It was not Mort Decker who needed to be careful, but my inherently awkward self, clambering over stacks of metal rods, stumbling constantly, battling to get the count right, hooking up the chain. I did myself innumerable minor injuries from falls and trips and generally being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The hardest thing was to remember not to be standing on the particular bundle of metal rods or railings that Mort was presently lifting. Too often I was.
 “Silly bugger,” Mort would mutter as I took another nosedive.

 

“Cut the switches!” he shouted to the girl. One by one she snapped them off. The din of the engines died away, leaving in the cabin the hum of gyros and radio equipment, and outside the screaming tyres.
Prentiss stared ahead in fascinated horror. With no sound of engines, the aircraft was still travelling fast, the ground leaping past them in a blur. He could see a big checker-board marking the turn at the end of the runway. In the fraction of a second his eyes registered the picture of the fire truck, its driver falling to the ground in his scramble to get away.
   Treleaven’s voice burst into his ears with the force of a blow. “Ground-loop it to the left. Ground-loop it to the left!”
Making an instantaneous decision, Prentiss put his left foot on the rubber pedal and threw all his weight behind it, pressing it forward savagely.
Veering suddenly from the runway, the aircraft began to swing in an arc. Flung from one side of the seat to the other, Prentiss struggled to keep the wings clear of the ground. There was a rending volume of noise, a dazzling flash, as the undercarriage ripped away and the aircraft smashed to the ground on its belly. The impact lifted Prentiss clean from his seat. He felt a sharp pain as the seat belt bit deeply into his flesh.
“Get your head down!” he yelled. “We’re piling up!”
    They say that everyone watches planes take off and land in the hope that they will get to witness a crash—unless, of course, someone they care about is aboard whereby they pray it won’t crash. I’m not so sure. I’ve witnessed a Caribou land without a nose wheel, been on two airliners that made successful forced landings, and survived a helicopter crash, and the reason I always look is to make damned sure the bloody thing isn’t going to crash on me! But I cannot deny the trill of awe, the astonishment at the magic and the shudder of fear that always sweeps through me when aircraft do their thing. And aeroplane crash stories were always big with me.
    The next newspaper serialisation was of a book that became a prototype—few have been so often imitated and parodied. It’s modern version is the comedy movie Flying High, (called Airplane in USA) followed by a sequel number but this was the first and best. It differs only in that Flight into Danger (called Zero Hour! in USA) is serious. The crew of an airliner suffers food poisoning and passenger George Prentiss—with some fighter experience—takes the controls, with lovely hostess Janet beside him, while in the control tower, Captain Treleaven talks them down. You could have learned to fly from reading the book.
“George, that was probably the lousiest landing in the history of this airport...”
    In such laconic style, they get down safely.
    Arthur Hailey created not one but two monsters. The first was the Flying High comedies which spoofed the movie made from his serious novel. The second was the Airport movies, one a year with an increasingly preposterous airliner disaster and huge cast sitting in the seats looking stupid. Supposedly serious, these monsters were even funnier than the send-ups. The first Airport, which Hailey wrote as a novel, wasn’t all that bad. A chaotic night at a busy snow-bound airport with all manner of melodrama snaking around the characters. In the madness that followed—since both novels were attempts at serious works—you have to wonder whether Hailey was completely horrified by the outcome, or if he just  threw his hands in the air and went along with the gag.