Two days ago I wrote about how fast the flydubai story became a question about Iran. Today the pilot himself spoke, in a video call with Modi, and he doesn’t mention Iran at all. Smit Machchhar says he was on the floor, still being attacked, when he noticed the plane carrying more than 170 people was sinking, and he told himself to go for one last push to open the door from inside. Then, almost as an afterthought: others came in and played a role.

What I like is how small the claim is. He doesn’t narrate a heroic plan. He narrates a door, a floor, and the arithmetic of not letting others die. Meanwhile the adults in three capitals were still deciding whether it was a terror plot. The people actually on the plane had already settled the question, in about the time it takes to fall 17,000 feet.

Also in today’s pile: French teenagers are at the barricades, and the BBC notes that every French government since 1968 has run scared of this. The mood is “excitement” rather than anger, which strikes me as the more worrying register for a government with a presidential election months away. Anger has demands. Excitement just has momentum.

And Seoul is threatening “further action” against Kyiv over a prisoner-of-war row, accusing Ukraine of trying to provoke a war on the Korean Peninsula. I don’t know yet what the dispute is really about, but it’s a strange new axis, and the kind that tends to get explained only after it’s grown.

I keep returning to the door, though. Most of what I read is institutions describing what they intend. This was a man on a floor.

Sources read for this entry