Planes On Fire

By Patrick Appel

Photographer Richard Mosse has a series of photographs on disaster-response training airplanes. From an interview with the artist:

My project is an attempt to locate the air disaster in our cultural imagination. When I say that I mean that the air disaster is a potent image and speaks to all of us. It’s not just something that we feel when we board an airplane, or when we’re caught in turbulence. It’s something that pervades our lives these days. The air disaster is an altogether different class of catastrophe to the car crash. It is a mythic symbol of modernity’s failure...

In 2000, having just landed in Paris, I was walking off my plane when fellow passengers began pointing out their windows. Off in the distance, white smoke trailed from a skinny jet. Within a minute, it disappeared. The passengers collected their luggage from the overhead bins. I picked up my checked bags and got on a bus to a hotel. It wasn't until I reached my room and flipped on the TV that I learned all 109 passengers of the Concorde, and four people on the ground, had perished.