UTERDS and CFITs
It matters what you call things....
Not long ago I boarded a small plane heading from Miami to Key West. It was one of those flimsy-looking machines with propellers hanging from the wings like old-timey desk fans. And when the large man in the back row struggled to dig out his seatbelt, the whole plane shook like a giant wet dog.
Getting on a plane like that is, for some people, a faith-based thing.
At the bottom of the stairs, on the tarmac, a female passenger suddenly got cold feet. We could see her, my seatmate and I, from our row. She was at the front of a long line of passengers – it was the kind of plane you have to approach from the outside, without the comforting cocoon of a jetway – and when she spotted the propellers and the rickety steps, the look on her face said it all: No way I’m getting on that tiny thing.
She backed away from the stairs.
“I don’t know why she’s nervous,” my seatmate said to me as we buckled in. “I’m a Navy pilot. I can tell her. Small planes are a lot safer. I mean, it’s pretty rare to pull a CFIT in one of these.”
He pronounced the acronym CFIT like “see-fit.” It casually rolled off his tongue.
“What’s a ‘see-fit’?” I asked.
“It’s a pilot term,” he said as he breezily scrolled through his phone. “C. F. I. T. Stands for Controlled Flight Into Terrain.”
“You mean a crash?” I asked.
“We prefer CFIT,” he said without looking up.
“Still,” I said, “we’re talking about a crash.”
He sighed and put down his phone.
“Technically,” the pilot said, “a CFIT is an event in which a perfectly operable aircraft is flown inadvertently into terrain – like a mountain side or an ocean or a misjudged runway. It’s not used when an engine fails or a plane is somehow disabled.”
Outside the plane, the woman’s husband was pleading with her. The tickets, I thought I heard him say, were non-refundable. The drive to Key West was over four hours. The plane, he told her, is perfectly safe.
“Call it what you like,” I said, “but a crash is a crash.”
The pilot shrugged. “It matters what you call things,” he said. “If an engine explodes mid-flight, or, I don’t know, the wing falls off, well that’s not the pilot’s fault. But when everything is working fine and the plane just slams into the water, well, you want to ask that pilot what his deal was, you know?”
“But you can’t.”
“Right. You can’t. Nobody walks away from a CFIT.”
It matters what you call things, my seat mate insisted, but it was hard not to notice that when something bad happens to a plane and it’s not the pilot’s fault, it’s okay to call it a “crash.” But when something bad happens to a plane and it is the pilot’s fault, they’ve invented a vaguely-worded euphemism for it, and for good measure they’ve wrapped the euphemism into an acronym. By double-wrapping an unpleasant thing in weasel-words and initials, maybe they can make the whole thing go away.
It’s like when you have something to throw away but you don’t want anyone to know what it is. First, you wrap it in a paper towel, then you put it into a plastic sack, and then you throw it away. It’s not trash. It’s an Unwanted Touchy or Embarrassing Refuse Disposal. A UTERD.
When newspapers are caught transforming flagrantly biased opinions and partisan talking points into “facts” and “news,” if at all possible they call these “glitches” or “software errors.” But when they’re really egregious and undeniable, they’re Oversights in the Layers of the Editing Workflow Process. Or OVERLEWPS.
When old episodes of television are dropped from distribution, it’s sometimes called a “licensing dispute” and blamed on the lawyers, but more often it’s a case of retroactive politically-correct censorship. In which case it’s called “retirement due to cultural sensitivities.” Or REDCULTS.
The lady on the tarmac was unpersuaded by euphemism or plain talk or statistics or scientific data, and she backed away from the tiny plane along with her deeply irritated husband and no weasel-words would get her to turn around. She may have been wrong about the plane — they are, in fact, quite safe — but until they call a crash a crash, can we really blame her?