Airline Safety Rankings Like Baloney All Flavor - No Substance

My middle-school teacher Paul Wesche once told me that the word assume could be broken down to into three parts ass – u – me, as in -  to assume is to make an ass out of you and me. The truth behind this clever wordplay was made abundantly clear in the article just published by U.S. News and World Report, America’s Safest Airlines. 

Look, I know that everything associated with the word “airline” is out-of-control sexy, and that the fact that US airlines have completed a year of fatality-free flying is frustrating for journalists who see the airlines as a source of juicy news when they are

a) crashing airplanes
b) annoying passengers and
c) embarrassed by the antics of pilots and/or flight attendants.

Qantas Depressurization Event Not Unique

"TERRIFIED PASSENGERS!"

"MID AIR DRAMA!" 

these are the kinds of phrases lavishly attached to the newspaper stories about the decompression on Qantas flight 670 on Tuesday. The Boeing 737 traveling from Adelaide to Melbourne was forced to make a rapid descent after losing cabin pressure at cruise altitude. 

Sure, the pilots wanted a rapid descent. The period of time that average healthy individuals can remain in a robust state at 36,000 feet is less than a minute, according to tables on the time of useful consciousness. Smokers, people with heart and other health problems may have even less time than that.

Grocery Store offers Food for Thought for the Airline Industry

Regular readers of Flying Lessons may have discerned a theme: what aviation knows about how to improve human performance can and should be applied to a host of other endeavors. My trip to the Fairway supermarket in Stamford, Connecticut yesterday made me realize that this remarkable grocery store can teach something to the airline industry.

What Pin heads Point Lasers at Airplanes?

FAA tests effect of lasers on pilots on a 737 simulator

Technology givith and technology taketh away, that’s the only way to look at today’s aviation news coming just a day after my story in The New York Times - now reverberating around the globe (and even plagiarized in London’s Mail for a day but that's another story) - that personal electronic devices can interfere with cockpit instruments. 

Now comes word that newer, more powerful laser pointers are being used more frequently against airplanes flying at low altitudes. The Federal Aviation Administration released the numbers on Wednesday with the disturbing characterization that 2010 set an all-time high for laser attacks on airplanes in the United States with a whopping 2836 cases reported.

Raise Your Hand Held if You Use Your Gadget on the Plane

Gadget firmly in hand at 30,000 feet

UPDATE ON THIS POST HERE

 Well in all my years writing for The New York Times, I've never found my email inbox filled with so many disgruntled reader comments first thing in the morning.  One reader claimed to be "dismayed" by my story suggesting that use of portable electronic devices on airplanes could be a safety hazard. Another reader suggested that I was "a liberal left-wing news reporter" too saturated in college with left wing communist views," (a Baptist college in Georgia?) And anyway, didn't I know that the television show MythBusters debunked the effect of EMI on airplane instruments?