What they should really show in the seatback pocket: what happened to the dude in your seat when American Airlines flight 1420 crashed

DadWagon has previously (and correctly) defended the right of children to be as annoying as adults on airplanes, but my 3-year-old girl has developed a new kind of menacing behavior on commercial flights: a loud and verbal curiosity about airplane disasters.

It’s not that she’s worried. Quite the contrary. She has her fears, though they change quickly around this age (studies show strangers become less scary just as monsters become more scary). She is definitely not afraid of planes. It’s just that in the infinite juncture between watching Kung Fu Panda while the plane is still parked at the gate and watching Kung Fu Panda once it’s safe to turn on all approved electronic devices at 10,000 feet, Dalia has only the colorful, clearly drawn Airline Safety Pamphlet to keep her entertained.

On our American Airlines flight to Miami this weekend, Dalia once again asked loudly to be led through drawn instructions about what to do in the event of fire, smoke, water landing or drop in cabin pressure. We whispered the answers to her, being truthful if a little evasive. She, however, held her end of the conversation in her loud, blunt quizzing-voice that could be heard three rows up and three rows back. As in, “When the plane lands in water, do we die or not die?”

As a frequent flier who has also from time to time morbidly pondered the unthinkable, I would probably rather hear a child screaming her lungs out or grunting a diaper full than have someone’s pre-schooler spend the initial ascent telling rows 19-26 all the ways one can die on a plane.

But there’s a sweetness to her curiosity. Disaster and death to her are total abstractions, as they are to all children under the age of 5. And even after 5, much of the work is about how to cope with fears and anxieties that they do understand. It’s one of the things that makes children children. It all reminds me, as it should anyone who was born in the 1970’s, of one thing: the Challenger disaster.

Challenger was, of course, the space shuttle that disintegrated shortly after liftoff in 1986. But it wasn’t just another NASA fuck-up. There was a schoolteacher on board, a fact which gave nearly every school in America the bright idea to turn the 11am liftoff into a live-on-TV curriculum event. So the children of America, who had been learning about the six brave astronauts and the teacher Christa McAuliffe, were watching live when all seven were blown to oblivion.

Imagine if, in the early morning of 9/11, 40 million schoolkids had gathered around to just watch the twin towers because of they had been learning all about stock brokers for school. That’s sort of what the Challenger was like.

No wonder there are 91 books with the keywords Challenger Disaster in Amazon’s children’s book section. Why do I think Dalia would love to read them all?