'We are in emergency.'

So who enjoys revisiting gruesome airliner tragedies?

Answer number one: Not me!

Answer number two: Well, lots of people, maybe.

These are fat times for white-knuckle voyeurs. There are the numerous websites with photos of crooked landings at Hong Kong's old Kai Tak airport, or www.liveatc.net, which lets you listen in on the Logan Airport chatter with incoming planes. Watch out for ''hazmets"! That's pilot talk for hazardous meteorological conditions.

At pilot Joe d'Eon's podcast site, Fly With Me, you can hear a tape of ground personnel speaking with the JetBlue captain who successfully landed his broken Airbus at Los Angeles International Airport last year. The money quote: ''We believe your gear is straight." In fact, the nose gear had locked into a sideways position.

Now you can get your distress-at-35,000-feet fix on stage or screen: ''United 93," the story of one of the airplanes hijacked on Sept. 11, is in movie theaters. And ''Charlie Victor Romeo," a reenactment of real cockpit conversations from six airliners about to crash, makes its New England premiere Wednesday at the Zero Arrow Theatre in Cambridge.

Good grief, who watches this stuff?

Not everyone, that's for sure. Before ''United 93" opened, a few cinemas stopped showing the trailer because audiences complained the snippets were too traumatizing. National Public Radio reported that 12 percent of moviegoers said they wouldn't see the movie, a number far above the typical negative response of 1 percent.

When the movie debuted, the industry trade publication Variety reported that ''studio tracking on the pic is ambiguous: By a slim margin the film is the top choice among males, but it's also registering a high percentage of 'definitely not interested.' " The movie, which cost about $20 million to make, has been a modest success at the box office, recouping most of its costs.

Bob Berger, a cocreator of ''CVR" (which stands for cockpit voice recorder), acknowledges that individuals react intensely when hearing about the show's gruesome subject matter. ''People's reaction to hearing about the play is always different from their reaction to seeing the play," he says. ''People bring their own baggage to the theater, because these situations have been depicted endlessly in movies and on TV."

Dr. Srini Pillay, director of panic-disorders research at McLean Hospital, says the dual response of terror and fascination in the face of horrifying material is programmed by different parts of the brain. ''Our first fear response is an irrational, protective mechanism that bypasses the cortical processing of the brain," he explains. ''Rational processing of fear is delayed. But an initial exposure to a noxious stimulant may subside over time.

''The bad news is that the fear is going to register anyway, but as humans we have greater control over that fear," Pillay says. Horror movies are the classic example of experiences that people seek out precisely to provoke the fear reflex, he notes: ''People perspire, their hearts beat faster, and what might be their ordinary existential anxiety is replaced by a transient crisis anxiety that makes them feel more alive."

A small but significant number of people will be unable to watch ''United 93" or ''Charlie Victor Romeo," Pillay says, because their instinctual fear overpowers any rational curiosity or interest in deepening their knowledge of what frightens them.

Berger has little patience for critics who feel the material is too raw: ''You don't want to see it? That's OK. The play doesn't need affirmation from laypeople who might be disturbed. We won two Drama Desk awards, we must have done something right."

In fact, since it first opened at the Collective: Unconscious theater in Lower Manhattan in 1999, ''CVR" has been produced in 20 US cities, as well as Australia and Japan. In Cambridge, it's being presented by the American Repertory Theatre and CRASHarts.

Berger says he and cocreator Irving Gregory got the idea for the play while browsing in a Manhattan bookstore in 1998. The reality-television vogue was just getting started, and ''we were taking books off the shelves that represented what I saw as an exploitation of reality -- for example, a coffee-table book on invasive surgery."

One of the books they bought was Malcolm MacPherson's ''The Black Box: All-New Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-Flight Accidents," the second of two compilations. Cockpit recordings from doomed airliners are made public after the National Transportation Safety Board completes its accident investigations. All the ''CVR" transcripts can be found in MacPherson's book.

''It's incredibly dramatic material," says MacPherson, a former foreign correspondent for Newsweek who says he became ''very afraid of flying on crappy African airlines." Hearing the transcripts, he says, ''You are listening to people in harm's way, and it's amazing how they struggle to rectify these often unrectifiable situations."

Unexpectedly, the black-box books have sold quite well. ''I had to deal with the ghoulishness of the thing," MacPherson says. ''It didn't bother me. If somebody wanted to call me a ghoul, I could handle that. God, there is such a fascination with this stuff."

MacPherson sits right in the middle of the horror-fascination gradient when it comes to airplane crashes. ''I would never go see 'United 93,' " he says. ''I have no interest in how those people struggled." He adds that he would never listen to a tape of the very recordings that he published, and that he would never go see ''CVR."

''Reading these things is quite enough. To have them dramatized is quite over the top. The imagination is a wonderful force."

MacPherson notwithstanding, ''CVR" has succeeded with some challenging audiences.

''I first saw it in this tiny theater that held 30 or 40 people," says retired United Airlines captain Alfred Haynes, who miraculously crash-landed a malfunctioning McDonnell Douglas DC-10 in an Iowa cornfield in 1992 and is depicted in the play. He's a fan. ''I thought, 'Who could possibly be interested in this stuff, outside of airline pilots?' But they kept filling the theater and filling the theater, and now they're in some pretty big spaces."

The Air Force has used ''CVR" to train widebody tanker pilots, and Harvard's Dr. Donald Berwick, head of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, staged ''CVR" at an annual meeting of the group several years ago for an audience of doctors, nurses, and aides. ''What you hear is a sophisticated interaction of technology, logic, communication, and hierarchical relationships," Berwick says. ''You don't have to stretch too far to see the applications to the operating room or the intensive care unit. It was spectacular."

''CVR" grips its audiences because the catastrophic (and near-catastrophic) outcomes of the flights are largely known to the audience beforehand. After MacPherson cashed in with his books of airplane-crash tapes, he tried to strike a happier note in 2002 by publishing ''On a Wing and a Prayer: Interviews With Airline Disaster Survivors."

''It didn't do very well," MacPherson reports. ''People want people to die, I think. They want that ultimate jolt when the cockpit voice recorder goes blank."

Alex Beam can be reached at beam@globe.com.