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Re: Portastorm and Patrick Smith. In addition to being an airline pilot, Patrick has extraordinary literary ability. I'm glad you appreciated the perspective, for - as you say - we have no significant information.

Re: FobicFlyer and the odds. The odds BEFORE rolling the dice are what they are, depending on whether you are considering a seven (the most likely outcome) or some other total for the pair of dice. Odds exist only BEFORE a roll. There is no such thing as odds AFTER a roll.

So when you say the odds for the people on the flight were 1 in 1, you are saying the plane was doomed from the start of takeoff. When I flew fighters in the USAF, each day I was assigned a "tail number". That identified the plane I was going to fly. I knew the F-100 was a killer. A third of my classmates in F-100 training were already dead (and that was peacetime), so each day, before going out to the plane, I went to the latrine to urinate (no toilet on an F-100) and had the thought that this might be the last time I ever did that. I would walk out to the ramp with my helmet, parachute, checklist, maps, etc., thinking that some of the planes sitting there are a bomb with a fuse already lit; they had a flaw somewhere that would someday reveal itself, perhaps in flight, perhaps found first by a mechanic.

I wondered whether the plane I had been assigned was one of them, and whether the fuse was short or long. Anxiety? Of course. But it came down to this: "are you going to do it or not?" And the answer was, "yes".

One form of anxiety is a "part" of us which is pushing us not to do something. When we decide we are going to do it, no matter what, that element of anxiety goes away. But if a person allows their feelings to override their will, anxiety will win. Is ones will too weak? Or are ones feelings too strong?

Whatever the answer to that question is, there is one thing I fail to have respect for, and that is when a person justifies their fear as if the thinking they do is based on reason rather than forced by fear. We all have an ego, but I can't find respect for an ego so rigid that is simply must be right even when wrong.

It could be said that once I accepted one of the F-100s which was a bomb with a fuse short enough that a half hour into my flight, the F-100 would kill me, that my odds were 1 in 1. But that is like saying if you jump off a 1000 foot cliff your odds of death are 1 in 1. And no one will accept that every person who buys a ticket has the same odds.

The real odds of being on a plane that crashes are one in five million. If you are that one in five million, you are doomed. But no one knows that in advance. But your odds of being un-doomed are 4,999,999 to one. So, either you do it or you don't.

But the lie in your reason is that you play it safe by not flying. When you drive a car 5.4 miles (urban) or 10.8 (interstate) THAT is equal in terms of fatality to taking a flight (distance is close to irrelevant). Yet you drive.

So, I'll consider you honest when you post here that you read about a person who got into the car and died a few minutes later, thus had odds of 1 in 1 and that's why you don't drive.

When a person does not develop normal ability to regulate emotions, they feel safe when they are in control, based on the idea that they can take the certainty out of the situation and be sure they will not be harmed. So the reason you don't fly is that your feelings - not your logic - rule you. Yet, you want us to believe the opposite.

Sorry. It won't fly.

There is just one completely absurd story in the media after another. The London Times had an "expert" talk about the "coffin corner", a situation which applied ONLY to a Strategic Air Command bomber built back in the 1960s, and claimed that is the crisis the pilots faced on this flight.

Patrick sent an email to one of these ass holes, a reporter for the New York Post; he was indignant.