Teresa Margolles: Translating The Horror

Aug13

Imagine you live in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
The “City of Evil”, one of the most violent places on the entire planet. Here, in the past few years, murders have reached inconceivable numbers. More than 3000 victims only in 2010 – an average of eight to nine people killed every day.
So every day, you leave your home praying you won’t be caught in some score-settling fight between the over 900 pandillas (armed gangs) tied to the drug cartels. Every day, like it or not, you are a witness to the neverending slaughter that goes on in your town. It’s not a metaphor. It is a real, daily, dreadful massacre.

Now imagine you live in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and you’re a woman aged between 15 and 25.
Your chances of not being subjected to violence, and of staying alive, drastically drop. In Juárez women like you are oppressed, battered, raped; they often disappear, and their bodies – if they’re ever found – show signs of torture and mutilations.
If you were to be kidnapped, you already know that in all probability your disappearance wouldn’t even be reported. No one would look for you anyway: the police seem to be doing anything but investigating. “She must have had something to do with the cartel – people would say – or else she somehow asked for it“.

Photo credit: Scott Dalton.

Finally, imagine you live in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, you’re a woman and you’re an artist.
How would you explain this hell to those who live outside Juárez? How can you address the burden of desperation and suffering this carnage places upon the hearts of the relatives? How will you be heard, in a world which is already saturated with images of violence? How are you going to convey in a palpable way all this anguish, the sense of constant loss, the waste of human life?

Teresa Margolles, born in 1963 in Culiacán, Sinaloa, was a trained pathologist before she became an artist. She now lives in Mexico City, but in the past she worked in several morgues across South America, including the one in Ciudad Juárez, that terrible mortuary where an endless river of bodies keeps flowing through four huge refrigerators (each containing up to 120 corpses).
“A morgue for me is a thermometer of a society. What happens inside a morgue is what happens outside. The way people die show me what is happening in the city.“

Starting from this direct experience, Margolles oriented her whole research towards two difficult objectives: one one hand she aims at sabotaging the narrative, ubiquitous in Mexican media and society, which blames the victims (the afore-mentioned “they were asking for it“); on the other, she wants to make the consequences of violence concrete and tangible to her audience, translating the horror into a physical, universal language.

But a peculiar lucidity is needed to avoid certain traps. The easiest way would be to rely on a raw kind of shock art: subjecting the public to scenes of massacre, mutilated bodies, mangled flesh. But the effect would be counter-productive, as our society is already bombarded with such representations, and we are so used to hyperreal images that we can hardly tell them apart from fiction.

It is then necessary to bring the public in touch with death and pain, but through some kind of transfer, or translation, so that the observer is brought on the edge of the abyss by his own sensitivity.

This is the complex path Teresa Margolles chose to take. The following is a small personal selection of her works displayed around the world, in major museums and art galleries, and in several Biennials.

En el aire (2003). The public enters a room, and is immediately seized by a slight euforia upon seeing dozens of soap bubbles joyfully floating in the air: the first childish reaction is to reach out and make them burst. The bubble pops, and some drops of water fall on the skin.
What the audience soon discovers, though, is those bubbles are created with the water and soap that have been used to wash the bodies of homicide victims in the morgue. And suddenly everything changes: the water which fell on our skin created an invisible, magical connection between us and these anonymous cadavers; and each bubble becomes the symbol of a life, a fragile soul that got lost in the void.

Vaporización (2001). Here the water from the mortuary, once again collected and disinfected, is vaporized in the room by some humidifiers. Death saturates the atmosphere, and we cannot help but breathe this thick mist, where every particle bears the memory of brutally killed human beings.

Tarjetas para picar cocaina (1997-99). Margolles collected some pictures of homicide victims connected with drug wars. She then gave them to drug addicts so they could use them to cut their dose of cocaine. The nonjudgemental metaphor is clear – the dead fuel narco-trafficking, every sniff implies the violence – but at the same time these photographs become spiritual objects, invested as they are with a symbolic/magic meaning directly connected to a specific dead person.

Lote Bravo (2005). Layed out on the floor are what look like simple bricks. In fact, they have been created using the sand collected in five different spots in Juárez, where the bodies of raped and murdered women were found. Each handmade brick is the symbol of a woman who was killed in the “city of dead girls”.

Trepanaciones (Sonidos de la morgue) (2003). Just some headphones, hanging from the ceiling. The visitor who decides to wear one, will hear the worldess sounds of the autopsies carried out by Margolles herself. Sounds of open bodies, bones being cut – but without any images that might give some context to these obscene noises, without the possibility of knowing exactly what they refer to. Or to whom they correspond: to what name, broken life, interrupted hopes.

Linea fronteriza (2005). The photograph of a suture, a body sewed up after the autopsy: but the detail that makes this image really powerful is the tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe, with its two halves that do not match anymore. Tattoos are a way to express one’s own individuality: a senseless death is the border line that disrupts and shatters it.

Frontera (2011). Margolles removed two walls from Juárez and Culiacán, and exhibited them inside the gallery. Some bullet holes are clearly visible on these walls, the remnants of the execution of two policemen and four young men at the hands of the drug cartel. Facing these walls, one is left to wonder. What does it feel like to stand before a firing squad?
Furthermore, by “saving” these walls (which were quickly replaced by new ones, in the original locations) Margolles is also preserving the visual trace of an act of violence that society is eager to remove from collective memory.

Frazada/La Sombra (2016). A simple structure, installed outdoors, supports a blanket, like the tent of a peddler stand. You can sit in the shade to cool off from the sun. And yet this blanket comes from the morgue in La Paz, where it was used to wrap up the corpse of a femicide victim. The shadow stands for the code of silence surrounding these crimes – it is, once again, a conceptual stratagem to bring us closer to the woman’s death. This shroud, this murder is casting its shadow on us too.

Pajharu/Sobre la sangre (2017). Ten murdered women, ten blood-stained pieces of cloth that held their corpses. Margolles enrolled seven Aymara weavers to embroider this canvas with traditional motifs. The clotted blood stains intertwine with the floreal decorations, and end up being absorbed and disguised within the patterns. This extraordinary work denounces, on one hand, how violence has become an essential part of a culture: when we think of Mexico, we often think of its most colorful traditions, without taking notice of the blood that soaks them, without realizing the painful truth hidden behind those stereotypes we tourists love so much. On the other hand, though, Sobre la sangre is an act of love and respect for those murdered women. Far from being mere ghosts, they are an actual presence; by preserving and embellishing these blood traces, Margolles is trying to subtract them from oblivion, and give them back their lost beauty.

Lengua (2000). Margolles arranged funeral services for this boy, who was killed in a drug-related feud, and in return asked his family permission to preserve and use his tonge for this installation. So that it could speak on. Like the tattoo in Linea frontizera, here the piercing is the sign of a truncated singularity.
The theoretical shift here is worthy of note: a human organ, deprived of the body that contained it and decontextualized, becomes an object in its own right, a rebel tongue, a “full” body in itself — carrying a whole new meaning. Scholar Bethany Tabor interpreted this work as mirroring the Deleuzian concept of body without organs, a body which de-organizes itself, revolting against those functions that are imparted upon it by society, by capitalism, by the established powers (all that Artaud referred to by using the term “God”, and from which he whished “to have done with“).

37 cuerpos (2007). The remnants of the thread used to sew up the corpses of 37 victims are tied together to form a rope which stretches across the space and divides it like a border.

¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? (2009). This work, awarded at the 53rd Venice Biennial, is the one that brought Margolles in the spotlight. The floor of the room is wet with the water used to wash bodies at the Juárez morgue. On the walls, huge canvases look like abstract paintings but in reality these are sheets soaked in the victims blood.
Outside the Mexican Pavillion, on a balcony overlooking the calle, an equally blood-stained Mexico flag is hoisted. Necropolitics takes over the art spaces.

It is not easy to live in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, to be a woman, and to be an artist who directly tackles the endless, often voiceless violence. It is even more difficult to try and find that miraculous balance between rawness and sensitivity, minimalism and incisivity, while maintaining a radical and poetic approach that can upset the public but also touch their heart.

For this post I am indebted to Bethany Tabor, who at Death & The Maiden Conference presented her brilliant paper Performative Remains: The Forensic Art of Teresa Margolles, focusing on the Deleuzian implications of Margolle’s works.
A couple of available essays on Margolles are What Else Could We Talk About? and Teresa Margolles and the Aesthetics of Death.

Spirits of the Road: The Cult of Animitas

Apr19

The traveler who exits the Estación Central in Santiago, Chile and walks down San Francisco de Borja street, after less than twenty meters will stumble upon a sort of votive wall, right on the side of the train station on his left, a space choke-full of little engravings, offerings, perpetually lit candles, photographs and holy pictures. A simple sign says: “Romualdito”, the same name present on every thankful ex voto.

If our hypothetical traveler then takes a cab and heads down the Autopista del Sol towards the suburb of Maipù, he will see by the side of the opposite lane an altar quite similar to the first one, dedicated to a young girl called Astrid whose portrait is almost buried under dozens of toys and plush bears.

Should he cross the entirety of Chile’s narrow strip of land, encased between the mountains and the ocean, maybe crossing from time to time the border to the Argentinian pampas, he would notice that the landscape (both urban and rural) is studded with numerous of these strange little temples: places of devotion where veneration is not directed towards canonical saints, but to the spirits of people whose life ended in tragedy. This is the cult of the animitas.

An expression of popular piety, the animitas are votive boxes that are often built by the side of the road (animita de carretera) to remember some victims of the “mala muerte”, an awful death: even if the remains of these persons are buried at the cemetery, they cannot really rest in peace on the account of the violent circumstances of their demise. Their souls still haunt the places where life was taken from them.

The Romualdito at the train station, for instance, was a little boy who suffered from tubercolosis, assaulted and killed by some thugs who wanted to steal his poncho and the 15 pesos he had on him. But his story, dating back to the 1930s, is told in countless versions, more or less legendary, and it’s impossible to ascertain exactly what happened: one thing is sure, the popular faith in Romualdito is so widespread in Santiago that when it was time to renew and rebuild the station, his wall was left untouched.

Young Astrid, the girl with the plush toys altar, died in 1998 in a motorcycle accident, when she was just 19-years-old. She is now known as the Niña Hermosa.

But these funeral altars can be found by the hundreds, mostly installed by the roadside, shaped like little houses or small churches with crosses sicking out of their tiny roofs.

At first they are built as an act of mercy and remembrance on the exact spot of the fatal accident (or, in the case of fishermen lost at sea, in specific sectors of the coast); but they become the center of a real cult whenevert the soul of the deceased proves to be miraculous (animita muy milagrosa). When, that is, the spirit starts answering to prayers and offerings with particular favors, by interceding bewteen the believer and the Holy Virgin or Christ himself.

The cult of the animitas is an original mixture of the indigenous, pre-Hispanic cult of the dead (where the ancestor turned into a benign presence offering protection to his offspring) and the cult of the souls of Purgatory which arrived here with Catholicism.
For this reason it shows surprising analogies with another form of folk religiosity developed in Naples, at the Fontanelle Cemetery, a place to which I devoted my book De profundis.
The two cults, not officially recognized by the Roman Church, have some fundamental aspects in common.

Animitas, built with recycled material, are folk art objects that closely resemble the carabattoli found in the Fontanelle Cemetery; not only for their shape but also for their function of making a dialectic, a dialogue with the Netherworld possible.
Secondly, the system of intercessions and favors, the offerings and the ex voto, are essentially the same in both cases.

But the crucial element is that the objects of veneration are not religious heroes, those saints who accomplished miraculous feats while they were alive, but rather victims of destiny. This allows for the identification between the believer and the invoked soul, the acknowledging of their reciprocal condition, a sharing of human misery – a feeling which is almost impossible when faced with “supernatural” figures like saints. Who of course have themselves an apotropaic function, but always maintain a higher position in respect to common mortals.
On the other hand the animitas, just like the anime pezzentelle in Naples, are “democratic” symbols, offering a much easier relationship: they share with the believers the same social milieu, they know firsthand all the daily hardship and difficulties of survival. They are protective spirits which can be bothered even for more modest, trivial miracles, because they once were ordinary people, and they understand.

But while in Italy the cult developed exclusively in one town, in Chile it is quite ubiquitous. To have an idea of the tenacity and pervasiveness of this faith, there is one last, amazing example.
Ghost bikes (white-painted bicycles remembering a cyclist who was run over by a car) can be seen all around the world, and they are meant as a warning against accidents. When these installations began to appear in Chile, they immediately intertwined with popular devotion giving birth to hybrids called bicianimitas. Boxes for the ritual offerings began to appear beside the white bicycles, and the funeral memorials turned into a bridge for communication between the living and the dead.
Those living and dead that, the animitas seem to remind us, are never really separated but coexist on the city streets or along the side of dusty highways stretching out into the desert.

The blog Animitas Chilenas intends to create an archive of all animitas, recording for each one the name of the soul, her history and GPS coordinates.
Besides the links in the article, I highly recommend the essay by Lautaro Ojeda, Animitas – Una expresión informal y democrática de derecho a la ciudad (in ARQ Santiago n. 81 agosto 2012) and the in-depth post El culto urbano de la muerte: el origen y la trascendencia de las animitas en Chile, by Criss Salazar.
Photographer Patricio Valenzuela Hohmann put up a wonderful animitas photo gallery.
Lastly, you should check out the Difunta Correa, Argentina’s most famous animita, dedicated to the legendary figure of a woman who died of thirst and fatigue in the Nineteenth Century while following her husband – who had been forced to enroll in the army; her body was found under a tree, still holding her newborn baby to her breast. The cult of the Difunta Correa is so widespread that it led to the construction of a real sanctuary in Vallecito, visited by one million pilgrims every year.

Roadkill cuisine

Jun27

La nostra serie di articoli sui tabù alimentari, The Dangerous Kitchen, è conclusa da tempo; ma torniamo a parlare di cucina. Nouvelle cuisine, potremmo dire, se non altro “nuova” e sconosciuta all’assaggio per la maggioranza di chi legge (e per chi scrive). Da non scartare a priori in tempi di crisi e di dilemmi etici sulle crudeltà verso gli animali da macello, la roadkill cuisine offre innumerevoli vantaggi per la buona forchetta. L’ingrediente di base sono infatti le carcasse degli animali accidentalmente colpiti ed uccisi sulle strade.

Certo, ad una prima occhiata l’idea di andare a caccia di animali selvatici spiaccicati, staccarli dall’asfalto, portarli in cucina, scuoiarli e metterli in pentola può sembrare un po’ distante dalle raffinatezze nostrane. Sarà perché le asettiche confezioni di carne già preparata al supermercato ci aiutano a dimenticare il “lavoro sporco” del curare e preparare l’animale. Eppure, a pensarci bene, superando la nostra ripugnanza per il corpo morto, quale differenza ci sarebbe fra un coniglio di allevamento e una lepre investita da un’auto? Si tratta pur sempre di cibo altamente vitaminico e proteico, senza grassi saturi e di sicuro privo di conservanti, coloranti, steroidi, nitriti, nitrati o altri additivi chimici alimentari. E se poi vi capitasse di trovare un cervo morto, avreste lo stesso identico bottino di una partita di caccia… meno la violenza del massacro volontario.

Bisogna però prestare particolare attenzione alla scelta dell’animale: il rischio è quello delle malattie. I due principi di base, a sentire i sostenitori di questa particolare dieta, sono: “Quanto fresco è? Quanto è spiaccicato?“. C’è evidentemente una bella differenza, per fare un esempio, fra una volpe sbalzata sul bordo della strada e morta per trauma cranico, ma il cui corpo è ancora intatto, rispetto a un’altra a cui sono passati sopra una dozzina di veicoli.

La carne, inoltre, va cotta più del normale, proprio come si farebbe con la selvaggina, per evitare infezioni batteriche. In ogni caso, il consiglio è di evitare del tutto i ratti, se non volete ritrovarvi con la poco simpatica leptospirosi.

Mangiare animali vittime di incidenti stradali è legale, o perlomeno non regolamentato, nella maggior parte degli stati: le eccezioni riguardano normalmente specie protette, o di grossa taglia, come cervi o alci. In Alaska, ad esempio, il corpo di un caribu investito da un’auto è proprietà dello Stato, e normalmente viene macellato dai volontari sul luogo dell’incidente. La carne viene poi distribuita alle mense dei poveri. Ma dagli orsi e dalle alci in Canada, alle celeberrime zuppe di scoiattolo e gli stufati di opossum degli Stati Uniti, fino ai barbecue di canguro in Australia, diverse tradizioni culinarie “insospettabili” dimostrano che praticamente tutto è commestibile. In America, la roadkill cuisine è piuttosto diffusa, tanto da essere perfino divenuta un topos da barzelletta per ridicolizzare una certa fascia medio-bassa della popolazione del Sud (i redneck, termine spregiativo per gli “zotici” del Sud).

Tra i propugnatori di questo stile di alimentazione vi sono però anche ambientalisti critici del sistema industriale di produzione della carne, veri e propri amanti degli animali, e la loro è una scelta di vita. Jonathan McGowan mangia esclusivamente piccole vittime del traffico da 30 anni: “Ho visto quanto erano sporchi gli animali nelle fattorie, e quanto erano poco salutari. Una volta andavo anche al mercato della carne, dove gli animali erano trattati in maniera grottesca dagli allevatori. Non ero contento di ciò che vedevo, per nulla“. Questo il suo motivo per passare a piccioni, gabbiani, tassi, talpe e corvi falcidiati dalle macchine.

L’ex-biologo Arthur Boyt gratta via donnole, ricci, scoiattoli e lontre dalle strade vicino alla sua dimora in Cornovaglia addirittura da 50 anni. Pur appassionato di cani (sia detto senza ironia), afferma che il gusto del labrador è squisito come l’agnello. Non sopporta che la carne vada sprecata, ma non ucciderebbe un animale per nulla al mondo.

L’attivista Fergus Drennan, impegnato in lotte per l’ambiente e contro le fattorie industrializzate, confessa invece che, nonostante apprezzi la roadkill cuisine, lui non potrebbe mai mangiare animali domestici: “una delle poche cose che tendo ad evitare sono gatti e cani. In teoria, non dovrei avere problemi a mangiarli… ma hanno sempre nomi e targhette sui loro collari, e siccome ho due gatti, è un po’ troppo per me“.

Lasciando da parte cani e gatti, ecco una tabella nutrizionale che abbiamo tradotto dalla pagina Wiki inglese dedicata alla roadkill cuisine:

Due le spontanee domande che, a questo punto, il neofita gourmet delle carogne arrotate si starà certamente ponendo. 1. Non sono un biologo: come faccio a sapere con sicurezza quale animale mi trovo di fronte? 2. Una volta identificato, come lo cucino?

Non disperi il nostro impavido sperimentatore del gusto. Masticando un po’ d’inglese, entrambi i dubbi avranno risposta. Per riconoscere gli animali spiaccicati, non c’è miglior soluzione della guida di Roger Knutson dall’esplicito titolo Flattened Fauna (“Fauna appiattita”), che descrive aspetto, abitudini e particolarità biologiche delle specie pelose più comuni, dunque a rischio investimento, sulle strade dell’America del Nord. Per quanto riguarda le modalità di cottura, nessuno invece batte Buck Peterson, vero esperto del settore e autore di numerosi ricettari che coniugano un leggero humor nero con la serietà nell’approccio (soprattutto per quanto riguarda i consigli igienico-sanitari). Anche se non avete alcuna intenzione di convertirvi a questa particolare arte culinaria, noi vi consigliamo ugualmente il suo The Original Road Kill Cookbook: se non altro, è un ottimo libro da tenere in bella vista sul bancone della cucina, quando avete ospiti a cena.

Volo 243

Mar22

Il cielo della grande isola di Hawaii era terso e splendente, la mattina del 28 Aprile del 1988. Per molti dei passeggeri che attendevano di imbarcarsi, il volo 243 della Aloha Airlines avrebbe sancito la fine delle vacanze: da Hilo, dove si trovavano, avrebbero volato sopra l’oceano, ammirando per l’ultima volta le barriere coralline, fino ad atterrare all’aeroporto internazionale di Honolulu.

Venne dato il via all’imbarco. Mentre saliva la scaletta che portava all’entrata principale del Boeing 737, una donna notò una piccola crepa verticale sul metallo della fusoliera. Ma, com’è comprensibile, tenne per sé l’osservazione e non avvisò nessuno. D’altronde l’esterno era già stato controllato la mattina stessa, e l’occhio attento dell’ispettore non aveva notato nulla di sospetto.
Quel giorno, l’aereo N73711 (chiamato Queen Liliuokalani in onore dell’unica regina delle Hawaii) aveva già eseguito sei voli interinsulari tra Honolulu, Hilo, Maui e Kauai, senza mostrare alcun problema a nessuno dei sistemi di bordo. Così tutto lasciava presagire un ennesimo volo di routine – una passeggiata per il capitano Robert Schornstheimer, 44 anni e 8.500 ore di volo alle spalle.
Erano in tre nella cabina: al fianco del capitano, la prima pilota femmina della Aloha Airlines, Madeline “Mimi” Tompkins, nelle vesti di primo ufficiale; sul sedile passeggero aveva invece preso posto un controllore del traffico aereo della FAA (Federal Aviation Administration). Fuori dalla cabina di pilotaggio, tre hostess si prendevano cura degli 89 passeggeri.

Alle 13:25 l’aereo decollò dalla pista, e cominciò la sua ascesa. La situazione meteorologica era perfetta, e il volo era condotto a vista. “Mimi” Tompkins, che stava ai comandi, portò tranquillamente il Boeing all’altezza di crociera stabilita di 7.300 metri quando, all’improvviso, udì uno schianto e un assordante rumore di risucchio. La testa le venne strattonata all’indietro, mentre nella cabina volavano detriti, fra cui dei pezzi di gomma isolante grigia. Il capitano lanciò un’occhiata indietro e si accorse che la porta della cabina di pilotaggio non c’era più: guardando sopra alle teste dei passeggeri, dove avrebbe dovuto essere il tetto dell’aereo, si poteva vedere il cielo blu.

Il capitano prese immediatamente i comandi dell’aereo, attivò le maschere ad ossigeno per i passeggeri, e cominciò la discesa di emergenza. Ma cosa diamine era successo, là dietro?

Verso le 13:48, una sezione del tetto sul lato sinistro si era aperta di colpo all’altezza della prima classe: l’assistente di volo Clarabelle Lansing, di 58 anni, che al momento stava in piedi vicino alla fila 5, fu immediatamente risucchiata fuori bordo. La decompressione improvvisa provocò un’esplosione che strappò via l’intero tetto dell’aereo, dalla cabina di pilotaggio fino quasi alle ali, per circa un quarto della lunghezza dell’intera fusoliera.

Fortunatamente tutti i passeggeri erano seduti con le cinture allacciate, al momento dell’incidente. La seconda assistente di volo, in piedi alla fila 15, fu gettata per terra e lievemente ferita, ma riuscì comunque a strisciare carponi su e giù per il corridoio per assistere e calmare i passeggeri. La terza hostess, invece, stava alla fila 2 – più vicina alla breccia: colpita in testa dai detriti che schizzavano in ogni direzione, venne sbalzata via e crollò sul pavimento.

L’aereo proseguì la sua corsa senza un tetto, rollando paurosamente a destra e sinistra. Il capitano trovava sempre più difficile mantenere la stabilità del velivolo; nel frattempo, anche comunicare con la Torre di Controllo di Maui (l’aeroporto prescritto in caso di emergenza) risultava quasi impossibile per via del rumore assordante che impediva di sentire le risposte inviate via radio.

Alla fine, dopo dieci interminabili minuti di volo in quelle condizioni, il Queen Liliuokalani riuscì ad atterrare all’aeroporto di Maui: sventrato, aperto come una scatola di sardine. I passeggeri vennero fatti evacuare dagli scivoli e, poiché sull’isola c’erano soltanto due ambulanze, furono caricati sui pullman turistici per essere trasportati all’ospedale.
Il bilancio finale fu sorprendentemente fortunato: 65 feriti, di cui soltanto 8 gravi. Unica vittima la Lansing, il cui corpo non venne più ritrovato. Delle altre due assistenti di volo, soltanto la numero 3 riportò trauma cranico e gravi lacerazioni al capo.

L’inchiesta successiva dimostrò come l’incidente fosse stato provocato da una rottura per fatica del metallo, aggravata dalla corrosione della crepa: l’aereo, in servizio da 19 anni, aveva sempre operato in ambiente costiero ad alto tasso di umidità e salinità.
L’incidente del volo 243, al di là dell’eccezionale atterraggio di emergenza che lo fece entrare nella storia dell’aviazione, fu essenziale per rivedere e modificare le norme di sicurezza. Oggi le procedure di routine prevedono un esame esterno fra un volo e l’altro, e anche per i materiali utilizzati nella costruzione e nelle saldature si è fatto tesoro degli errori evidenziati in questo episodio.

Il capitano Bob Schornstheimer, ritenuto un eroe, si è ritirato nel 2005. “Mimi” Tompkins ha continuato a volare con la Aloha Airlines, diventando il primo capitano donna della compagnia.