Patrick Smith's Ask the Pilot blog adds an astounding data point to the accident, which killed at least two people and injured many more, some very seriously. [T]his was the first multiple-fatality crash involving a major airline in North America since November, 2001. The streak has ended, but it lasted nearly twelve years, with some 20,000 commercial jetliners taking off and landing safely in this country every single day — an astonishing run. Is it perverse to suggest that Saturday’s accident, awful as it was, serves to underscore just how safe commercial flying has become? [Emphasis added] 20,000 x 365 days x...

Patrick Smith, pilot-columnist at Salon, chides the media for cheapening the currency of heroism in the US Airways Hudson River ditching: Moneyquote: This is tough for the networks to work with, I know, but Capt. "Sully" Sullenberger and his first officer, for all their guts and talent, weren't heroes so much as the luckiest pilots in the world. If fate decrees that your engines are to become choked with geese with no chance of reaching an airport, by all means let it happen in daylight, in reasonably good weather, overhead a smoothly flowing river alongside a major city. Change even one of...

The US Transportation Safety Administration now keeps airspace safe from attack by snow globes, as well as toothpaste, mouthwash, and hair gel. A blog post by Patrick Smith, the airline pilot who posted this photo to his Flickr account, bores into the core irrationality of the phoney security restrictions citizens have acquiesced to since 9/11. Money quote: Conventional wisdom says the [9/11] terrorists exploited a weakness in airport security by smuggling aboard boxcutters. But conventional wisdom is wrong. What they actually exploited was a weakness in our mindset — a set of presumptions based on the decades-long track record of hijackings. In years...

Last Saturday, 57-year-old Jules Paul Bouloute, got off a flight from Haiti to New York. While attempting to find his way out of  Kennedy Airport's American Airlines Terminal, he accidentally opened an emergency exit door and set off an alarm. [caption id="attachment_4221" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Jules Paul Bouloute"][/caption] This has happened to most of  us. In confusion, inattention, or an ill-considered attempt to find a shortcut, we open a restricted door and set off an alarm. Sometimes it leads to an embarrassed chat with the on-duty Commissionaire; sometimes there are no consequences at all. In Bouloute's case, however, security officials evacuated Terminal 8 for...