.
Let it run to 32 seconds.
What must it be like, then, to know, with utmost certainty, possibly around the 15 second mark, that this was it?
That these would be the last few precious seconds of my life?
To know that things were hopeless, beyond fixing, to press that button on the radio and say those last words:
Mayday, Mayday, Mayday.
Hopefully some day we will know.
Some of the answers at least, I hope.
Of what went on in that cockpit.
What went wrong with that aircraft.
Why did it fall slowly out of the sky?
And hopefully once we know, airlines around the world will scramble to fix things.
To fix airframes, or equipment, or crew, or ground staff or whatever went wrong.
So that these 32 seconds never happen again.
Tonight, before your head touches that soft comfortable pillow, close your eyes.
And say a little prayer.
For 32 seconds.
Better still, pick up that smartphone, yes, the one with the smartwatch, and call someone.
Someone you love.
And let them know.
You love them.
Because life is fragile.
And who knows.
One day, we may only have…
32 seconds.
