For the Ones we've lost

The rains are here, its good to see the mist and the fog another time. Dear fog and mist, you were missed. We’ve eaten dust like it was our daily bread. Man, like our lives depended on it. People starved, our animals died while the rains were somewhere in the space just watching. Haidhuru!

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night for nothing- for no reason and lose sleep completely? You get out of the bed and grope in the darkness unclothed like some ghost. You can’t find your underwear so you just pull the pants coz, who knows? You take a glass of water, pull your hoodie from the nail on the wall and get out to the balcony. The breeze is fine, the sky is clear and the stars are twinkling gorgeously. In the neighborhood dogs are barking, from a far another is barking too and you wonder what they are trying to communicate. You stare blankly at the open sky that is slowly getting covered in clouds. The stars are slowly but surely waning. 

Down the road, you see someone’s husband staggering with a bottle of beer held in his left arm. He is calm, not making noise, just walking badly. Not even singing ‘furaha ni kulewa na marafiki’ or shouting at the streetlights for stinging his eyes and you wonder when drunkards became that civilized. The darkness is becoming thicker. The dogs can’t find a reason to bark anymore for some ungrateful owner who is deep inside the coverlets. The night is becoming more and more silent. It is the night of the all saints day, the night that inaugurates the second day of November. The all souls day, the day that we honour the loved ones we’ve lost. It is the night that it got to rain after a very long time. 

Do you ever imagine how a last breathe would taste? When you clearly know you only 47 seconds to be alive, what do you think of? Do you imagine how the next unknown place would be? Or do you think of how those you love are gonna deal with your absence?

You ever happened to have watched the video of the 2019 Ethiopian crash, that seemed to have been recorded by a passenger? Sit tight!

I wanted to be a pilot when I was young and full of ambitions. The dream is yet to come to pass, I don’t know how. I am so much interested in aircrafts. I watch a lot of aircraft crash investigation documentaries. Maybe it is the reason I have scary dreams of planes crashing. The Ethiopian  plane was an ET-AVJ-registered Boeing 737 MAX 8 with the manufacturer's serial number 62450 and construction number 7243. It was powered by two CFM International LEAP-1B engines. The aircraft was about four months old at the time of the accident having been manufactured in October2018. The previous evening, it had flown flawlessly from South Africa. 

Yared Getachew, 29, was the pilot of the aircraft. He had been a pilot for the airline for almost nine years, accumulating to over 8,000 flight hours, half of which were on the Boeing 737. Since November 2017, he had piloted a Boeing 737-800, and since July 2018, a Boeing 737 MAX. He held the record for being the airline's youngest captain at the time of the crash. The airline's first officer, Ahmed Nur Mohammod Nur, had recently graduated and had done 361 flying hours under his belt, including 207 hours on the Boeing 737. He was only 25 years old. 

Flight 302 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Addis Ababa to Nairobi. The plane took off from Addis Ababa at 08:38 local time with 149 passengers and 8 crew on board. A minute into the flight, the first officer, acting on the captain's instructions, reported a flight control problem to the control tower. A minute later, the plane's MCAS system activated, sending it into a dive toward the ground. The Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System is a flight-stabilizing feature developed by Boeing that has so far caused more harm than good. Find time and read about MCAS. The pilots struggled to keep it under control and managed to keep the nose from diving any further but still the plane kept losing altitude. The complications became so much just three minutes into the flight - when the plane was almost at a speed of 450 knots. 

The captain asked the first officer to request clearance from air traffic control to return to the airport three minutes into the trip, as the aircraft continued to drop altitude and accelerate beyond its safety limitations. Permission was given, and other approaching flights were redirected by air traffic authorities. They turned the aircraft to the east, as instructed by air traffic control, and it tilted to the right. As the turn steepened, the right wing began to point down.

The captain requested assistance from the first officer at 8:43am and then turned on the electrical trim tab system in the hopes that it would enable him to return the stabilizer to neutral trim after he had failed to stop the nose of the aircraft from further diving by physically drawing the yoke. However, he triggered the MCAS system as well when he turned the trim system back on, further lowering the nose. The captain and first officer pulled on their yokes to manually elevate the nose, but the plane kept losing altitude. 

There was tension and the well dressed ladies walking along with encouraging words and telling you guys to pray and hope. Seeing the oxygen tubes drop from the decks above as the crew helped the passengers fix them on their nose was heartbreaking. The prayers and screams from the ladies and children is the last thing you want to hear in that video. If at all, that video was true. That moment that death is so certain. Death is standing right in front of you, naked and ugly! You know you have 47 seconds to achieve everything you’ve ever wanted under the white sun. The countdown is on and you now have 10 seconds before everything turns dark. Do you think of your loves or the next life, whether it exists or not?

The plane crashed at Woreda, Oromania Region in a farm near Bishoftu town- 62km South of Bole International Airport.  The plane crash at a speed of 600 knots, an insane speed. You don’t expect that anything is left. The impact of the crash created a crater 90 feet broad and 120 feet long, with wreckage driven up to 33 feet deep into the soil, this about 10 meters deep. Wreckage, personal items, and body parts were strewn all over the field. Not reasonable body parts, small body parts like burnt finger or a toe. 157 lives departed in a whisker, without a reasonable trace and proof of them. 

The police, the fire fighters, Red Cross, the villagers and other rescue teams arrived shortly to recover the pieces of human remains. Excavators and tractors were used to dig the site. The few human remains that were found were bagged and taken to Bole international Airport. They were stored in the refrigerators where flowers were stored before exportation- awaiting identification by DNA. The largest body part that found was a burnt palm. Families of the victims were given some soil from the crash site to go and burry… that time that someone else’s pain hits you so bad. 

As I write this its late into the second day of November, yesterday TakeOff was shot dead. Seeing his lifeless body lie in that blood was sickening. In the transition from October to November, the world hasn’t been a very nice place to be for many families. The other day 154 souls were lost in a stampede during Halloween celebration, Seoul, South Korea. A day after, over 140 people perished in India after a cable bridge in Morbi collapsed. November, be nice to us! 

A candle for the loved ones we've lost.