Joyless Creatures – Charlie Victor Romeo Review ****

In 1956, the Australian inventor David Warren developed a prototype for a “Flight Memory Unit” for commercial airliners that would record instrument readings and cockpit audio recordings. The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) showed little interest in the model and reportedly brushed it off as an unnecessary device that “would yield more expletives than explanations”. Wiser minds prevailed, of course, and by 1960 Australia was the first country in the world to require airliners to carry so-called “black boxes” (which are actually orange, but that’s another story).

Black box data has been essential in flight failure inquiries over the last 50 years, and indeed the recovery of the flight data recorder (FDR) and cockpit voice recorder (CVR), which are housed in the same component, is now considered the most critical stage in any crash investigation. The audio from the cockpit reveals not only important details about what’s being said, but about what’s not being said – the background noise or instrument warnings that can indicate everything from an on-board fire to a physical struggle (i.e., United Airlines Flight 93).

And of course at a more disturbing level, the audio from the cockpit reveals the horror of helpless individuals facing imminent catastrophe, creating an eerie permanent record of someone’s last moment alive. This drama of doom serves as the inspiration for Charlie Victor Romeo (see: Cockpit Voice Recorder), a documentary based on a play based on the black box transcripts from six airline incidents and accidents that occurred between 1985 and 1996. The play was developed in 1999 by Bob Berger, Patrick Daniels, and Irving Gregory, who also act in and co-direct the filmed version. The play premiered before 9/11, of course, and well before Air France Flight 990, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 (its black boxes were recovered in 2011), and Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared somewhere in the Eastern Hemisphere in earlier this year.

As evidenced by the MH 370 search, the theories and confirmed causes of plane crashes can be wildly varied: a rogue pilot, a hijacker, bad weather, bad decisions, faulty equipment, or in the case of TWA Flight 800, even a conspiratorial missile strike. Whatever the cause, one imagines (or at least I imagine) insufferable screaming and chaos as the humanity on board collectively come to grips with their own mortality. While not based on voice recording transcripts, Paul Greengrass’ masterful United 93 offered a somewhat different depiction of this stereotype. Certainly there was a lot of horror, but there was also heroism and hope among the passengers. Charlie Victor Romeo depicts similarly gutsy determination in the cockpit, with the pilots desperately but calmly attempting to control their fate, knowing too well the responsibility they bear for the helpless souls trapped behind them.