As the general public sees it, Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger saved the lives of everybody on board through nerves of steel and consummate flying skills. As Langewiesche sees it, the real hero wasn't Capt. Sully, but the electronic wizardry of the Airbus A320, which was able to deftly manage the angle and speed of its perilous glide pretty much on its own.

I submit that neither plane nor pilot deserves as much credit as they've been given. The most critical factor was nothing more than plain old luck -- specifically, the time and place where things went wrong. As it happened, it was daylight and the weather was reasonably good; there off Sullenberger's left side was a 12-mile runway of smoothly flowing river, within swimming distance of the country's largest city and its flotilla of rescue craft. Sullenberger performed admirably in the face of a serious emergency, as did his jetliner. He needed to be good, but he needed to be lucky as well. He was. Had the bird strike occurred over a different part of the city, at a slightly different altitude, or under slightly different weather conditions, the result was going to be an all-out catastrophe, and no amount of talent, skill or fly-by-wire technology was going to matter.

I dare suggest that if you could put a hundred crews, flying pretty much any modern airliner, in Sullenberger's exact situation, the results would be more or less the same. Thus the passengers owe their survival not to miracles, talent or the fail-safe genius of the A320, but to the less glamorous forces of luck and, to use a word I normally dislike, professionalism.

Sullenberger, to his credit, has been duly humble. He has acknowledged the points I make above, and has highlighted the unsung role played by his first officer, Jeffrey Skiles. The media pooh-poohs this as false modesty or self-effacing charm, when really he's just being honest. As for the magic of his airplane, Sullenberger told Christine Negroni of the New York Times that Langewiesche "greatly overstates how much it mattered."

Separately, Langewiesche's analysis, with its emphasis on the role of cockpit automation, is helping to perpetuate the stubborn and widespread belief that pilots are fast becoming obsolete. It is hardly the author's fault if a book reviewer misinterprets his conclusions, but consider this from Times book critic Dwight Garner:

"What the public doesn't understand ... is the extent to which advances in aviation and digital technology have made pilots almost superfluous ... Mr. Sullenberger's airplane, an Airbus A320, was nearly capable of guiding itself gently to the ground, even after losing both of its engines."

Wow. OK, timeout.

Incidentally, William Langewiesche, Christine Negroni and Dwight Garner all are fans of and/or occasional contributors to this column, and I'm hoping not to offend my influential regulars or the companies they work for. But hang on and let me circle the wagons.

I do a fair bit of myth busting in this column. It comes with the territory, I suppose. Air travel has always been rich with conspiracy theories, urban legends and crackpot notions. Where this all comes from is easy enough to understand: Commercial flying has exactly the right ingredients to nurture paranoia -- it's scary to millions of people and steeped in secrecy. Airlines, it hardly needs saying, aren't the most forthcoming of entities, and even the most elementary technicalities of flight -- how does a plane stay in the air? -- aren't understood by vast numbers of travelers.

I've heard it all. Nothing, however, gets me sputtering more than misunderstandings about cockpit automation -- the idea that modern aircraft essentially fly themselves, with pilots on hand merely as a backup in case of trouble. "Baby sitting a flying computer" as one smartass letter writer recently put it here on Salon.

This is so far from the truth that it's difficult to get my arms around it and begin to explain how. Baby sitting a computer? Really? I'll keep that in mind during my next recurrency training and simulator check; the next time I'm weaving around thunderheads over the Amazon; shooting a VOR approach in Africa in a rainstorm at 4 a.m., or setting up for an ILS in blowing snow and a quarter-mile visibility.

But never mind the extremes. If I were to take even the most routine, trouble-free and "automated" flight, from the preflight planning stage to block-in at the destination, and break it down event by event, explaining each of the hundreds of decisions and inputs made by the crew, big and small, from rote procedure to the unexpected judgment call, I would be typing for the next three days.

Would it do any good?

Forget about the New York Times for a minute. Two weeks ago National Public Radio ran a piece on "Morning Edition" looking at the Northwest 188 incident (the flight that wandered off course after both pilots became distracted by their laptop computers). The segment included this exchange between host Renee Montagne and guest Michael Goldfarb, an aviation consultant and former Federal Aviation Administration chief of staff:

Montagne: Now, for us passengers, the pilot says hello. He might alert us to turbulence during the flight, but we tend to think that the pilot and the copilot are flying the plane. What exactly does that mean, flying the plane?

Goldfarb: Well, it doesn't mean what it meant 30 years ago. There's so much automation in the cockpit that, literally, an aircraft taking off from Los Angeles and landing in New York can have very little attendance by the crew.

What total nonsense. And Montagne's comment, "We tend to think that the pilot and copilot are flying the plane." Tend to think? I have never been so insulted.

As I wrote in a column in October, a jetliner can, in theory, take itself laterally from waypoint to waypoint along a preprogrammed route -- a basic, skeletal outline of the flight. But the idea that a jet will "fly itself" to the destination without meaningful input from the crew is preposterous and downright offensive to anybody who flies for a living.

One of the media's big mistakes is a reliance on aviation academics and bureaucrats -- professors, directors, consultants, researchers, etc. -- rather than pilots, for its expertise. These people are bright and knowledgeable, but they're often highly unfamiliar with the day-to-day operational aspects of flying planes.

Having said that, pilots too are occasionally part of the problem. By grossly oversimplifying things, we paint a caricature of what flying is really like, at the same time undermining our value as employees. It's no wonder so many people think pilots are overpaid if we're saying things to the press like, "The plane will fly to its destination without any input from the pilot at all," to quote an American Airlines pilot talking to CNN a couple of weeks ago.

You might sometimes hear a pilot describe a given aircraft as "simple to fly." Indeed, a few months back, Miles O'Brien, CNN's former aviation expert and himself a pilot, made this very comment in reference to an Airbus A320. Simple, yes, but only in the context of an airline pilot's prerequisite level of expertise.

The analogy I'm fond of making is the one about aviation and medicine. Out in the field, automation helps a pilot in the same way that it helps a surgeon. It makes flying easier, but it does not make it easy. Like O'Brien and his Airbus, you might hear a surgeon make a comment about the "simplicity" of a certain procedure or operation. That in no way implies that the layperson could give it a go and be successful, and it does nothing to diminish the knowledge and experience required to perform at that level in the first place. The technology is advanced and expensive and ultimately engineered to keep your customers safe and alive. But to understand how this equipment works, and to use it properly ... well, you still need to be a doctor, or a pilot, first.

Even passengers get into the fray. A month ago I was sitting in economy class when our plane came in for an unusually smooth landing. "Nice job, autopilot!" yelled some knucklehead behind me.

Funny, I concede, but wrong. It was a fully manual touchdown, as the vast majority of touchdowns are. Most jetliners are certified for automatic landings -- "autolands" in pilot-speak -- but in practice they are rare. In any case, the fine print of setting up and managing one of these landings is something I could talk about all day. If it were as easy as pressing a button, I wouldn't need to practice them twice a year in the simulator, or need to consistently review those tabbed, highlighted pages in my manuals. It's there if you need it -- for that foggy arrival in Buenos Aires, with the visibility sitting at zero -- but it's anything but simple. Guess what: An automatic landing is, in most respects, more challenging, more complicated and more work-intensive than a manual one.

But at some point we won't be having these discussions, as pilots are phased out and airplanes become fully automated. Right?

On Oct. 27 I appeared on a local TV talk show here in Boston. I was one of two guests. The other was Missy Cummings, a former U.S. Navy pilot turned researcher/academic, now an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Cummings is of the mind that pilots are becoming expendable, and that the jetliner as we know it will eventually be replaced by fully automatic aircraft controlled from the ground.

This is so laughably far from reality that, again, it's hard to get my arms around it and begin to explain. But apparently Cummings' reality is a different one, and she contended on air that it's "just a matter of time" before the crew is engineered out of the picture.

I became visibly annoyed at this, but it was two against one. The host, Emily Rooney, who I need to point out has no aviation background or expertise whatsoever, was in eager agreement with Cummings. "We don't need them," Rooney said flatly of pilots.

The conversation continued after the cameras were off. "Drop by my lab sometime," Cummings said to Rooney (by this point Cummings was refusing to speak or make eye contact with me). "And I'll show you how to fly a UAV with your iPhone."

UAV is "unmanned aerial vehicle," like the military drones used over Afghanistan and Pakistan. These highly sophisticated, remote-control craft carry no occupant and are guided from the ground. But to compare a UAV to a commercial airliner is ultimate apples and oranges. I am happy, assistant professor Cummings, that you are able to send commands to a robot plane using an iPhone. But I would like to see your iPhone perform a high-speed takeoff abort after a tire explosion, followed by the evacuation of 250 passengers. I would like to see your iPhone troubleshoot a pneumatic problem requiring an emergency diversion over mountainous terrain. I'd like to see it thread through a storm front over the middle of the ocean. Oh, heck, even the simplest stuff.

Point being, there are so many contingencies large and small, so many subjective decisions required on every flight -- situations that you simply cannot get a grasp of remotely. Never mind for a minute whether or not we can come up with a pilotless airliner. Why would we want to?

And what sort of time frame are we talking? (This past September a CIA drone went out of control over Afghanistan and had to be shot down.) Look, I am not a Luddite. But I also fly for a living. Yeah, that makes me an advocate, but it also gives me a very healthy sense of just how far-fetched this idea of pilotless planes truly is. Someday, perhaps. In our lifetime? No chance.

Of course, the only people more insufferable than assistant professors and aviation consultants are the desktop simulator buffs who think they can hop into a 767 and fly it like a pro. They were given some false confidence back in 2007 when the popular show "MythBusters" tried to find out if a nonpilot could land a plane. They got themselves a NASA simulator stripped down to represent a "generic commercial airliner" -- which is to say a rather unrealistic one. A seasoned pilot, stationed in an imaginary control tower, carefully instructs the hosts via radio. On the first try, they crash. The second time, they make it.

But all they really did, essentially, is land a make-believe airplane in a contrived, tightly controlled experiment.

To be fair, the question of whether a nonpilot could land an actual jetliner depends somewhat on the meaning of "land." Do you mean from just a few hundred feet over the ground, in ideal weather, with the plane stabilized and pointed toward the runway, with someone talking you through it? Or do you mean the whole full-blown arrival, from cruising altitude to touchdown, requiring all sorts of maneuvering, programming, communicating and configuring?

You've got a fighting chance with the former. The touchdown will be rough at best, but with a little luck you won't become a cartwheeling fireball. But the scenario most people envision is the one where, droning along at cruise altitude, the crew suddenly becomes incapacitated, and only a brave passenger, who has perhaps a little desktop sim time under his belt, can save the day. He'll strap himself in, and with the smooth coaching of an unseen voice over the radio, try to bring her down.

Try this a thousand times and I reckon you'll have a thousand crashes.

Don't believe me? Let's try it. I need a willing participant who does not have a pilot's license or any formal flight training. We'll rent out a full-motion Boeing simulator and the instructor will set things up for 35,000 feet, somewhere over the middle of the United States. Ready, set, go. In you come and sit down. The rest is up to you. All of it.

If you crash, you foot the bill and I get to mock you in Salon. If you make it, I foot the bill and write a five-page retraction carefully detailing your heroics.

Any takers?

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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.

Believe me, a pilot showing up for duty under the influence isn't going to be held in high esteem by his colleagues. But more important, I need to make clear that although this isn't the first time such a thing has happened, it shouldn't give the traveling public the wrong impression. These rare and isolated incidents are not a symptom of some dangerous and unseen crisis. I understand and expect that passengers will worry about all sorts of things, rational and otherwise. But as a rule, whether your pilots are intoxicated should not be one of them. My own personal observations are hardly a scientific sample, but I have been flying commercially since 1990, and I have never once been in a cockpit with a pilot I knew or suspected was intoxicated.

The Federal Aviation Administration blood alcohol limit for airline pilots is .04 percent, and we are banned from consuming alcohol within eight hours of reporting for duty. Pilots must also comply with their employer's policies, which tend to be tougher. Most airlines impose a 12-hour consumption restriction. Drug and alcohol testing is random and frequent.

This is not something pilots tend to play fast and loose with. Why would they, with a career hanging in the balance? Violators are subject to immediate, emergency revocation of their pilot certificates.

And Britain's regulations are considerably stricter that those of the FAA. The legal limit is set at 20 milligrams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood. That's one-fourth the British limit for driving, and equates to about .02 percent blood alcohol level. It's possible for a pilot to be in full compliance with the time restriction and not feel any of the typical signs of intoxication, yet still be in violation. The same can sometimes be said for our own .04.

No, that is not an excuse for Washington or anybody else; I have no problem with a requirement that pilots abide by a higher, more conservative standard than others. If we need to be extremely careful, so be it, that's part of our job. But it's something to think about, and passengers should realize that "flying drunk" isn't as clear-cut, or as wildly negligent as it might seem.

It is also true that more than one airline pilot has been pulled aside after a passenger, Transportation Security Administration guard or other airport worker suspected intoxication, only to be vindicated after testing. Typically in such cases, the papers and TV news hastily report the initial suspicion, but not the eventual results.

Having said all of that, it should go without saying that alcoholism exists in aviation just as it exists in every other profession. To their credit, air carriers and pilot unions like Air Line Pilots Association have been very successful with proactive programs that encourage pilots to seek treatment. This has helped keep the problem from being driven underground, where it's more likely to be a public safety issue.

Not long ago I flew with a colleague who participated in the highly successful HIMS program -- an intervention and treatment system put together several years ago by ALPA and the FAA. HIMS has treated more than 4,000 pilots and records a success rate of approximately 90 percent, with only 10-12 percent of participants suffering relapses.

I asked that colleague if, prior to going into HIMS, he'd ever knowingly flown under the influence. He said, "No."

And I'll leave it at that.

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Let's move on, because what I really want to talk about this week is nothing.

And by "nothing" I mean the deafening silence that marked the passing of Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009. That was the eighth anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 near Kennedy airport in New York City -- the last large-scale crash involving a major U.S. airline anywhere in the world.

We've seen a handful of disasters involving regional planes since then -- the worst of them being the 2006 crash of Comair Flight 5191 in Lexington, Ky., and last February's Colgan Air tragedy outside Buffalo. But aside from a young boy killed when a Southwest 737 overran a snowy runway in Chicago in 2005, our largest airlines, operating some 10,000 daily flights between them, have been fatality-free. Eight years is a record going back at least to the dawn of the jet age a half-century ago.

Here we are amid what might be called the safest stretch in modern commercial aviation history, but you wouldn't know it listening to the media. Passengers learn instead of frightening-sounding mishaps like that of the United pilot and the totally overblown Northwest incident two weeks ago. Heck, a plane blows a tire and CNN will have its cameras out for live coverage of the touchdown, but I have yet to come across a single mention of the significance of yesterday's anniversary.

No news is no news, I guess.

This eight-year run (and counting) is owed to several things. Better training is not the least of them, along with improved cockpit technology and other aircraft safety enhancements. We have engineered away many of what used to be the most common causes of disaster.

Yes, we've been lucky too. And while I hate to say it, that luck will run out at some point. When the inevitable crash does come, I only hope that somebody besides me takes the time to point out the unprecedented streak that preceded it.

American 587 was an Airbus A300-600 bound from JFK to Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. The plane went down on Nov. 12, 2001, after the first officer, Sten Molin, overreacted to an encounter with wake turbulence spun from a Japan Airlines 747 that had departed moments earlier. Molin's overzealous use of the plane's rudder caused the entire vertical fin to separate. Airborne for less than three minutes, the jet plummeted into the Rockaway section of Queens. All 260 passengers and crew were killed, along with five people on the ground.

The rudder is the large movable surface hinged to the aft edge of the vertical stabilizer -- that is, the tail -- used to control the side-to-side "yawing" motion of an airplane. It is controlled either through the autoflight systems or, if need be, manually through a pair of foot pedals at either pilot's station. Here is a view of the first officer's station of an A300-600.

The voice and data recorders show that Molin commanded a full deflection of the rudder. Fully deflecting a plane's rudder is somewhat akin to yanking a car's steering wheel 90 degrees, so most larger planes, including this one, are equipped with segmented rudders and automatic limiters, reducing the available rudder travel as speed increases. The faster you're flying, the less available movement. Even had the limiting systems somehow failed, Flight 587 was, at the moment of its doom, sufficiently below the speed at which maximum deflection, intentional or otherwise, should have damaged the structure. Pilots call this "maneuvering speed." Barring any structural anomaly, it seems there was no reason for Flight 587's vertical stabilizer to fail.

Except for two things. First, Molin applied maximum pressure rapidly and in both directions, repeatedly swinging the rudder to the left and to the right. A plane's airworthiness certification standards are not based on such unusual, alternating applications of extreme force. Second, the A300's rudder controls are unusually sensitive, and resultant movements, even at low speeds, may be more severe than a pilot intends. In other words, Molin didn't realize the level of stress he was putting on the tail.

Clearly he overreacted, but he didn't have reason to think his inputs were going to rip the tail off, and he was not the only pilot surprised to learn that full deflections below maneuvering speed, however irregular, are risking structural catastrophe.

There also remains the chance that the A300's carbon-fiber tail may have played a role in the accident. Carbon-fiber components are stronger and lighter than traditional metals, but damage tends to occur internally in a way that is hard to detect. And Airbus tails are built to withstand lesser -- though still quite forceful -- amounts of stress compared to Boeing jets.

In 1994 the same plane involved in the accident made an unscheduled landing in the Caribbean after it struck unusually rough air at 35,000 feet. Could this have resulted in a structural weakness, more or less undetectable, needing only the right set of circumstances to manifest itself? The recovered portions of 587's tail were put through advanced CT scanning and analysis, to no significant findings.

Flight 587 was well-known among New York City's Dominican community. In 1996, merengue star Kinito Mendez paid a sadly foreboding tribute with his song "El Avion." "How joyful it could be to go on Flight 587," he sang, immortalizing the popular daily nonstop.

For more facts and findings pertaining to Flight 587, please revisit this 2004 column. And in closing, since everybody seems to be in such a negative and morbid state of mind these days, here's a list.

History's 10 Worst Aviation Disasters Involving Major U.S. Air Carriers

1. 1977. Two Boeing 747s, operated by Pan Am and KLM, collide on a foggy runway at Tenerife, in Spain's Canary Islands, killing 583 people, 335 of them on the Pan Am plane. The KLM jet departed without permission and struck the Pan Am jet as it taxied along the same runway. Confusion over instructions and a blockage of radio transmissions contributed to the crash. (Three years ago I met and interviewed the surviving first officer of the Pan Am 747. His incredible story is here.
2. 1979. As an American Airlines DC-10 lifts from the runway at Chicago's O'Hare airport, an engine detaches and seriously damages the wing. Before its crew can make sense of the situation, the plane rolls 90 degrees and disintegrates in a fireball beyond the runway, killing 273. The engine pylon design and airline maintenance procedures are faulted by investigators, and all DC-10s are temporarily grounded.
3. 1988. Two Libyan agents are later held responsible for planting a bomb aboard Pan American Flight 103, which blows up in the night sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, including 11 on the ground.
4. 2001. American Airlines 587 goes down outside JFK airport in New York killing 265. See above.
5. 1996. Shortly after departure, a fuel tank explosion destroys TWA Flight 800, a 747 carrying 230 passengers and crew from JFK to Paris. There are no survivors.
6. 1995.A navigational error causes American Airlines Flight 965, bound from Miami to Cali, Colombia, to wander off course during arrival. The 757 hits a mountain 25 miles from its destination. There are four survivors of the plane's 163 occupants.
7. 1987. A Northwest Airlines MD-80 crashes on takeoff at Detroit. The pilots had neglected to properly set the flaps and slats, and for reasons unknown the jet's warning system failed to alert them. One hundred and fifty-four people on the plane perish, as do two people hit by the aircraft.
8. 1982. A Pan Am 727 goes down seconds after departing from New Orleans. There are 153 fatalities, including eight people on the ground. The plane had taken off into a rare and deadly microburst -- a localized, high-power wind shear produced by a violent thunderstorm.
9. 1978. A Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) 727 collides with a small private plane over San Diego. A total of 143 people die, including seven on the ground.
10. 1985. Delta Flight 191, a Lockheed L-1011, crashes in Dallas after encountering a severe microburst on approach to landing. Thirty people survive; 137 do not.

Not Listed

• 1985. An Arrow Air (charter) DC-8 carrying U.S. servicemen crashes in icy weather at Gander, Newfoundland, killing all 256 military personnel and crew. Investigators blame weather and inadequate deicing.
• 1989. An Independent Air (charter) Boeing 707 slams into a mountain in the Azores. All 104 passengers and crew are killed. Numerous procedural errors were committed by both the crew and air traffic control.

• Also, for what I think are sensible reasons, I've omitted those aircraft involved in the 2001 terrorist attacks.

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  Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

Now, as I feared might happen, the witch hunt is on: Politicians are weighing in, pushing for federal legislation that would prohibit pilots from using laptop computers and other devices while flying. 

First on this square-wheeled bandwagon is Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., who wants to ban all nonessential gadgets from the cockpit. 

"With dozens or sometimes hundreds of lives in their hands," said Sen. Menendez, "we need to ensure that pilots are focused on one thing only: getting their aircraft from point A to point B safely and efficiently." 

"What's true in a car is generally true in an airplane," he added, demonstrating an exquisite knowledge of how jetliners are operated, "and we need to address distracted flying, just as we are addressing distracted driving. The fact that there isn't already a prohibition on 'texting while flying' for airplanes seems reckless." 

Well, except that such rules do in fact exist. Almost all airlines prohibit the personal use of computers in the cockpit, and the Federal Aviation Regulations (FAR) restrict a pilot's use of certain other devices just as they do for passengers. Is a federal law going to make any difference?  

And if Menendez is truly that concerned about "distraction," why is he not weighing in on the improvement of flight and duty time regulations, which, believe me, are a much bigger threat to safety than a pilot's laptop or iPhone. 

Chiming in with Menendez is his colleague Al Franken of Minnesota. Now, I was a fan of Franken going back to his early days on "Saturday Night Live" in the 1970s (Franken & Davis, not Stuart Smalley), but I wish he'd butt out of this. 

"As passengers, we open our laptops on airplanes for one reason," wrote the senator in a statement. "To distract ourselves from the fact that we're flying. But airline pilots can't be distracted from constant monitoring of their aircraft and traffic." 

Constant monitoring? What does that mean, Al? I can't argue with the gist of your concern -- like anybody else you want pilots to be, as we say in the biz, situationally aware. But how much do you know, honestly, about what goes on in a cockpit at 35,000 feet during cruise flight -- about which things pilots need to monitor, and how? 

"We all pay a lot for air travel," added Franken. "I think an attentive pilot should be included in that ticket price." 

Now he's being cute, and so I can't resist: This is ripe for argument, Senator, but I'll submit that we don't pay a lot for air travel, comparatively speaking. Airfares have been in decline for each of the past 10 months, and on average we're paying the same to fly today that we were paying in the 1980s. And, of course, an attentive pilot (two of them to be more accurate, and sometimes a third or fourth) is included in that ticket price -- though one of the reasons they are earning 20-40 percent less than in years past is because that ticket price is so low. 

I'm just saying. 

Although what occurred over Minneapolis was an obvious dereliction of duty on the part of the crew, the media's fixation on the event was and remains vastly disproportionate to any danger the passengers faced. To have members of the U.S. Senate joining the fray ratchets up the hysteria even more. Of all the things government can and should be doing to improve commercial air safety -- from overhauling the lunacy of the Transportation Security Administration to dealing with the very real dangers of lithium-ion batteries carried as cargo -- for any lawmaker to spend even five minutes on a proposal like this is shameful. Alas issues involving batteries aren't very sexy, lacking the more scandalous aspects of our wayward pilots and their PCs. 

And what exactly constitutes a distraction? Are Franken and Menendez suggesting that, for example, a pilot on a nine-hour flight be banned from snapping a photograph while traversing the grandeur of Greenland,  or shooting a few seconds of video?  I try not to overuse the word "preposterous," but in this case it's perfect. Such rules would do nothing -- nothing -- to enhance safety. Should pilots be banned from eating meals or carrying on conversations? Is everything under suspicion save for staring straight ahead? 

Ultimately, I think there are two underlying factors at work here. 

First, despite my best efforts over the past seven years, the truth remains that a vast majority of people have no real idea what the environment of a cockpit is like. They have little understanding of what an airline pilot actually does up there, and what the repercussions of certain mistakes are -- or aren't. 

Pilots are at times extremely busy; at other times there are long stretches of low workload. Duties come and go, ebb and flow, and an aircraft will not suddenly flip upside down or come screaming out of the sky if a pilot's attention is temporarily diverted. Indeed it often needs to be diverted. If you want to guarantee more tired and brain-fried pilots, the best way to do it would be through some of that "constant monitoring" that Sen. Franken seems to be hinting at. 

Meanwhile, nervous passengers hear the term "pilot error" and it frightens them. Occasionally it should, but I don't always like that term because it fosters the ridiculous idea that any error is a potentially fatal one, and that for a flight to be safe its pilots cannot in some way err. In practice pilots make minor, inconsequential mistakes all the time -- just as any professional does in any line of work. There is no such thing as a perfect flight, and we will not, ever, engineer, automate or legislate this reality away. Considering the rarity of crashes, people should be more comfortable with that. 

I also sense that this is yet another manifestation of people's distrust and dislike for airlines.  Pilots, more so than most airline employees, usually escape the traveling public's wrath, but we're not immune (especially when people have this crazy, ill-formed idea that pilots are bringing in huge salaries in exchange for little or no actual work). Politicians smell blood, and this is an easy way for them to look good. Really, what's to lose in any legislation that in some way takes airlines to task? 

Am I absolving the Northwest pilots of blame? Am I advocating that crews should be allowed to break out their laptops to play computer games or surf the Internet while flying? No. But here again we are witnessing one of this country's most wasteful and self-defeating tendencies: that of coming up with unrealistic, zero-tolerance solutions to problems that are either greatly exaggerated, badly misunderstood, or that don't exist in the first place. 

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Lastly, a quick thanks to the many readers who sent condolences and other kind words after the death of my mother. I received more than 150 e-mails during the past several days, in addition to the dozens of posts left in the letters section of last week's column. I could not respond to everybody with a personal thank-you, but all of your letters were appreciated.  

I was going through some of my mother's things a few days ago, and among the items I found were her American Airlines stewardess wings, an "AA" eagle lapel pin, and a "Stewardess Corps" pendant, all from 1965. They are rendered in sterling silver -- tarnished but beautifully engraved.  

It should go without saying that airlines no longer give out sterling silver wings. 

The first airplane I was ever on, big or small, was an American Airlines Boeing 727, in April of 1974. We flew from Boston to Washington, D.C., and they served sandwiches and cheesecake -- yes, in economy class on an 80-minute trip. I remember the stewardess asking if I wanted seconds. 

The photo you see here,  taken by my mother, shows me and my sister walking up the stairs to that airplane. 

There are some definite date markers in that shot -- the haircuts, the clothes, the old-timey air-stairs in lieu of the modern jet bridge. 

Astute viewers will notice one thing that hasn't changed, though: the American Airlines livery. I know of no major carrier that has stuck with the same color scheme and logo for so long. The bare polished aluminum, the gothic tail bird and tricolor cheat; there's nothing particularly beautiful about it, but I hope they keep it going -- if for no other reason than it bucks the annoying "in motion" livery theme that is now so common among airlines. Take a look at the tarmac palette these days -- there are enough streaks, swishes, swirls and curls out there to make anybody dizzy, most of them indistinguishable from each other. Carriers want to appear slick, sleek and modern, but they've jettisoned their identities in the process. 

I am really fond of those drive-up stairs. There's something dramatic about stepping onto a plane this way: the ground-level approach along the tarmac followed by the slow ascent. The effect is similar to watching the opening credits of a film -- a brief, formal introduction to the journey. By contrast, the jet bridge (Jetway if you prefer) makes the plane itself feel almost irrelevant; you're merely in transit from one annoying interior space (terminal) to another (airplane cabin). Many of the overseas routes I fly find me at airports that still employ stairs, and I always get a thrill from them.  

All right, except for those times when it's 95 degrees and I've got 90 pounds of luggage.

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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

I'm the first to admit that it doesn't look good.

To start with, airline policies vary as to what pilots are or aren't allowed to do during the cruise portion of flight, but most carriers, Northwest included, prohibit the use of laptops and other forms of personal entertainment. Indeed, the Federal Aviation Administration has revoked both pilots' airline transport licenses (they can later be eligible for reinstatement). Even still, how two pilots could have remained so distracted, for such a protracted length of time, is very difficult for me to understand.

Yes, the cockpit radios can sometimes remain quiet for long stretches, particularly when flying late at night or over remote areas. And yes, it is common for pilots to temporarily lose contact with ATC: We copy down the wrong frequency or mistakenly leave the volume down; we miss a handoff. But these are innocuous gaffes that generally resolve themselves after just a minute or two. For an hour to pass? On a short-haul domestic flight? Had they not noticed the absence of ATC? Were they not monitoring their position relative to the flight plan waypoints, right there on the plane's navigation screens?

Do airline pilots sometimes become distracted? Of course they do, just as any professional in any line of work occasionally becomes distracted, even in the middle of important duties. There is no such thing as a perfect flight; pilots make minor mistakes just like anybody else. But this was something different.

Just the same, I am more than a bit dismayed by the intense media focus on this story. There was no catastrophe. There was no near catastrophe. The plane was temporarily off-course during high-altitude cruise flight, under ATC watch above non-mountainous terrain. The crew made an embarrassing mistake, and will be punished accordingly, while the rest of us who fly for a living will draw important if obvious lessons. It was a comparatively minor event that has received far more attention than it deserves. I've been astounded by the level of traction. A week later and it's still above the fold. Reporters and pundits have been digging and digging for some nonexistent deeper meaning, asking if perhaps the event was a symptom of a frightening breakdown in air safety. One radio station even asked me if I thought the incident was related to "pilot stress" brought on by Northwest's ongoing merger with Delta.

No, I don't. I think it was what it was: a freak event.

Red herrings everywhere. I appeared on a talk show the other night with an aeronautics professor who began talking about cockpit automation, and how the downside of the high-tech flight deck is the propensity for pilots to grow bored. Modern avionics, she insinuated, were making this sort of incident more likely. Bollocks. Boredom and automation have little to do with one another. Boredom was a factor 60 years ago, when planes had rudimentary autopilots and propellers spun by pistons. It's going to be a factor in any profession where the bulk of tasks becomes repetitive and routine. We don't know exactly what happened over Minneapolis, but the fancy electronics of the Airbus A320 weren't the problem, trust me.

I operate eight-, nine-, even 12-hour nonstops all the time. There's a certain tedium that I expect and have to deal with. But is it because of the automation? No. If I had to have my hands on the wheel that whole time, I'd be twice as bored and 10 times as exhausted. And on the whole, Minneapolis notwithstanding, pilots are pretty good at the kind of self-discipline it requires to be alert for long periods of low workload. It's part of the job. (What's the best method for combating boredom? One word: conversation.)

Contrary to what people think, both boredom and fatigue (we'll get to the latter in a moment) are often easier to manage on long-haul flights than on shorter ones. Most flights over eight hours long carry augmented crews, allowing pilots to take organized rest breaks in a bunk room or designated crew seat. On a 12-hour nonstop from New York to Tel Aviv, a pilot will spend no more than three or four consecutive hours at a control seat, versus six hours on a trip between New York and San Francisco.

And the cockpit can be a busier place than you might imagine, even late at night over the middle of the ocean: There are ATC and company position reports to transmit and record, weather reports to check, arrival procedures to review and plan, aircraft systems to monitor, logbook issues to take care of, and so on.

On Wednesday, CNN ran a story about pilots becoming bored. It included the following:

When cruising over great distances, "it's very easy to be distracted because there's not a whole lot going on," said Emilio Corsetti, a 30-year commercial pilot with American Airlines who has written numerous magazine articles about aviation. An airliner's entire flight can be programmed; once that program is activated, "the plane will fly to its destination without any input from the pilot at all," he said.

When I read that, I thought my head was going to explode. Rarely have I come across a more misleading statement in the mainstream media when it comes to flying. This is arguably the most grotesque caricature of cockpit automation I have ever encountered, and any pilot who reads this ought to be fuming.

Corsetti is talking about the programming of general flight plan data into the flight management system -- the basic, repeat basic, profile of a flight. A jetliner can, in theory, take itself laterally from waypoint to waypoint along a preprogrammed route. But the idea that a jet "will fly to its destination without any input from the pilot at all" is absolutely preposterous and downright offensive to anybody who flies for a living. There are so many myths out there when it comes to cockpit automation, and pilots are often their own worst enemies, grossly oversimplifying things in an eagerness to boast of the various technologies at their disposal. I've said it before, and I will say it again: Automation helps a pilot in the same way that it helps a surgeon. It makes flying easier, but it does not make it easy. Even the most routine and "automated" flight remains subject to countless contingencies and a tremendous amount of input from the crew. Yes, tremendous.

Also, please ignore the media's harping on the fact that the Northwest pilots reportedly were not wearing headsets at the time. It is perfectly normal for pilots not to wear headsets during the cruise portion of the flight. They'll use a hand-microphone for making transmissions, while listening over the flight deck speakers.

Meanwhile, not everybody is buying the laptop excuse, theorizing instead that both the captain and first officer had fallen asleep. Thus, whatever the actual cause or causes, the incident has ignited a conversation about the problem of pilot fatigue, similar to what transpired in the aftermath of a Colgan Air (Continental Connection) crash near Buffalo last February. Unlike other aspects of this story, this is a conversation worth having.

Pilot fatigue, explored in this column previously, has been a long-simmering issue that regulators have yet to become aggressive with. There's little I can say on the topic that I haven't said before. Neither is it unprecedented for one or more crew members to have inadvertently nodded off.

Last year, the pilots of a Go airlines regional jet fell asleep over Hawaii, overshooting their destination by 15 miles. The same thing happened last June on an Air India jet headed from Jaipur to Mumbai. The plane continued past Mumbai for more than 300 miles before the crew woke up and turned back. The National Transportation Safety Board has cited fatigue as a likely contributing factor in several accidents, including the 1999 fatal crash of American Airlines Flight 1420, at Little Rock, Ark. Two fatal crashes involving cargo jets -- one at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the other in Kansas City -- were blamed more directly on air-crew tiredness.

Signs of a crisis? No, and the fact that every week in America more than a hundred thousand commercial airline flights operate safely and without incident underscores this. What happened above Minneapolis was, if nothing else, a freak occurrence. For the record, I've been flying commercially since 1990 and I have never been in a cockpit where anything like this has happened. Neither am I aware of any colleagues who've experienced such an incident. But the menace of fatigue is out there, its effects very subtle and difficult to quantify. Such a high level of safety and reliability is perhaps less an indicator that all is running smoothly than evidence of skilled and dedicated pilots operating admirably under tough conditions. As one crash forensics expert I spoke with put it: "Indicators that a safety problem exists are seen in the number of events, not the number of non-events. And unfortunately, the actual number of events is not known to the public, or, worse, to investigators, because only the highly irregular ones are noted. That the Northwest event seems isolated doesn't mean that it is."

What's unusual about Minneapolis is that it involved a major carrier. Contrary to conventional wisdom, fatigue is considerably more prevalent at the commuter and regional airline level than at the majors. Everybody's physiology is different, but my own experiences bear this out: I have flown intercontinental long-haul, domestic mainline, back-of-the-clock cargo and short-haul regional. It's intuitive, I suppose, to associate long-haul flying with fatigue, but in many ways it's the easiest form of flying out there. Indeed, the circadian scramble of a 10-, 12- or 15-hour nonstop is something to reckon with, but these flights carry augmented crews with organized rest breaks; layovers are long and comfortable, the workload comparatively light. In the regional theater, on the other hand, pilots fly multiple daily legs in and out of busy airports, into the teeth of bad weather and heavy traffic, making quick turnarounds and/or sitting out long delays. After eight or nine hours at the Holiday Inn Express, it's time to do it all again.

As I advocated in this space a few months ago, the most productive step that regulators can take is adjusting the definition of what it considers "rest." As it stands today, a pilot is considered off duty and on "rest" anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes after his final flight of the day shuts down at the gate. With paperwork and other duties to attend to, the pilot's rest clock often begins ticking while he is still at the airport -- sometimes still on the plane! And, the next morning, it ends not in the hotel lobby, but back at the airport at the moment of sign-in. Once you account for transit time to and from the hotel, time for eating, etc., what exists on paper as a 10-hour rest period might only include five or six hours of actual sleep. In fairness to a pilot and his passengers, the rest clock should not begin to tick until the minute he latches the door of his hotel room, and stop ticking no later than the minute he checks out.

Will this happen? I doubt it. For one thing it brings ambiguity into how long a layover will actually last, and that is very difficult for airlines (and their customers) to work with.

I also advocate that pilots be allowed supervised cockpit naps (one at a time, obviously), as is permitted by regulations in Canada and other countries. The idea is seen as radioactive by the FAA, unfortunately, and to this point has been kept off the table.

Thanks in part to collective bargaining agreements, airline rest rules often surpass the more skeletal federal regulations. But again this is primarily at the larger network carriers. As a rule, in-house policies at the regionals aren't nearly as protective.

For additional background on pilot fatigue and rest, click here.

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And with that, I need to cut things short this week due to some unfortunate news.

Last Thursday night, while I was at work on an earlier draft of this very column, my mother suffered a brain aneurism and cardiac arrest at her home in Revere, Mass. She passed away the next day at age 65. If I've been tardy at answering your mail, or if this article feels a little scattershot or abbreviated, this is the reason.

In the mid-1960s, before I was born, my mother was a flight attendant for American Airlines. Those were still the glamour days of commercial aviation, and becoming a flight attendant still held a certain cachet -- so much so that when she graduated from training in April 1965, she got her picture in the local newspaper. You can see it here. Note the reference to "Astrojets" -- American's nickname for its early Boeings.

I remember her stories of Lockheed Electras and 707s and how excited people used to be as they stepped on board.

Sorry, did I say "flight attendant"? I definitely meant stewardess. I don't think the term "flight attendant" even existed yet. When, in 2007, I wrote a column about flight attendants and dared to recycle the politically incorrect S-word, I was hit with a hailstorm of angry protest from readers. "Tell them to shove it," was my mother's response.

I have a copy of her acceptance letter, dated Nov. 21, 1964, inviting her to the American Airlines Stewardess College, training grounds of "the finest Stewardess Corps in the air."

She flew only for a year or two, but eventually went back to the airlines in 1979, when I was in junior high, this time as a counter agent for Northwest. It happened mostly at my urging: I wanted the free tickets and backstage access to planes. She did airport counter, gate agent, then the city ticket office (back when airlines had such things) and cargo sales before retiring about 10 years ago.

In the early 1980s we took many family trips using her employee passes. Deregulation was yet to take its toll: I remember fancy first-class omelets and champagne -- on domestic flights! I remember non-revving to Florida -- Orlando! -- dressed in a jacket and tie. Most memorable was a vacation in Israel in 1981, after she'd scored some freebies from a friend at El Al. That was my first time outside the United States, and my first-ever ride on a 747.

Mom also made a cameo in this 2006 column, discussing the dangers of frozen tomato sauce with a Transportation Security Administration guard.

She was the one who broke the news to me about last week's Northwest fiasco with a phone call, about an hour before she collapsed. She had a love/hate relationship with her former employer and was obviously getting a kick out of the news. "Don't you guys have maps?"

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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.

Would there be a problem with hooking up a nose camera so we could experience the same view as the pilots? It'd be very cool to see the takeoff and landing as the cockpit crew sees it.

A number of airlines already have this, connected to the seat-back screens on their 777 or Airbus series aircraft. I've experienced it myself on at least two carriers -- Air France and Emirates. On Emirates, the system allows you to switch back and forth between a nose view and one that points straight down, showing what the plane is passing over. (The latter resulted in a rather silly controversy in Britain when nude backyard sunbathers worried that overflying passengers were getting a free peep show.) Iberia Airlines is among those offering a backward-facing view -- a somewhat dizzying perspective that lets you see the departure runway slowly falling away.

I am not aware of any U.S. airlines with these features. Which is too bad. Behold the glory of approach lights at dawn in this one-minute video.

Otherwise, the closest we have anymore is the audio feed on United Airlines, which allows you to eavesdrop on the conversation between pilots and air traffic control. They call it "channel 9" in honor of its position in your armrest dial. It's either fascinating or tediously indecipherable, depending on your level of infatuation with flight. It is sometimes unavailable, at the crew's discretion, because of the unfriendly letters people send and the litigation they threaten when it's perceived the pilots have made some "mistake." Also, passengers not familiar with the vernacular may misinterpret a transmission and assume nonexistent or exaggerated troubles. Let's say a controller is spacing a series of aircraft and asks, "United 537, um, do you think you can make it?" This is a query pertaining to whether a plane can hit a specific height or speed at a specific fix. Depending on the controller's intonation, or the pilot's reply -- "No, I don't think so" -- such innocuous exchanges might have a passenger bursting into tears and picturing his wife and children.

In the late 1970s, American Airlines had cameras in the cockpits of its DC-10s that would allow you to watch the crew performing takeoffs and landings. I remember seeing it a few times as a kid. How quaint the idea seems today. The footage was grainy, projected on the old-fashioned bulkhead movie screens. It looked something like this.

Note the fellow with the baseball cap and glasses. Pilots often wear ball caps while flying because it helps with the glare.

Our flight was delayed for two hours because they couldn't find a captain. Initially we were told he was en route from a different concourse, but then it changed to "We don't have a captain." How can an airline schedule a flight without a captain?

They can't and wouldn't. The scheduling matrix at a large carrier is highly complex, and crews will sometimes interchange, "connecting" much the way passengers do -- the captain arriving on one flight; the first officer from another. And because of earlier delays, one of those pilots might be subject to flight or duty-time restrictions while the other is not. With delays so unpredictable, last-minute substitutions aren't uncommon, which might entail having to call in a pilot from at-home reserve. These situations are often dumbed down into the likes of "We don't have a captain."

I've noticed that when cleared for takeoff, a plane's engines seem to increase thrust slightly, then level off, then go to full power three or four seconds later. It's like they are warming up for a moment. Is this correct?

Yes. This isn't the procedure for all engine types, but it is for many of them, including those on the planes that I fly. We accelerate the engines to a prescribed RPM, allow them to stabilize for a few seconds, then advance them toward takeoff power. At a certain point, the auto-throttle system takes over and fine-tunes the thrust.

Southwest was running a commercial that said its Boeing 737s fly at "an average speed of 590 miles per hour." That doesn't seem right to me. It sounds awfully fast.

It depends on whether they're talking nautical miles or statute, and true airspeed, indicated airspeed or groundspeed. Confused already? Keep reading...

The speed at which a plane is moving through air or relative to the ground isn't necessarily the speed a pilot reads from the cockpit airspeed gauges. They can all be different, and usually they are.

What the pilot sees on the primary cockpit speed gauge is called indicated airspeed (IAS). This is the basic reference for all flight maneuvering. This value does not account for changes in temperature and pressure, however, both of which, as a rule, drop as altitude climbs. Adjusting for this phenomenon gives us something called true airspeed (TAS). Imagine two airplanes. One is flying at 1,000 feet, the other at 30,000 feet. Both are showing 200 knots (nautical miles per hour) on their airspeed gauges. As far as the aircraft themselves are concerned -- in terms of the amounts of lift, drag and wind resistance -- both are traveling at exactly the same speed. However, the plane at 30,000 feet is actually traveling much, much faster through the air -- some 60 percent faster. But because the high-altitude atmosphere is thinner, the plane isn't "feeling" it. (TAS is never a fixed value. Because temperature and pressure can vary at any given altitude, so does TAS.)

Indicated speed is used as the standard reference rather than true airspeed, because this is what the airplane "feels." Stalls, takeoff and landing speeds, and various performance limitations are all predicated on IAS.

You've also got groundspeed to consider -- your velocity relative to the surface. Speed through the air and speed over the ground can be substantially different, dependent mostly on whether there's a headwind or a tailwind. Heck, you can point a small Cessna into a strong headwind and actually fly backward relative to the ground, still with a healthy IAS or TAS on the gauges.

Here's my cockpit demo on the various airspeed differences, shot recently on a flight coming from Europe.

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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.