I am pleased to be back home after a one night trip to Cleveland. Reading the Economist magazine on the plane, I learned that the fastest growing political party in Germany is the Pirate Party; they are making rapid gains. Their main plank as far as I can tell is immediate and regular input from members to their elected representatives instead of the more typical situation where politicians rarely listen much to their constituents except just before elections. I am skeptical; it seems that one point of elections is to elect someone whose judgment you trust instead of directing the elected official how to vote by popular consensus on every issue as it comes up. (That probably overstated the Pirate Party position.)

Arrrgh. The Pirate Party was a sideshow; the real purpose of this entry is to tell you about the pilot I sat next to on the Dallas to Cleveland leg. He was chatty in a good way, especially after we talked about non-flying stuff for 20 minutes first... and I was interested in his stories...I have tried to summarize the most interesting parts below. I will call him Captain X.

1. Captain X was a pilot for TWA for the first part of his career and he had friends on TWA 800. He later became a pilot for American and he was friends with the guys who were flying the American 757 before the terrorists flew it into the WTC on September 11, 2001. This got me thinking: Captain X may be the only guy in the world who had friends on both of those planes. Sort like how Armand Hammer was probably the only man in the world who knew both Vladimir Lenin and Ronald Reagan...only different.

2. Captain X told me that he had 10,000 hours of flying time on the type of aircraft we were on--formerly known as an MD80, and almost 20,000 hours of flying time overall, with most of the non-MD80 hours on 757's and 767's. How do you get that many hours? Well, flying from New York to Italy (Milan and Rome) six times a month for a long time (as Captain X did for TWA) helps a bit. And simple longevity in the industry gets you there as well...that's a lot of time at the controls of an aircraft. Malcolm Gladwell theorizes that 10,000 hours doing something often makes you fantastically good at it (e.g., the Beatles played together about 10,000 hours before they ht the big time). But it doesn't guarantee anything...Captain X and I also discussed the sad case of the former chief pilot of Alaska Airlines, who had 29,000 hours of flying time and on his final flight, a small charter plane carrying Senator Ted Stevens, the good captain crashed the plane, with no mechanical difficulties, into the side of a mountain that he couldn't see at the moment but had flown over and around countless times; I think the aviation industry lingo for such accidents is "controlled descent into terrain."

3. We got into a conversation about the Alaska Airlines MD80 that crashed into the Pacific near Los Angeles several years ago and Captain X mentioned that the ultimate trouble was the pilots tried to troubleshoot the malfunctioning stabilizer on the tail and during the lengthly troubleshooting process, the problem became catastrophically worse. If they had just declared an emergency and landed at LAX, all souls on board would have been saved. This, Captain X said, caused the FAA to issue new directives about landing the plane almost immediately under a wide variety of malfunction scenarios instead of troubleshooting in the cockpit...he said his in-cockpit troubleshooting manual went from very thick to very thin as a result.

4. I asked about turbulence, if Captain X is ever bothered by it, and he said only when the whole airplane is vibrating so badly that he cannot read the instruments.

5. We talked about the takeoff of 747's and Airbus 380's and airplanes in general. I told him that I understand the absolute basics, how air pressure differentials above and below the wings create lift...but that I find it practically a miracle when a giant airplane takes off. He smiled and said that despite his years of schooling on the matter and his almost 20,000 hours of being at the controls of an aircraft, he feels like it is a little miracle almost every time he lifts off as well.

6. I asked him what his favorite aircraft to fly is and he said hands down, the Boeing 757 (he said that he, like many pilots, has a sticker that says: "If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going"). He said the 75's (Pilot short hand for Boeing 757) are like beautiful strong women...has "power to spare, is sleek and sexy, and responds well to gentle touches."

7. I asked if he ever had any hairy incidents and he said that many years ago he was flying an L1011 (Lockheed's giant widebody plane) and an engine blew right after takeoff. The entire plane of course was shaking violently and a flight attendant throws open the cockpit door and starts screaming at Captain X and his colleagues, and yelling questions like "what the f**k is going on?" The flight attendant was an experienced hand but it was her first flight back after taking five years away from the industry. She swore if she landed she would quit and never get on another airplane. Sure enough, Captain X gets the bad engine shut down, dumps the fuel and lands the plane. Despite every one of the passengers (according to Captain X) getting on a replacement plane a couple hours later, this flight attendant was totally done and refused to get on the replacement plane and then quit on the spot.

I am sure Captain X could have kept the stories up all the way to Cleveland but I had to work and he wanted a nap, so that was the end.