A commercial airliner plunges thousands of feet, a wounded captain somehow gets the cockpit door open, passengers apparently fight their way through a violently gyrating cabin, a plumber takes the controls, two off-duty pilots materialise at precisely the right moment, and the aircraft lands safely. You are not reading the script of a Steven Seagal movie. And even if you were, it sounds so extravagantly implausible that satire has little to do with it, and the script would probably have been returned with a note asking the writer to tone it down. Every government eventually discovers that the public has a surprisingly high tolerance for improbable stories, especially when the alternative is admitting something went spectacularly wrong. But even by that generous standard, the story emerging from flydubai flight FZ1073 requires an unusual suspension of disbelief.

Let us be absolutely clear about one thing. Something serious happened on that aircraft. The plane descended violently, the cockpit became the scene of a physical confrontation, the captain was injured, and the aircraft was diverted to Tabuk. Everyone on board was extraordinarily fortunate to survive, and nothing about that is amusing. What is amusing, at least in the darkest possible sense, is the increasingly polished narrative that has grown around the event before the public has been given the one thing that could settle much of the argument. The black boxes. Two pieces of evidence are particularly important in an aircraft like this. The flight data recorder tells us what the aeroplane was actually doing, and the cockpit voice recorder tells us what was being said and, within the limitations of the recording system, what was happening in the cockpit. Add air traffic control recordings, aircraft system data, crew statements, passenger testimony, and physical evidence, and one should eventually have something more substantial than a story assembled from frightened passengers, official briefings, and political declarations.

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© Mathrubhumi English