William Shakespeare- The air accident Shakespeare caused
Published on Apr 24, 2016
Avian dangers, aviation accidents, Shakespeare caused an aviation accident. On the 400th death anniversary of the Bard let me tell you the story of the great L-188 Eastern Airways disaster.
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PRESENTATION OUTLINE
William Shakespeare
Caused an Air Accident
He wrote around 9,000,000 words altogether for this
Photo by Huntington Theatre Company
On the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death,
I would like to tell you a real-life tragedy,
connected to his illustrious name
Photo by joewcampbell
It’s a really interesting narrative enhanced with modern technology based tools
Photo by EllenSeptember
Half an hour before the sun was to set over the yachts anchored in Winthrop Harbour on the clear, golden evening of Oct. 4, 1960, a noise like a sonic boom exploded the glassy calm as residents sat down to their suppers
Photo by Chris Smith/Out of Chicago
The boom was the sound of a Lockheed L-188 Electra, bound from Boston’s Logan Airport to Philadelphia, slamming into the water
Photo by csakkarin
More than 60 passengers and crew from Eastern Airlines Flight 375 would wind up in the Boston mortuary
Photo by Djof
Untitled Slide
And while the official cause of death listed may not have been William Shakespeare, one of his plays is the setting of the disaster’s first act
Photo by Swamibu
As we mark the 400th anniversary of the
Bard’s own death,
it’s also worth remembering his unfortunate connection
to a largely forgotten
real-life tragedy
Photo by Emerson Utracik (EP)
A butterfly flaps its wings in Shakespeare’s mind in the late 1590s, and 365 years later,
the Electra plunges into
Winthrop Harbour,
sparking what remains one of the largest and most remarkable
rescue efforts
the city of Boston ever witnessed
Photo by spettacolopuro
Starlings may
be small, but they are considered
a lethal threat by
aviation experts
Photo by chapmankj75
Despite penning close to 40 plays and 9,000,000 words, Shakespeare makes but a single reference to the starling
Photo by thisisbossi
From the nightingale to the lark, birds appear in many of his plays, but it is only in the somewhat obscure Henry IV, Part 1, that the starling makes its brief appearance when the rebel Hotspur proclaims that he will train a starling to drive the king crazy by repeating the name of his imprisoned brother-in-law, Mortimer, whom the king refuses to ransom
Photo by Barbara Walsh Photography
The seed of a calamity is planted, even if not in the king’s ear
Photo by the yes man
Common, or European, starlings are small, dark, thickset birds with white speckles best known for their often obnoxious ability to mimic almost anything they hear, from alarms to dogs barking, as well as a tendency to hang out in enormous groups, called “murmurations,” that can number in the thousands
Photo by aldenchadwick
They are native to Europe, including Shakespeare’s England, but not to North America, where an estimated 200 million live today
Photo by Sprengben [why not get a friend]
For that, we have a bird/Bard-loving eccentric named Eugene Schieffelin to thank
Photo by Mr Noded
A wealthy New York drug manufacturer, Schieffelin was head of the American Acclimatization Society, one of many 19th-century groups dedicated to introducing European plants and wildlife into North America
Photo by ibsut
You see, Europeans living abroad missed their native birds, Kevin McGowan of the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology says
Photo by sethhepler
This sentimentality often had disastrous consequences, such as the avian malaria carried by nonnative birds that wiped out many native Hawaiian species
Photo by lars hammar
Which is how Hotspur’s fanciful starling, nesting in the private library of a Bronx pharmacist, managed to beget millions of glossy-feathered descendants in North America
Photo by Pro-Zak
One winter day in 1890, Schieffelin, as part of an ambitious project to introduce every avian species mentioned in Shakespeare into the U.S., released about 60 starlings into Central Park, hoping they would go forth and multiply
Photo by aldenchadwick
Boy, did they ever, colonizing America much faster than their human European counterparts had ever managed
Photo by db Photography | Demi-Brooke
By 1930, the murmurations had reached the Mississippi; by 1950, they were nationwide, driving out native American species like bluebirds and woodpeckers
Photo by hedera.baltica
Starlings, as McGowan explains, are heavier and more muscular than other birds their size, so they fare very well in the perpetual avian competition for nest sites
Photo by Damian Gadal
One of the starlings’ favourite American nest sites was Boston’s Tobin Bridge, where a murmuration of around 160,000 birds would flock at sunset
Photo by eclectic echoes
Tobin Bridge was likely the final destination for the outbound flight of some 10,000 to 20,000 starlings that collided with Flight 375 that fateful evening in 1960
Photo by biggles621
As Michael N. Kalafatas documents in Bird Strike, the Electra hit the avian cloud just seven seconds after takeoff, sucking hundreds of birds into three of its four engines
Photo by Nissan Juke Nismo RS
It happened so quickly the pilots did not utter a word to the Logan control tower as the plane rolled and crashed almost vertically into the harbour’s shallow water
Photo by Nissan Juke Nismo RS
The scene of the accident was horrific. Many of the passengers were trapped underwater with their seat belts fastened
Photo by sfllaw
The bird strike resulted in 62 deaths, and there would have been more had not local residents waded into the thick mud to form a human chain to rescue survivors
Photo by Lonnie's Life
Among the passengers were 15 newly inducted Marines and an Air Force engineer with top-secret missile system plans in a locked briefcase
Photo by DVIDSHUB
Starlings may be small, but when in large numbers, they are considered a lethal threat by aviation experts
Photo by Stuck in Customs
“Fast-flying and relatively dense,” writes Kalafatas, “a single starling can be a feathered bullet; a swarm of the birds is a feathered fusillade.”
Photo by Damian Gadal
Starlings have also been known to transmit disease, consume cattle feed and entire wheat fields and cost U.S. agriculture around $1 billion a year in crop damage
Photo by Random_fotos
“When sorrows come,” as Shakespeare put it in Hamlet, “they come not single spies, but in battalions.” Or in murmurations,
as the case may be
Photo by joewcampbell
sonic boom
Photo by matt.forestpath (flash200)
The explosive sound of the shock wave produced by an aircraft travelling at or above the speed of sound
Photo by zJMac
Still love birds, love all animals as thyself,
Try always to help other animals too
Photo by nosha
THANK YOU
Photo by Alberto Marín
