System Disruption

Forgetting for the moment the tragic reality that there were two lives lost, this morning's crash involving a FedEx MD-11 at Tokyo Narita actually made pretty nice footage. Here's the landing ... we see the plane bouncing ... once ... twice ... and it flips over to the side and goes up in flames ...

A later Wall Street Journal article mentioned the matter of the packages on that cargo flight. Imagine being notified that your package which you just sent via FedEx to your friend in, say, the States just got destroyed in a crash at Tokyo. If you weren't familiar with the way international freight companies operated, it would come across as quite strange, no? You deposited the package at an outlet in Singapore, and then you know nothing about where it goes or what it does until someone tells you it has arrived, or else something completely out of the blue happens. It's almost as if the way of the world just got disrupted by some bizarre, off-the-book error.