Midair

Two planes collided over Wisconsin. Both caught fire. The scenario kills everyone on board. Except everyone on board was a professional skydiver, so when separation came—violent, unplanned, early—they just deployed their parachutes and floated down.

Someone had cameras on their helmets. Multiple someones. So there’s footage of the whole thing: the impact, the breakup, people falling away from the fireball with their equipment. The kind of thing you’d expect to be the last known footage of those people. Instead it’s a viral video of people surviving the unsurvivable.

Watching it doesn’t compute. You’re waiting for tragedy and instead you get people doing their job. They trained for emergencies, and this was an emergency, and they handled it. The fire isn’t metaphorical. The fall is real. The parachutes work. Everyone goes home.

There’s something about watching someone’s job description save their life that stays with you.

What. The. Fuck.