What Part of “Kleerdalahn” Don’t You Understand?

By John Harrell

Dispatches from the Circuit, No. 1

FORT WORTH, Texas — Words matter. Two of them, “at takeoff,” contributed to the crash of two Boeing 747 jetliners in the Canary Islands, 49 years later still the deadliest plane disaster to date. The controllers at the restless machine that is Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport know the power of words. So do the Scriptures.

Approaching one of DFW’s seven runways, a crew’s spoken request to land takes two seconds. When it ends, as it often does here, with the phrase “one-eight right,” the reference is to a runway pointing at 180 degrees on the compass — the zero is added mentally — but since there are two parallel runways, the pilot is referring specifically to the one on the right-hand (west) side. The controller calls back, her tempo of speech bordering on superhuman, calling the flight number and declaring, “one-eight right, clear to land.” Or perhaps more correctly, “kleerdalahn.” Milliseconds add up when a vehicle doing 130 knots counts as moving slowly.

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 “The controllers at the restless machine that is Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport know the power of words. So do the Scriptures.”

“Right” matters a great deal too. Gathering near the end of “one-eight left,” 400 obstructionless yards to the east of 18-R, is a flock of metal birds holding altogether hundreds, maybe thousands of passengers — bound, at one check on an average Thursday night, for Portland (Oregon), Mexico City, Sacramento, Billings, Torreón, Provo, Bismarck, Fargo, Lincoln, Vancouver, and Portland again — waiting to take off in turn. Amarillo takes off from 18-L as Denver is landing on 18-R. Good thing the left knew what the right was doing.

And there’s a song in the noise. Hidden within the lickety-split call-and-response between tower and cockpit is an invigorating array of humanness, even incarnation. When traffic backs up at DFW for weather, a pilot’s last remark to the tower on handoff might be the two tiny words “good job,” thrown in across an extra 0.2 seconds, to compliment the controller for untangling a backlog caused by a storm north of town that snarled up departures a dozen deep on the taxiway.

“Guys” is another gem. Handing off (say) Alaska Airlines Flight 100 to departure control just after takeoff, the tower might say, “Alaska 100, contact departure, good night” — instructions to the crew to switch channels and talk to the person who will guide them into the climb. But sometimes the word “guys” appears at the end, changing “good night” to “good night, guys” — a luxuriant one-tenth of a second but enough to convey friendship, compassion, and camaraderie, a high five in a high-stakes environment in which each syllable is precious.

Mark the Controller?

St. Mark the evangelist could have been an FAA controller. In his Gospel, the NIV has 12 occurrences of immediately in English — the first is in the first chapter: “Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they immediately told Jesus about her” (v. 30) — but the Greek word eutheós (the “immediately”) appears 42 times. The pace is fast.

Tiny words matter in the Gospel just like on an airfield. John remembers Jesus saying not just eimi (“I am”) but ego eimi (“I myself am”) — the good shepherd, the gate, the way, the truth, the life. Jesus, the human God, in a single word, displays the embodied, incarnate majesty of God’s action in the world. He, He Himself, is with us.

Mark, too, might have known how to end a transmission on a single note that changes everything. The shorter ending of Mark — whose last words are “because they were afraid” — ends on gar (the “because”). Debates have raged over gar’s significance, or whether it’s truly the end of the book; yet in canonizing the text, the Holy Spirit, through the mystery enshrouding that tiny word, leaves us hanging, hungering for more story, desperate to know what the women, and we ourselves, are to do next.

If the controllers were to say “runway one-eight” instead of “runway one-eight-right,” a pilot would be skimped of information to avoid a crash. Which landing strip do I use? There are two rectangles of pavement before me: Which one do I land on — left, or right? Mark’s evangel wants us to be similarly dissatisfied, hungering for God’s next word of life to come immediately.

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 “Jesus, the human God, in a single word, displays the embodied, incarnate majesty of God’s action in the world.”

Deliberately Chosen

Speaking of immediacy: If the game is tight here at DFW, it’s even tighter at San Diego International, whose runway — it has just one — is wedged between buildings, terrain, water, neighborhoods, and Interstate 5.

“Can you take an immediate?” asks Lindbergh Tower, the airport’s call sign, to a Frontier plane waiting for takeoff to Phoenix on Runway 27. Translation: “The next arrival, which needs the same asphalt you do, is four miles from touchdown. If I let you taxi onto the only runway we’ve got, can you make like a pinball and launch?”

Affirmative, comes the reply; 120 seconds later, Frontier is up, Delta is down, and most of us never see the dance.

But the controllers do. So do the pilots and maybe a few nerdy passengers. To them, tiny, deliberately chosen words — words the size of gar — empower, protect, and befriend, pointing to how deliciously human our existence is. May it be so in resurrection life. Good night, guys.
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