I usually like to watch about an hours worth of plane crash videos before attempting to sleep as well.
I don't know what it is about plane crashes, but they are beyond fascination. I think it's because, in my opinion, plane crashes are top of the list when it comes to disasters. Millions of pounds go into the designing, testing, manufacturing and operating of airplanes, then you fill them with people who have paid a fairly large amount of money to be on them, then you take that whole package into the sky and then it crashes and kills everyone and destroys everything. I mean, that is what I call a lose, lose, situation. In hindsight - probably shouldn't have bothered. It's like buying 42 inch widescreen TV and a Nintendo Wii, only to smash the controller through the screen on your first game of Tennis.
It's like that.
Plane crashes can be avoided, they are man-made disasters, and that's why they are so much worse than natural disasters. Tsunami's for instance, roll into town, uproot houses, sweep entire towns away and clock up huge death tolls, what can you do about it though? - just stand and applaud as you get run over by a library. They don't have nearly the level of menace that a plane crash has. Look at Japan, we saw a week of just out-of-control devastation, pure rulebook physics just fucking stuff up and that was the end of the enquiry - nobody's fault, it will probably happen again, let's get cleaning. They won't have made a dent repairing the damage caused, but the interesting part is over, and nobody watching TV cares any more. The only interesting part was the precarious nuclear situation, which was, yes, man-made - and the only real way to make sure that goes down in history as a memorable disaster is if a plane crashes in to it.
Wow, imagine.
It's not up for debate that human beings love watching plane crashes. 9/11 being the mother of all plane crashes goes to show that. People want to see all angles of the crashes, they want to know where it hit, how fast it was going, how low it was flying, what flight number it was, what the onboard vegetarian option was. Everything. And not only did 9/11 capture the fascination of the entire world, it made plane crashes cool! A few years later "Lost" came out - a whole fucking TV series about a plane crash that was the most popular show for the six years it was on. Then the minute that finished another american TV show called "The Event" started up, and just to wet the appetite of the frothing public, it featured an out-of-control jumbo jet heading straight for a populated area in it's pilot (no pun intended) episode! So don't frown at me watching plane crash videos online all the time, at least I'm not making up new situations where plane crashes could happen. I'm reflecting on the how we as human beings react to real, visual disaster, I'm not re-writing Titanic so that the ship hits an iceberg - then get's hit by a plane.
But I'm telling you, the crucial part to a totally shocking plane crash is the human involvement. Look at this image from then 2009 monster/disaster film "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus".
The text isn't in the actual film, but what you can clearly see happening there is that a giant shark has jumped out of the ocean and taken down a plane. The effect has been lost. This is the Chris Tucker of plane crashes, even if it happened in real life you'd just be like "well that was totally O.T.T., but it happened... now what?"
Meanwhile this artists impression of a collision between a taxi-ing Pan am 747 and a KLM Boeing 747 that was attempting take-off in Tenerife in 1977, that killed 583 people...
...christ
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to Youtube!
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