When Amity Airlines Tried To Pass The Buck When One Of Its Planes Fell To Earth- “Passengers” (2008)- A Meta-Film Review Based On The Life Of Psychotherapist Claire Summers   

By Special Guest Reviewer Emma Summers Smythe

We will probably never get to the bottom of what really happened with Amity Airlines Flight 1166 which crashed and burned shortly before it was supposed to land at JFK Airport in New York. The FAA ruled it an accident, human error or some kind of error. Amity’s public relations and legal departments lived and died by that report and its own report claiming pilot error. The pilot had failed a series of eye tests conducted by its own house ophthalmologist, and it was found the pilot had been addicted to opioids unknown to them as well (he had not had a mandatory test, peeing into a urine cup, in several years). The priest at one memorial service called it divine intervention, a minister came to the same conclusion except called it providence at another, a rabbi invoked the Kabbalah at a third. Based on all of this fog, and on the recollections of the few survivors, a wrongful death class action suit was initiated, and the survivors and deceased’s kin receive settlements when the airline to cut it loses and avoid worse publicity settled out court. (Originally using the pilot error acting as an independent contractor defense the airline told the plaintiffs to sue the pilot’s estate. That didn’t get very far once the attorneys got the eye and urine tests which closed on the idea of defending case in court by the airline).

And based on the strange things that happened around this doomed flight a film Passengers was made out of it so people could make their own judgments about who or what was responsible for what was too have been a routine flight from Miami. The film starred Anne Hathaway who while she had a startlingly close physical resemblance to Claire was far too perky, far too worldly even for the morose, sullen and periodically severely depressed real Claire Summers. That according to my husband Daniel who was at the premier. I just couldn’t bring myself to go and face that same music I have been hearing in my head since Claire passed away in that horrible flight that fell to earth.

None of this which will bring my younger sister, Claire, beautiful Claire Summers, back. (The only “good” part of the whole ordeal was that our part of the settlement did insure that our two boys will be able to go to college, grad school if they like or get that far). Claire and I been close as kids after our parents were killed in a freak accident and we were taken in by a kindly maternal aunt as I played the big sister role to the hilt. We had not been getting along for the year or so before she passed mostly because she would not take my advice and stop daydreaming her life through schools and programs and get out in the real world and down in the mud using her acknowledged skills to some social good. That “talk” would inevitably lead her to sign up for yet another class at New School. She had been working on her Ph.D. dissertation on therapeutic effects of Senegalese fertility gods on young women before her death too give you an idea of what she was up to. 

Claire, and if I showed you a photograph you would have to agree, was the beauty of the family, an “ice queen’ beauty that had every guy who came within a mile of her dreaming some fantasy dream about her, about enchanted castles and brave if errant knights to the rescue. I had been having sex since I was maybe fifteen, but I think if Claire had any sexual experience it was only after she graduated from college with a guy named David from the Anthropology Department at NYU. I do remember when we had one of our sisterly talks several years ago that she told me she blushed when some guy asked her to do something she said was “nasty.” A blow job no big deal these days but she blushed even talking about it. (She said she did what was asked but didn’t like it, yes, an ice queen pure and simple)     

Then she met Eric, Eric Wright, a hedge fund manager at a big Wall Street firm. She made me and my husband, Daniel, laugh when she mentioned his name saying that she had met Mr. Wright and we thought she meant the Mr. Right she was always talking about meeting someday in her dreamy non-academic moments. This turned out to be a very fateful meeting since it was Eric who invited her to his place in Key Largo from which they were returning to the city when the plane fell down from the sky    

We had only met Eric once over drinks at a swanky Soho bar, but he seemed like a good fit for her and she seemed happy that night. Claire had confided in me then that they had met at a group therapy session where she was going get help to try to “focus” her life and he to lower his temperature, stop being driven so much by the cash nexus endemic to the hedge fund business. The rules of the road were that group members were not permitted to have outside social contacts, so they had been keeping their relationship a secret from the group. Since I hadn’t heard except through a post-mortem birthday card Claire had on her desk in her apartment to be sent to me as a “peace” offering when we went to clear out her belongings I don’t know whether they were still attending the same group sessions. I assume that Key Largo trip meant they had resolved something, and they would go to separate groups but that is only my guess.

You should know that the reason I am writing this little piece is that Claire (and Eric) have been gone a few years now and the recent anniversary has left me very blue, very lonely and depressed that I never responded to Claire’s many voicemails before it was too late. My own therapist has insisted that it would be cathartic for me to do so, to write it down, to focus on what has damaged me, and now that there has been a film made about what happened (as a counter to the positive spin of the heroic pilot Sully who landed his plane in the Hudson River saving almost all his passengers and crew if I recall) my good friend Greg Green had allowed me to do the public grieving I need.   

If you see the film, I know I can’t not now, I hope you will have questions too about what happened. I scream at the television every time I see Donna Lee, the commercial face of Amity going on and on about how safe and friendly their services are. I really believe there was a massive coverup to save the airline from going bankrupt. One of the deceased passengers had left behind at his apartment all kinds of material detailing the problem the company had with its planes over the previous year before the accident. One of the survivors, bless her for I believe that her testimony would have blown the case sky high and is the real reason Amity settled, swore on a stack of Bibles that there had been an explosion in one of the engines before all hell broke loose. I have already mentioned how our attorneys had gotten the information about the pilot’s eyesight flubbed by their in-house toady and the lack of independent medical evaluation. About how pilots and flight attendants (but not mechanics and handlers) were routinely passed on the supposedly mandatory drug tests. There is more and I think the film should provoke an outcry against these permitted violations of air safety standards.  Still that won’t bring Claire back and won’t fill my empty heart.

Yes, we won’t really find out about what happened to Amity Airlines Flight 1166 will we.