July 8: Numbers from the Sky
On July 8, 1965, Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 21 was destroyed by an in-flight bomb over British Columbia, killing all 52. Tonight's film: Knowing (2009).
July 8, 1965, a Thursday afternoon. Canadian Pacific Air Lines Flight 21 is a milk run out of Vancouver, stopping in Prince George, Fort St. John, Fort Nelson, and Watson Lake before reaching Whitehorse in the Yukon. The plane is a Douglas DC-6 named the Empress of City of Buenos Aires. A routine hop. The crew is experienced: Captain John Alfred Steele is 41, his first officer 29, the flight engineer 26. Fifty-two people on board, 46 passengers and six crew.
Around a quarter to four, Vancouver air traffic control hears three mayday calls. An explosion goes off in the left rear lavatory. The tail separates from the fuselage. The aircraft spirals and drops into the forest, 32 kilometers west of 100 Mile House, near Dog Creek. Everyone dies. The coroner’s inquest finds a substance “foreign to the normal contents of the aircraft.” Traces of potassium nitrate and carbon point to a low-velocity blast, the kind gunpowder or stump-removal powder makes. The Mounties focus on four passengers. Nobody is ever charged. Sixty years later it is still unsolved, one of the largest unsolved murders on Canadian soil. In 2018 the CBC spent six episodes on it in a podcast called Bomb on Board.
This is the kind of story that makes something shake inside me. Not the explosion. The fact that nobody ever learned why. Not even half a century later.
I think that is why Knowing (2009) landed so hard the first time I saw it. Alex Proyas directs, Nicolas Cage plays an MIT astrophysicist named John Koestler. A time capsule is opened at an elementary school, and out comes a sheet of numbers that a girl named Lucinda wrote in 1959, half in a trance. The numbers are dates, death tolls, coordinates. Every major disaster of the next fifty years is on that page: Oklahoma City, 9/11, Katrina. And three that have not happened yet.
There is a scene where Koestler stands at the side of the road and watches a plane go down. No heroics, no swelling music that earns anything. He just stands there while people burn. For a second it put me right back at that July 8 afternoon over Ashcroft.
Let me be honest with you: Knowing is not a great film. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 35 percent from 182 critics, and the consensus says it carries interesting ideas buried under an absurd plot and too much seriousness. I get it. The ending, with its solar flare and whispering strangers, jumps the tracks. And yet the film cost 50 million dollars and grossed 186 million worldwide, opened at number one in 3,332 theaters with a 24.6 million opening weekend. Something in it worked. For me the something is the dread of knowing what is coming and still being unable to stop it. The same helplessness as those mayday calls over Vancouver.
Lately the world often feels like nothing but bad news. One war after the next, another crash, another blast. On those nights I turn the TV on and I am not looking for the news. I want a story about someone trying to understand what is happening to him, even as the sky falls. Knowing is that kind of story. Imperfect, honest. Tonight, press play.
What else could have been tonight
1497: Vasco da Gama leaves Lisbon (Mission to Mars)
On this day in 1497, Vasco da Gama sailed out of Lisbon with four ships and about 170 men, looking for a sea route to India. He was the first European to get there by rounding Africa, making landfall at Calicut on May 20, 1498. Two and a half years into the unknown on dark oceans, without any map to follow.
The film: Mission to Mars (2000), directed by Brian De Palma, with Gary Sinise, Tim Robbins, and Don Cheadle. The year is 2020, the first crewed expedition to Mars. Three of the crew die, one (Cheadle) is stranded on the red planet. Critics mauled it, Empire called the script awful, but the spine is there: someone sails into the unknown knowing they may not come back. Just like da Gama. That is what I love about science fiction, the old shape of courage told in a new language.
2011: Atlantis and the last shuttle (Armageddon)
July 8, 2011. The shuttle Atlantis launches on STS-135, the final flight of the Space Shuttle program. A crew of four, the smallest in shuttle history: Commander Chris Ferguson, pilot Doug Hurley, mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim. Thirty years of American shuttle flight ended here. Atlantis landed at the Kennedy Space Center on July 21.
The pair: Armageddon (1998), Michael Bay’s film with Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck. An asteroid the size of Texas is coming, and NASA sends oil drillers into space. A 140 million budget, 553.7 million worldwide, critics hated it. It is not a clever film. But the moment a shuttle crew throws itself at the impossible, it channels the same American space age Atlantis closed down thirteen years later. Some nights you want a film that is not subtle, only loud and true.
Sources
Main event (CP Air Flight 21):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Pacific_Air_Lines_Flight_21 (flight route, 52 dead, lavatory bomb, unsolved)
https://newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/bomb-on-board-canadian-airlines-flight-21 (2018 re-examination, Bomb on Board podcast)
Film (Knowing):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowing_(film) (50M budget, 186M worldwide, disaster number sheet)
https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/knowing (35%, 182 reviews)
Side events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama (1497 voyage, four ships, about 170 men)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_to_Mars (De Palma, 2020 Mars expedition)
https://www.nasa.gov/mission/sts-135/ (STS-135, July 8 launch, July 21 landing, four-person crew)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armageddon_(1998_film) (140M budget, 553.7M worldwide)