Vintage "Ask the Pilot." In particular:

I will kill you, it says, if you don't take proper care of me.

So, I take proper care.

This passage is like some holy litany of the machine age.

I agree, classic. Very Martin Cadin . . . Smith talks about the preflight being meditative - and so is the column. Gorgeous.

rock on, Patrick

This is kind of article that I have come to love this column for. I am glad for the break from the recent TSA rants. It's interesting that you visited my homeland (Jamaica) in an Air Canada DC-8. Air Jamaica used to fly DC-8s as well from the 1970s until the early 1980s. Keep up the good work work... Your loyal Jamaican fan

...but I wil agree, this is a great installation. This is why I read this column. This is why I read Salon. This is why I read.

Thank you, Patrick.

Some of your best writing so far.

Wow, this piece is one of Smith's best. He has taken the lonely cockpit ruminations of Lindbergh's We and Markham's West With The Night and fast-forwarded them nearly a century. Although modern mundanity has snatched away the glory of nighttime Transatlantic flight, Smith shows that an aviator's emotional conflicts are still the same. Better still, he proves that there remains a good deal of heroism in those who conquer their primordial fears, rage against the dying light, and do not go gentle into the good night.

I shall never again so blithely get onto an airliner as I once did.

As an organist, I've often had people say that the console (with multiple keyboards, pedals, and lots of moving parts) looks like an airplane cockpit. (The main difference, being, of course, that if I play a wrong note, no one's life is in danger.)

But this is the first time I've ever seen the opposite comparison, making me even more glad than I usually am each week to have read Patrick's column faithfully for years!

Reading these musings while C-Span is replaying Thursday's congressional hearings on the FAA's failure to oversee carrier maintenance provides a more than bit of vertigo.

Inspectors and supervisors, way too cozy with the airlines they were supposed to be monitoring, ignored major problems and persecuted or ignored whistleblowers, while we in the cheap seats blithely relaxed, no more aware of danger than were the tulips Smith was hauling from Belgium to NYC.

I was reminded of the old Bob Newhart routine, as some congressmen probed FAA execs, about the "Grace L. Ferguson Airline and Storm Door Company. This is where deregulation has brought us: Traveling in flying deathtraps that have somehow managed to stay aloft.

ATA has just declared bankruptcy, the TV crawl tells us. How many more carriers are pushing the fiscal limits and skimping on maintenance and self-inspections in order to stay ahead of their own bond holders?

I look forward to The Pilot's comments in his next column.

Great article Patrick

Great work! Keep it up.

This was one of your best columns yet. (Yes, I've read them all, or almost.)

Now this is why I read "Ask the Pilot." The only thing wrong was no link to a DC-8, so I had to do the work of searching Ailliners.net myelf. Please toss us gear-heads one of these bones every third or fourth installment.

Exactly why I look forward to your column, Mr. Smith. Thanks!

This reminded me of Gann's Fate is the Hunter. Great job Patrick. Thanks.

...and an apologist for airline treatment of passengers/cattle during two-hour runway delays, etc., you're a damn fine writer, Patrick.

Beautiful article. I'm looking up pics of "Monsters" as I write this.

***************

Less telling passengers to just suck it up and deal with crappy airline treatment - and more columns like these!!!

Here's a DHL DC-8:

http://tinyurl.com/54o29k

Which if I read the story correctly, is Patrick's "Monster".

Great writing, great column. Up there with the best parts of your book, Patrick!

I just love the way you write. I still occasionally see the Monster flying overhead going in/out from Willow Run, just west of Detroit Metro. It always catches my attention, being such an anachronism. I'll look at it with much more appreciation now.

COURAGE

Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.

The soul that knows it not Knows no release from little things:

Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,

Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear

The sound of wings.

How can life grant us boon of living, compensate

For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate

Unless we dare The soul's dominion?

Each time we make a choice, we pay

With courage to behold the restless day,

And count it fair.

— Amelia Earhart

A lovely piece. Thanks, Patrick. Ernest K. Gann is smiling somewhere, as I hope is my late Dad, who was an Air Guard pilot when I was young, and whose prime identity in my mind (his too, I think) was always "jet pilot," even though he retired from flying 25 years before his death.

I've been reading Patrick from the beginning, waiting patiently every week, cursing him madly when he is late.

This is the best one you have ever written, Patrick. Thanks for bringing us the magic of flying. I always knew that is how it is, and now you have shown me.

great great great great.

The timing of this article is spot on! Given all the dire news that the airline industry produced this past week I think many of us were expecting PS to respond in a more direct manner. Instead he very eloquently reminds us of the complexities involved with flight. In so doing he subtly, I think, is responding to the news. Just a hunch.

Damn, Patrick.

Keep writing, I promise to read whatever you write, even when you're writing about an ugly old plane you flew in 1998...I guess because that's not what you're actually writing about.

You're right, we're all afraid of flying. I miss my childhood, when I loved flying completely, without question, with no fear, I'd look out the window and imagine surfing and skiing on those bright white clouds.

Now, flying is a pain. The getting to and from the plane/airport is the biggest pain, but even flying is a pain. I can't, without effort, banish from my mind the wild, scary possibilities. But your columns help. I remind myself of what you've written about turbulence and I can calm myself...until the next flight. Ah well.