Thursday, April 05, 2012

Certain Restrictions

I've flown JetBlue on a couple of occasions. It's nice to know that there is a discount alternative for flying from Oakland to New York. Not discount like forty-five dollars discount, but if you saved your nickels and dimes, you might end up feeling as if you saved a few of those nickels and dimes by flying the skies of Blue. Of course, you might also be a little nervous about the flight crew of this bargain airline.
Last Tuesday, Captain Clayton Osbon ran through the cabin before passengers tackled him in the galley. He screamed incoherently about religion and terrorists, which put a damper on the in flight entertainment found in the back of every headrest. Consequently, Flight 191 from New York to Las Vegas was diverted to Amarillo, Texas where Captain Osbon was taken in to custody. Later in the week, his wife let everyone know that "he was not intentionally violent toward anyone." Unintentional violence at thirty thousand feet is still a pretty dicey proposition.
It got me to thinking about the relative safety of other kinds of travel. The advantage that a jet has over a bus is a co-pilot. If the bus driver goes nuts, you had better hope that Sandra Bullock is on board to grab the wheel, or you're probably going to end up in a ditch. Even at sixty-five miles an hour, the descent probably won't be as abrupt as flying. Then there's the train, which certainly has its potential for becoming runaway, in which case you had better check to see if Jon Voight isn't your conductor. You could always settle for the family road trip across this great land of ours, but after a few hundred miles of getting the back of your seat kicked and choruses of Ninety-nine Bottles Of Beer, even the most responsible of us might begin to crack.
And that may be the point where discussion ends: After twelve years of slogging back and forth across the continent, Captain Osbon may have reached his limit of being asked "Are we there yet?"

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