To Ditch is a Verb

images-3I first encountered the word “ditch” in an aviation context when studying an emergency checklist for the Cessna 150.   I didn’t have any idea what it meant to ditch an airplane; I just assumed it meant you had given up all hope and were going going down.  That’s because, most likely, the only times I had heard the word “ditch” in my youth were in relationship to something you do to a girlfriend, or the thing you dig in order to hide the people you dispatch, or the thing that carries water from the street to the ocean.

When I arrived to California in high school I heard the word again, but this time in relationship to skipping school.  At my high school, they had a thing called a “senior ditch day” when the seniors somehow found themselves on the beach instead of class.   I had never heard that word used that way before, probably because growing up in New York skipping school was not a thing one ever considered.   Missing school was something you did if and only if you were deathly ill, and even that wasn’t a great excuse.

From the emergency checklist, I quickly learned that to ditch an airplane meant to land it on water.   Unless the airplane was specifically built for that purpose, the only reason to do such a thing would be in the event of some sort of catastrophic failure; I guess not too dissimilar from the girlfriend scenario.

Like many things in aviation there are many controversies about the best way to ditch an aircraft, and even which are the best airplanes to ditch in, as if you had a choice.   People argue about whether a high wing or low wing airplane is easier to ditch, and how to best approach a series of waves.

There is relative agreement about the fact that when ditching an airplane, you want to be going as slowly as you can, although not so slowly that you stall and pitch the nose down.   I suppose you do ditch an airplane the same way you might ditch a lover; go slowly and keep your nose and head up all the way down to the splashdown.

I am somewhat embarrassed to say that in the ten years since I first learned what the word “ditching” meant in its aviation context, I never knew its origin.   If you guessed it comes from the concept of digging a ditch, perhaps for your own grave, you would be wrong and probably in need of antidepressants.  The word, it turns out, originated in the Royal Air Force.   The English Channel was colloquially known as “the ditch,” and if you couldn’t make it across and had to land in it, well of course that meant you were “ditching.”

I don’t know enough about British English to know if you can ditch school there as well, and if that means you go hang out near the channel, or if ditching a girlfriend might mean…. No, don’t think I’ll go there.