Heroic Han Solo Why Harrison Ford fits the bill.
Harrison Ford remained calm when the engine conked out on his vintage two-seater war plane
Harrison Ford is a hero.
If you said this to his face, of course, he’d scowl. He’d tap his Breitling Aerospace watch and give you 30 seconds to explain. Then you’d back up two steps and nervously recall his brush with death on Thursday.
“Well, Mr. Ford, when the engine in your Ryan Aeronautical ST3KR conked out after takeoff from Santa Monica Airport, you made an emergency landing on a golf course. You steered away from houses and roadways. You were as cool as Han Solo, as focused as Indiana Jones. Strapped inside that vintage two-seater, you glided to safety without killing yourself or anyone on the ground. Just imagine if ”
“What’s your point?” Ford would cut you off, sounding a bit like his villainous character Dr. Norman Spencer in What Lies Beneath.
“I’m no hero. I just take flying very seriously.”
The post-shock reaction to the crash, in which Ford was injured but is expected to fully recover, was predictable.
There were stories suggesting the 72-year-old is a real life daredevil. There were headlines that wondered if the actor had “the experience to pilot the vintage WWII plane that crashed.”
This is what we do when a celebrity crashes.
We theorize, speculate, inculpate, deconstruct and ask pointed questions. The exercise gets foggy and more feverish when those accidents are fatal. In 1997, John Denver was killed after crashing his experimental Rutan Long-EZ plane in Monterey Bay. Two years later, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife Carolyn Bessette and her sister Lauren died when the Piper Saratoga he was piloting went down in the Atlantic.
We know travelling on a commercial airliner is now safer than at any time since the dawn of powered flight. An MIT study in 2013 concluded a person could fly every day for 123,000 years before getting into a fatal crash. But fear is not rational.
And statistics are of cold comfort when we see footage of mishaps, as on Thursday when Delta Flight 1086 skidded off an icy runway at LaGuardia Airport.
Meanwhile, Sunday marks a grim anniversary: it has been one year since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 vanished.
Accidents happen. Conditions in the sky and on the ground can be unpredictable. Pilots are not immune to error. There can be deadly mechanical failures, especially in aircraft not equipped with the automated systems and safety redundancies and sophisticated navigation computers found in commercial fleets.
Five years ago, a pilot died after his Cessna crashed eerily close to where Ford touched down near the eighth hole at Penmar Golf Course. Santa Monica Airport, where celebrities such as Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger keep their planes, has been the point of departure or arrival for at least a dozen crashes since 1989.
So why is Ford a hero? Because during a terrifying few seconds, when everything could have gone terribly wrong, he calmly did everything right. He was flying a plane that was built in the same year he was born. But as it turns out, Ford is a great pilot for the same reason he’s a great actor: he takes it seriously.
He immerses himself in the process. He masters the small details. He is respectful of the machines he controls and the physical laws he cannot. As he observed in a non-daredevil way in 1998: “Flying attracted me as a chance to develop a skill, build a body of knowledge, not as a way to seek danger. I try to observe a distinction between exciting and scary.”
That distinction has revealed itself in previous close calls.
In 1999, experts were stunned when Ford walked away unscathed after crashlanding his helicopter during a training exercise in California. The next year, he made an emergency landing at Lincoln Municipal Airport in Nebraska due to wind shear. One official who witnessed Ford’s deft handling of the twin-engine Beechcraft Bonanza said: “He’s either very experienced or darn lucky.”
But this isn’t a binary equation. Ford is now both. And that he’s used his love of flying to help others — including rescuing a hiker in Idaho in 2000 and, the following year, finding a missing Boy Scout in Yellowstone National Park — is proof Hollywood is not just a toxic sinkhole of ego and greed and narcissism.
Hidden behind the fame, lurking behind some of the most memorable characters of our time, stand real heroes. vmenon@thestar.ca