Twinkling

The Visayan Daily Star
Tuesday, September 8, 1998
By Ninfa R. Leonardia

The terrible disaster that befell the Swissair plane on its way to Geneva has renewed the flying phobia of a lot of people. Yesterday I was talking to a relative overseas who is set to fly to Portugal late this month and he says that he is being discouraged from doing so by his friends who are full of dire warnings about aircraft worthiness or terrorist activities. He says the Americans are especially conscious about such things and it would not surprise him if tourist travel outside the U.S. gets greatly reduced this year.

But as I go on reading about the reports on the Swissair accident, I find myself thinking that our Filipino pilots seem to be able to think faster and decide more judiciously when faced with the threat of an air mishap. They've had their own tragedies, but they also seem to have better batting average in a clinch. I remember that air explosion on a PAL plane over Tokyo when the Pinoy pilot was able to land it safely despite the hole on its side. A long time ago, a PAL plane also had an explosion inside while flying on the way, to Bacolod and the pilot landed it safely in Roxas. There were casualties, one of them a six-year-old boy and our neighbor at Rosario Street, but the rest survived.

At a party this weekend, people were also talking about how much more deadly the Bacolod crash last March could have been if the pilots had lost their heads and dove into the river bank instead of landing above it. Well, maybe it is also because a lot of the passengers I watch whenever I'm on a plane pray before takeoff and even during flight. Anyway, Mr. Fred Mascunana came to see me yesterday to correct what I said here about there being no flights to Cebu. Yes, there is, he said they have the Mindanao Express which has this 19-seater aircraft that flies to Cebu regularly. He even invited me to try the plane out. I wonder if I could ever get up the guts to do so. Even on those Sun risers used by PAL a few years ago, my throat would be dry the whole flight through.