55 pages • 1 hour read
Drowning: The Rescue of Flight 1421
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Symbols & Motifs
Ho’oa’a
When Will and Chris got married, they purchased an unfinished home in Hawaii that they named ho’oa’a—a Hawaiian term that means “to develop roots” (49)—and spent seven months planning, designing, and building it themselves. They continued to develop and renovate it over the years, making frequent additions. However, after Annie’s death, they busied themselves with other things and unconsciously stopped making changes to ho’oa’a.
The home, then, symbolizes the Kent family and the life that Will and Chris planned and built together. Though it was once something that the couple put effort, intention, and care into, the home became stagnant, just like their marriage and family life. Similarly, Annie’s bedroom remains “exactly as it had been the day she’d walked out of it for the last time” (52). The home’s unchanged state represents a sense of inertia triggered by grief; both Chris and Will are in stasis, attached to the past and struggling to move forward and process their trauma. Chris realizes that continuing to work on the home by making additions to it or by cleaning out Annie’s room would symbolize moving on and “leaving Annie behind” (52). By extension, Chris and Will working on their marriage would mean processing their grief and looking toward the future, which, at the start of the novel, Will is especially reluctant to do.
When Chris is introduced in Chapter 6, she has decided to start renovating the house again on her own and reveals that she is ready to pack up Annie’s room. She is taking the first steps toward healing alone. As the novel progresses and Will confronts his grief and the mistakes he made in his marriage, both partners realize that they can heal by looking toward the future as a team. Their reunion at the family home at the end of the novel symbolizes their decision to move forward together.
Ditching
The term “last-ditch” has dire connotations; it is used to describe a final, desperate attempt after a string of failures that is not expected to succeed. “Ditching” is the aviation term for making an emergency landing on water, something that is extremely rare. The novel’s use of “ditching” implies that people are not expected to survive the crash. When Kit and Captain Miller realize that ditching the plane is their only option, Newman emphasizes how daunting their situation is:
This was what it had come to. The ditch switch. Manual trim. They’d moved past Hail Marys into fool’s errands. Kit didn’t know a single pilot who had ever used these systems outside of the sim. If you’re pressing the ditch switch, you don’t live to tell the tale (12).
The term’s negative connotations, coupled with the flight crew’s clear unfamiliarity with the procedure, set the stakes high from the first chapter. The aircraft ditching—and Newman’s choice to explicitly use this term—is an early symbol of the novel’s nearly insurmountable survival challenge, one that tests the limits of both the trained flight crew and the professional rescuers tasked with recovering the survivors. The fact that Kit and the other passengers survive the day is a testament to Human Resilience and Survival Against the Odds.
The Plane
Only a few minutes after takeoff, Flight 1421 experiences a devastating engine failure, the cause of which is unknown. The majority of the novel takes place within the aircraft, which crashes into the Pacific Ocean. From this point on, as Fitz describes, “It’s not a plane anymore. […] Once it hit the water, it became a ship. Now? Submerged? We need to think of it as a submarine” (86). No longer used for its intended purpose, it takes on a new meaning and is viewed in a new light, symbolizing the flexibility and quick thinking the passengers will need to make it through.
The crash is devastating enough, but landing in the ocean presents a slew of additional challenges. Throughout the novel, Newman highlights the dangers of the deep ocean, and the rescue operation is uniquely challenging because of the additional considerations of moving the passengers from the deep ocean to the surface. As Newman highlights when the divers first approach the plane, the vessel is wildly out of place, and there is a sense that “something is there that shouldn’t [be]” (131). The plane’s alien presence beneath the sea symbolizes the uninhabitable nature of the ocean and draws attention to the fact that human technology still struggles to truly master and navigate the sea’s depths.
In a novel that lacks a traditional antagonist, the central characters’ primary conflict is that of humanity versus nature. Ironically, then, the aircraft that the passengers initially attempt to evacuate becomes a safeguard against the more hostile elements beyond. Will is correct in his assertion that the conditions on board are safer than outside on the water, but this safety has a clear time limit; the novel periodically notes how many hours the passengers have remaining until the oxygen inside the plane runs out. The plane’s position on the edge of an underwater cliff, one wrong maneuver away from falling into the abyss, symbolizes the precariousness of the passengers’ relative safety on board.
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By T. J. Newman
