This fucking Englishman named Gilbert Gaunt, which he later changed to Gilbert "Fuck You" Gant (a concession probably to fucking Yankee phonetics), having come to Baltimore all the way from fucking Bristol in 1837 on a fucking sailing vessel, soon let the profits of a public house which he had purchased roll all the fucking way down his improvident fucking gullet. He fucked off westward into Pennsyl-fuckin'-vania, eking out a dangerous fucking living by matching fucking fighting cocks against the champions of country barnyards, and often escaping after a night spent in a fucking village jail, with his champion dead on the fucking field of battle, without the clink of a fucking coin in his pocket, and sometimes with the print of a farmer's big fucking knuckles on his reckless fucking face. But he always escaped, that canny fuckknuckle, and coming at length among the Dutch at harvest time he was so fucking touched by the plenty of their land that he cast out his fucking anchors there. Within a year he married a rugged young widow with a tidy fucking farm who like all the other Dutch had been just fucking charmed by his air of travel, and his grandiose fucking speech, particularly when he did Hamlet in the manner of the great Edmund fuckin' Kean. Every one said he should have been an actor.-from What the Fuck You Looking At, Angel?, by fucking Thomas Wolfe, you may have heard of him
Although I don't recommend that you try this, I've listened to a number of these recordings, and I can tell you that normal rules of polite speech break down when you're in a plane about to smash into the ground.Not always. I'm a bit of an industrial disaster junkie, and the last-moment air transcripts that stand out for me are often of pilots of remarkable stoicism.
The Legacy came streaking at the Boeing about 30 feet to the left of the fuselage and 2 feet lower. The displacement was infinitesimal on the scale of the sky, and a measure of impressive navigational precision. The Legacy’s winglet acted like a vertically held knife, slicing through the Boeing’s left wing about halfway out and severing the wing’s internal spar. The outboard section of the wing whipped upward, stripping skin as it went, then separated entirely, spiraling over the fuselage and demolishing much of the Boeing’s tail. In the Boeing’s cockpit the sequence sounded like a car crash. Instantly the Boeing twisted out of control, corkscrewing violently to the left and pitching straight down into a rotating vertical dive. The cockpit filled with alarms—an urgent klaxon and a robotic voice insistently warning, Bank angle! Bank angle! Bank angle!, as if the crew might need the advice. Back in the cabin the passengers screamed and shouted.Also what stands out is the Concorde crash of flight Air France Flight 4590, where the pilots not only don't swear but never, ever give up attempting to regain control:
The pilots reacted as one might expect, fighting desperately to regain control. They probably did not know what had gone wrong. They certainly never mentioned it. What is unusual is that they also did not swear. Ten seconds into the dive, one of them did cry “Aye!,” but the other urged him to stay calm. “Calma!” he said, and seconds later he said it again. If pilots must die in an airplane, all would choose to finish so well. Of course these two knew they were gone, but they did what they could, even extending the landing gear to slow the dive. The gesture was hopeless.
As the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) transcript recorded it, the last intelligible words of the crew were (translated into English):In both instances what fascinates me is what must have going through the pilots minds. In the case of the Concorde pilot, the plane was still on the ground but had just passed V1 speed when the loose metal tore apart the fuel line, so they were forced to take off, staying aloft for around a minute and a half before ploughing into a hotel.
Co-pilot: "Le Bourget, Le Bourget, Le Bourget."
Pilot: "Too late (unclear)."
Control tower: "Fire service leader, correction, the Concorde is returning to runway zero nine in the opposite direction."
Pilot: "No time, no (unclear)."
Co-pilot: "Negative, we're trying Le Bourget" (four switching sounds).
Co-pilot: "No (unclear)."
A lot of people say that people who swear a lot have a small vocabulary, but that's wrong. I'm a lexicographer, which means I have a huge vocabulary, and I swear all the fucking time.— which really was written by a lexicographer, Lorna at Collins Dictionaries. Looked after the thesaurus database, and knew it by heart. Swore like a fucking trooper, but only at precisely the right time. Some of the dictionary bods were twee and contrived swearers ("Spanish Reflexive Verb Ending!" was a common one), but most were direct.
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posted by Mental Wimp at 10:17 AM on August 18, 2011