The plane was headed for Charlotte, North Carolina, and apparently struck a column of geese at three thousand feet, disabling both engines simultaneously. The captain (fifty-eight years old)—who was not at the time flying the plane—immediately made a series of decisions, none of which was brilliant or exceptional, but all of which showed immediate rational calibration toward a serious danger, one for which the pilot had long prepared. The first thing he did was to take control of the plane. “My airplane,” he announced to his first officer, the standard procedure for a takeover. “Your aircraft,” the officer (age forty-nine) responded.
The pilot first decided against landing at two possible airports and chose the large Hudson Bay instead. He cut speed by lowering wing flaps and made sure that the nose was raised on landing. It was experienced as a “hard landing” by the crew in the rear of the plane, with utensils flying around, but there was no damage to anyone in the craft, beyond a flight attendant’s broken leg. In the captain’s own words:Losing thrust on both engines, at a low speed, at a low altitude, over one of the most densely populated areas on the planet—yes, I knew it was a very challenging situation. I needed to touch down with the wings exactly level . . . with the nose slightly up . . . at a rate that was survivable . . . and just above our minimum flying speed, not below it. And I needed to make all these things happen simultaneously.
The pilot had several advantages. He was very experienced and competent, having been the top Air Force Academy cadet in his class in flying ability and having flown military jets before becoming a commercial pilot. He was trained as a glider pilot, precisely what was required in this situation, the key being to keep both wings out of the water while landing on it. He had taught courses on risk management and catastrophes. He remembered from training that when in a forced landing in water, you should look to land near a boat. Within moments of landing, there were so many boats nearby, large and small, as to risk swamping the already rapidly sinking aircraft. Children as young as eight months and eighteen months emerged alive. Two women who ended up in the frigid waters were rapidly rescued.
The remarkable scene was a source of excitement for several days. The key is that the captain was highly conscious throughout, very well prepared, and ended up doing everything right. When asked whether he prayed, he said he was concentrating too hard: “I would imagine someone in back was taking care of that for me while I was flying the airplane.”
CHAPTER 10
False Historical Narratives
False historical narratives are lies we tell one another about our past. The usual goals are self-glorification and self-justification. Not only are we special, so are our actions and those of our ancestors. We do not act immorally, so we owe nothing to anyone. False historical narratives act like self-deceptions at the group level, insofar as many people believe the same falsehood. If a great majority of the population can be raised on the same false narrative, you have a powerful force available to achieve group unity. Of course, leaders can easily exploit this resource by coupling marching orders with the relevant illusion: German people have long been denied their rightful space, so Dass Deutsche Volk muss Lebensraum haben! (German people must have room in which to live!)—neighbors beware. Or the Jewish people have a divine right to Palestine because ancestors living in the general area some two thousand years ago wrote a book about it—non-Jewish occupants and neighbors better beware. Most people are unconscious of the deception that went into constructing the narrative they now accept as true. Nor are they usually aware of the emotional power of such narratives or that these may entrain long-term effects.
There is a deep contradiction within the study of history between ferreting out the truth regarding the past and constructing a false historical narrative about it. As we have seen in this book, we make up false narratives all the time, about our own behavior, about our relationships, about our larger groups. Creating one for one’s larger religion or nation only extends the canvas. Usually a few brave historians in every society try to tell the truth about the past—that the Japanese army ran a vast, forced system of sexual slavery in World War II, that the United