It is a cruel and slightly eerie Hollywood coincidence that a new documentary, called Living in the Age of Airplanes, features narration by Harrison Ford and a musical score by the Oscar-winning composer James Horner.
Why?
Ford was badly injured last March after crash-landing in his vintage single-engine plane, and Horner was killed when the single-engine plane he piloted crashed just a couple of weeks ago.
After Ford's close call I suggested in this blog that his March 5 crash near the Santa Monica Airport might be one of those widely publicized celebrity mishaps that creates a teachable moment, and that Ford himself could be much more than a fly-by-night spokesman for the cause of doing something about the troubling accident rates of private planes.
Besides Ford's global celebrity as an actor, along with the dubious celebrity that comes from an accident like crash-landing on a public golf course, Ford has impressive credentials as a pilot - the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association even gives a Harrison Ford Legacy in Aviation Award, and of course Ford was tapped to be the voice of Living in the Age of Airplanes, a National Geographic film now playing in giant screen, digital, and IMAX digital cinemas worldwide.
I couldn't help thinking about Ford again when I heard the sad news that composer Horner, whose many film-scoring credits include box-office sensations like Titanic, A Beautiful Mind, Braveheart and Avatar, had crashed in his plane at a remote site in Los Padres National Forest, midway between Santa Barbara and Bakersfield, about 90 miles northwest of where Ford fell from the sky. It occurred to me, too, that Horner had joined a tragically long list of musicians and entertainers killed in private plane accidents.
And like Ford just a few months before, Horner was flying alone in a single-engine aircraft, the kind of private plane involved in an alarmingly high percentage of crashes, by novice and experienced amateur pilots alike. The very concept of a single-engine plane seems oddly counterintuitive in the safety-minded 21st century. Those of us who drive cars understand that engines sometimes die, but that doesn't usually mean that we drivers and our passengers have to - we just pull over and call the Triple A.
But to take flight under the power of a single engine, well, if that engine or any of its components fail, the pilot's options are limited, as Harrison Ford experienced during what must have felt like harrowing moments between the time his restored World War II-era airplane lost power and his hard landing on the golf course near the Santa Monica Airport, from which he had taken off just minutes before. Ford was hospitalized for several weeks before being released.
Horner was not so lucky, and more than 200 people typically die in private plane crashes each year, which is about equal to a commercial jetliner filled with passengers going down every year. But fatal commercial airline crashes in the U.S. have become almost nonexistent while the number of deaths in private plane crashes has remained stubbornly consistent over many years, as pointed out in a 40-page report on the years 1999 through 2011 by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the independent, nonpartisan congressional watchdog.
In this report and other such findings, there's an issue worthy of the Fourth of July because of the latent tension between a wariness about excessive government regulation -- the AOPA's motto is "protecting your freedom to fly" -- and the ways in which rules and regulations can save lives. Think seatbelts.
But it's hard not to get the impression that private planes and "general aviation" operations bear some resemblance to the Wild-West atmosphere of Mos Eisley, the Star Wars spaceport where audiences first met Harrison Ford as Han Solo.
General aviation is the category that includes all U.S. aircraft that aren't commercial or military, so everything from funky, single-seat experimental planes to multi-million-dollar corporate jets - some 220,000 aircraft nationwide, or about 90 percent of U.S. civil aircraft. Three out of every four takeoffs and landings at American airports are by general aviation aircraft, according to a Federal Aviation Administration report of May 2012, and most flight-related fatalities in the U.S., about nine out of 10 in 2011, are attributable to general aviation, according to the National Transportation Safety Board.
It usually takes a while for the NTSB to complete its final accident reports, but its preliminary report about Horner's accident, released on June 29, tells a haunting story reminiscent of many other private plane crashes, especially those involving single-engine craft.
On June 22, the day after Father's Day, Horner took off shortly after 8 a.m. from Camarillo Airport, one of the nation's nearly 3,000 general aviation hubs, which is near the Pacific coast midway between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. Horner's single-engine plane, a Short Brothers PLC S312 Tucano T Mark 1, was reportedly one of several registered to the composer, this one a 1989 model categorized as "experimental exhibition" -- a somewhat Mos Eisley-ish type, as the FAA definition suggests.
The Tucano seats two but Horner was flying alone that morning. He had filed no flight plan but was in contact with the SoCal Air Route Traffic Control Center and was receiving advisories while maneuvering over a sparsely populated wilderness area. A couple of witnesses reported seeing the plane and hearing its engine as it passed about 500 feet overhead, tracing a route along lonely Quatal Canyon Road. The NTSB reviewed radar that showed multiple turns along with rapid changes in altitude and airspeed. At 9:25 that morning, a little over an hour after Horner took off, radar contact was lost and there was no further word from the pilot.
At the crash site, a dry creek bed about 50 miles north of the Camarillo Airport, investigators found a crater some five feet deep and about 11 feet across, with debris strewn over an area equal to several football fields. About an acre of land burned around the crash site, but all the major structural components and primary flight controls were recovered and the NTSB will be examining them to try to figure out what went wrong.
Obviously a death like Horner's is utterly heartbreaking -- for his friends, colleagues and family. He was a husband and father of two, and just 61 years old. There is another layer to the tragedy for all of us when a creative voice like Horner's is suddenly and prematurely silenced: The musical compositions we will never hear and the songs we will never sing.
But as in the case of Harrison Ford's more highly publicized crash, perhaps lessons can be learned that will keep more amateur pilots and their passengers from falling out of the sky. And perhaps now, even more than a few months ago, there is a leading role for a star like Harrison Ford to play.