I read the short article linked below on CNN this morning about
a safety incident on a trans-Atlantic commercial airline flight on February 6.
It reports that the pilot flying the plane accidentally knocked over a cup of coffee on to the cockpit controls, and the hot liquid created a potentially dangerous situation.
"The equipment became so hot that one of the buttons on the control panel began to melt, which prompted the plane to divert."
Fortunately, the incident ended safely, no disaster occurred, and no one was injured.
What makes this incident so eerily chilling, though, is that a virtually identical incident, of hot coffee being spilled on to airplane cockpit controls, producing a potentially disastrous in-air situation, occurs in the 1964 film "Fate is the Hunter."
In the film this happens, but it also results in the deadly crash of the plane. But that this was the cause is unknown in the film, and the storyline is the effort of the characters to discover this fact.
To do so, a similar flight is launched, and each step that happened on the doomed flight is repeated on this second one, step by step, including the inadvertent spilling of the coffee, until this sequence again causes the same series of events, and another deadly crash is about
to happen.
But this time the pilot reacts quickly enough to avert disaster, and when the plane lands safely, what happened, and what had happened on the previous doomed flight, is understood.
I was a bit surprised that there was no reference in the CNN article to this earlier, prophetic film. I guess the writer wasn't aware of it.
But what's even more chilling is that googling the general terms of this incident reveals that there have apparently been a
number of such coffee-spillings reported on in-air flights for some time now!
Maybe some airline pilots should watch that film.
But, wow, talk about
life imitating art!
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/plane-diverted-coffee-spill-intl-scli/index.html