Hi Orcastraiter; Re: "Hanjour, the pilot that crashed the Pentagon...he couldn't fly a Cessna, yet on his first time in the seat, he takes the stick of a 757 flys a beeline to Washington, does a 270 degree turn past the Pentagon and then swoops down a steep vertical curve for a perfect hit on the first floor wall."
The size of a plane is not proportional to the skill required to point it in a given direction. Just ask the next airline pilot you run into how hard it would be to fly a Fokker triplane.
Let me put it to you this way. Cessnas are a typical "general aviation" aircraft. The fatality rate on those things is around 16 per million hours. In other words, if you take 1000 4 hour flights in a small plane, the chance that you'll come home in a box is about 6%. The odds of buying it on a commercial jet airline flight is about 1 in 52 million, so if you do 1000 of those, your dirt nap probability is about 0.0019%, or 3000 times smaller.
Now flying a jet SAFELY is much more difficult than flying a Cessna safely, but as far as the actual details of moving the plane around the sky, the big jets are much easier than the bouncy little airplanes.
Think of all the examples where the pilot of a small plane was incapacitated and a passenger took over the controls. The usual class for a "pinch hitter" pilot is 4 hours. At that point, you're good to go to take over in an emergency:
www.flighttraining.aopa.org/cfi_tools/publications/inst_reports2.cfm?article=4375
also see:
www.ntsb.gov/ntsb/brief.asp?ev_id=20001208X05479&key=1
To fly the big birds, most of your training is going to be devoted to emergency procedures and other stuff that just isn't going to be an issue for a suicide pilot. Fuel consumption, for example, doesn't matter, nor does any of the stuff associated with inspections, takeoff or landing.
Here's what the BBC says:
"You haven't got to be superhuman. You don't need a brilliant academic mind," says John O'Hara, Chief Flying Instructor at the BBC staff club's flying section.
...
[re WTC attack] You haven't got to take it off. You haven't got to land it," Mr O'Hara explained. "It's a one-way trip. You don't need to be a skilled pilot: I could teach you in half an hour the skills needed to aim at that tower."
www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1542204.stm
Look. It's nearly 2006. It's time for the left wing to forget the alien abduction BS and focus on reality. As long as they are concentrating on how elections that they fairly lost were "stolen" and how airplanes that were clearly flown into buildings didn't really exist, things are not going to improve.
Yes, Bush has a disapproval rating of 60%, but have you considered what your disapproval rating would be?
-- Carl |
