12 Moreover, no one knows when their hour will come:
As fish are caught in a cruel net,
or birds are taken in a snare,
so people are trapped by evil times
that fall unexpectedly upon them. Ecclesiastes 9: 12
https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/18/us/southwest-emergency-landing/index.html
Grieve for the Dead and her Family
A passenger on Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 died in a freak accident yesterday. One of the engines on the Boeing 737 had a mid-air explosion and shrapnel entered the passenger compartment causing depressurization. Seven others were injured. According to the British tabloid The Sun yesterday, she was Jennifer Riordan, an Albuquerque banker with Wells Fargo. Seems like such a brief statement, to be identified by a person’s occupation. Whose lives did she change. Whom was encouraged or loved or cared for. Yet, a husband has lost his wife, and their children have lost their mother. Let the community rally around the living and that the airline company moves quickly to do everything possible to care for them, the injured, the other passengers and crew.
Honor the Pilot’s Skill
The flying public, myself included, take for granted, after sixty or more years of travel that nothing will disrupt our cocktail and peanuts, the in-flight Wi-Fi or movie. But silently we depend on the professionalism and skill of the pilot and crew. Hundreds of lives at 35,000 feet depend on a machine and an operator. The pilot of the aircraft, Tammy Jo Shults, has been a pilot in commercial aviation for decades. Prior to that, according to news reports, she was one of the first female naval aviators and of a smaller, more exclusive group of skilled aviators – pilot of an F/A-18. The skill of our commercial and military pilots is without a doubt exceptional. More than a hundred passengers and crew owe their lives today to the skill of the crew in landing at Philadelphia. That no other lives were lost is a credit to cool professionalism. Yet I hope she is comforted as well as lauded for handling that emergency so well. Military training or long years in commercial aviation: no one wants to lose someone on their watch.
An instant changes everything
Every day, a split-second can be the difference between life, death, or serious injury. The decisions we make affect us. Yet we are not always in control. Nobody can predict what the day will bring. In a complex machine that is a commercial airliner, a bolt that passed inspection may have sheared causing mayhem. A tree limb weakened by a harsh drought may crack and fall on a sleeping camper. A wrong turn or an earlier than normal start to a work commute may result in an accident with someone distracted on the way home. A routine medical procedure that saved a hundred lives that week, may result in a rare complication where someone died.
Twenty-five years ago, a Sailor I served with on a Navy destroyer, was driving a Navy van on a pier during a snowstorm. The van skidded and drove off into the harbor and that sailor died. His body was not discovered till months later. And last year, another Sailor, in a horrible collision at sea, tried to get everyone out of a berthing compartment. To save his shipmates, he told others to seal the hatch and sacrificed himself for others.
Life of Faith, or Fear
Life is unpredictable. As a follower of Jesus Christ, a retired Navy Senior Chief, and a devoted husband and friend, I hope I may respond as my faith and training enable me.
Truths, Half-truths, and Sea Stories 