The past week or so have been a bad time for air travellers.
First, Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was brought down by a missile over eastern Ukraine, killing the 298 people on board. Then 48 people died when a plane crashed in bad weather in Taiwan. Less than two days later, the wreckage of Air Algerie flight AH5017 was found in northern Mali. All 116 passengers and crew perished.
My own brush with aviation catastrophe - a distant one, mercifully - was brought to mind both by these disasters and an interview I conducted yesterday with the musician and writer Joe Pernice, whom I first met on September 11, 2001.
Joe and his group The Pernice Brothers had flown out of Newark airport in the early morning of that day bound for Heathrow and a tour of the UK with a Scottish band, The Zephyrs. I had earned a name as someone who could be trusted to look after groups plying the British and European gig circuit, so John Niven - then the A&R man for both bands and now a successful and doubtless more circumspect author and screenwriter - had enlisted me to shepherd them on a week-long daunder round some of Britain's less illustrious venues.
It was in anticipation of earning an easy grand before undertaking a postgraduate journalism degree that I drove to London in a splitter van - a blacked-out minibus with a cargo hold at the back. The radio was tuned to Five Live as I ploughed south.
A few hours into the journey, Simon Mayo, then hosting the early afternoon slot, interrupted a discussion with his studio guests to relay the news emerging from New York. A plane had flown into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. Before half an hour had lapsed, the news of a second plane hitting the South Tower came out, followed quickly by reports of a plane flying into the Pentagon.
Thereafter the journey is lost to the mists of time. What does stay with me, though, is making my first acquaintance with Joe and his gang, all of whom were based in New York or Massachusetts, a few hours later. They were glued to the TV in a hotel lobby, mainlining whatever information they could about the attacks, cut off from their loved ones and adrift in a foreign land.
In time, the musicians got in touch with their families and partners - all were safe - and the tour proceeded, albeit under a sombre cloud with outbreaks of purgative joy. Joe and his girlfriend Laura - now his wife - moved to Toronto and had a child. I went back to university. Our worlds kept turning. But what if…?
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