13,760 Feet My Personal Hole in the Sky

Suellen Alfred. Rev. 13,760 Feet: My Personal Hole in the Sky by Mark Berry. St. Louis, MO: Trans World Author, LLC, 2013.

        Mark Berry has lived through a modern American nightmare. His fiancée Susanne Jensen was killed when TWA Flight 800 crashed shortly after taking off from JFK airport on July 17, 1996, on its way to Paris. His book, 13,760 Feet: My Personal Hole in the Sky, is the story of that crash and Berry’s efforts to heal from the grief of that tragedy.
        The horror of that loss is made poignantly ironic by three important realities in Berry’s life. First, as a devoted airline pilot, he has often quoted the old but accurate maxim that statistically one is much safer in an airplane in the sky than in an automobile on the ground. Sadly, that statistic did not hold true for Susanne when she boarded TWA Flight 800. Second, he would have actually been on that flight with Susanne had they not changed their plans at the last minute when he decided to stay behind in order to move furniture into their newly purchased home so that it would be ready when Susanne returned from a business trip to Paris. Survivor’s guilt is a natural response to such an irony. Third, as a member of a close knit flight community Berry is in the habit of readily responding to news of any airline accident if he is in the vicinity and off duty. Not long after Susan’s flight takes off, Berry hears on television that an airplane has crashed in an area near his home. Sadly, as he tries to join his colleagues to “work the scene,” he learns that there was no land crash site to investigate. Finally, Berry is told that Susanne had boarded that flight on her way to Paris.
        Berry’s attempts to deal with his grief are varied. Not long after Susanne’s death he tries to go back to work as a relief pilot but is turned away by the captain of that flight who is concerned that Berry will upset his crew. When Berry sees his company’s psychiatrist, he is told that these sessions are like a “checkride,” a procedure a pilot goes through before he can fly an airplane with which he is not familiar. But after some visits, Berry turns in a letter of resignation and finds a job in Puerto Rico as a rookie pilot for a paltry wage that barely pays for his cheap motel lodging. Later, he lives in St. Croix in the U. S. Virgin Islands where he resides in a dump and flies from one island to the next with pilots who sometimes break the rules.
        After he returns to New York, he still feels “stranded in a land of despondency more foreign than any continent I had ever visited“ (102). But his ongoing work with a psychotherapist helps on his slow road to recovery and he becomes stable enough to fly for TWA again.
        The cause of TWA Flight 800’s crash has never been fully explained. Berry’s account of attempts or lack thereof to ascertain what caused the horrifying incident is compelling and deserves a book of its own.
        Conversely, a weakness of the book is Berry’s habit of interspersing song lyrics or poems among the prose sections. The quality of that writing is weak, especially since it is juxtaposed with his well-written prose.
        Throughout the book Berry includes a good deal of flying jargon that will appeal to readers who are familiar with the world of aircraft and flying. Also, some readers may enjoy the international party scene with free floating booze among interesting women and frequent travel to Europe and the Caribbean. For the novice, however, these sections are an unfortunate distraction from the excellent main story.