Photo credit: Kevin Westenberg
A PEOPLE magazine article from last month discussed Chris Cornell avoiding flights with bad weather during the final weeks of his life, with a source stating it was proof that he valued his life. An insider told PEOPLE that on May 4th – just two weeks before Cornell’s death – he pushed his flight from Atlanta, Georgia, back a day over safety concerns about flying in inclement weather.
The next week, on May 9th, Cornell made a similar choice after hearing his flight from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, was delayed due to mechanical issues. The source says that Cornell was nervous to fly due to potential plane issues, and instead drove a rental car over seven and a half hours to his intended destination.
A 1996 Kerrang Magazine article details Cornell’s fear of flying at the time.
Like the rest of Soundgarden, Chris hates traveling. We’re not using the Eurostar today because Cornell’s a rock star, but because he has a serious fear of flying and has to take prescription sedatives just to get on a plane.
“My dad flew small planes when I was a kid, and I used to go up in those all the time, I was never afraid. But then the first commercial flight I ever had was to New York; it took off from Seattle in bad weather and as soon as we got up we heard this huge explosion, and the pilots came on and said it was ‘static discharge’. Yeah, right! That means the plane got struck by lightning. The whole flight was storms all the way, and we had an abortive landing. So that totally freaked me out for a long time.”
Cornell spends the next half hour cataloguing a series of traveling disasters that have befallen Soundgarden, like the tour bus that almost plummeted off the Italian Alps when the brakes failed, or the drunken 18-hour nightmare ferry journey to Scandinavia. Then there was the one that nearly wiped out everyone on the Australian Big Day Out tour…
“We were supposed to land at this little airport, but the power had gone out because something got struck by lightning,” recalls Chris. “You could see lightning flashing all around the plane. All of a sudden, the clouds part and you see, like, the chimney of a house. Then you could see this house that had ‘Jesus Saves’ in big letters on the roof. That made everyone nervous because we thought it was the last thing we’d ever see. Our last chance to repent! The pilot forced the plane down at the fourth attempt and everyone went straight to the bar.”
Then there was the flight they had in a Puddlejumper. “They’re like small commuter planes that crash all the time. We were in bad weather in that, too. About halfway through the pilot comes on and says, ‘Apparently…’, and then clicks off. We’re sitting there for 20 minutes going, ‘Apparently what? The engines have broken? One of the wings has dropped off? ‘ It turned out we were going to be a few minutes early. It’s probably some pilot joke thing.”
