'British Airways, We'll Take Good Care Of You'
But that artificial limb is not, after all, a part of you, now is it?
See: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=1&ObjectID=10398581
When paralympic champion athlete Kate Horan checked in for a flight from London to Amsterdam, airport authorities refused to allow her to bring, as carry on, her $10,000 running leg. The leg was checked as luggage, and then lost. This puts a crimp in her plans to run in the IPC World Championships 100m race next week.
'They said there's 20,000 bags sitting in Heathrow and mine is just one of them. I was told they don't know where it is,' she said.
Leg manufacturer Otto Bock and Ossur will attempt to build her another leg in time for the world championships.
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British Press Conference
'All That Drama About Liquid Bombs? What We Said About Ten Airliners Being Blown Up?
Well, What We Said Was 'Unfortunate'; There Was No Imminent Threat.'
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/28/world/europe/28plot.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Senior British officials now say MI5 agents had secretly installed video and audio recording equipment inside the apartment used by the liquid bomb plotters. The police had been monitoring them for over a year as they experimented with chemicals. It was known all along, senior British officials now say, that since the suspects had been completely unable to produce any liquid explosives at all, they were -- indeed -- not at all prepared to strike.
- Why, then, did they not say that at the time of the arrests?
- Why, then, did they say ten airplanes would have been blown up were it not for the arrests?
- Why, then, did they terrorize the public?
- Why, then, did Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, claim the plot was 'really quite close to the execution stage'?
'Unfortunate, Speculative, And Exaggerated'
No explanation is offered. Instead, in the press conference, the British officials said public statements at that time were 'unfortunate', and that the statements that 10 planes could have been blown up was 'speculative and exaggerated'.
If you read the special newsletter on August 10th, you may remember that I told you this was all staged. If, in spite of the newsletter, the scare tactics did bother you, now you have it from the horse's mouth. Apparently any distress they may have caused you was also 'unfortunate'.
At the press conference the officials pointed out:
- Two of the suspects did not have passports.
- The leaders of the plot were still recruiting would-be bombers.
- The suspects had neither made reservations nor purchased plane tickets.
- The suspects had NOT been successful in producing the liquid explosive (HMTD ).
In fact, British officials now say they are unsure whether any of the suspects was technically capable of ever making a liquid bomb. A chemist involved in what the Brits now are calling an 'inquiry' said whether the suspects 'had the brights to pull it off remains to be seen.'
Liquid Explosives Made From Peroxide Is 'In Theory Is Dangerous'.
As I said in the Special Newsletter, no research has been done to show whether a practical liquid bomb can or cannot be made. I said that this massive change in security was a publicity stunt.
The chemist quoted above said that HMTD can be prepared by combining hydrogen peroxide with other chemicals and that HMTD 'in theory is dangerous.'
'In THEORY?' I thought they told us ten airlines were about to be blown up? Did I miss something? Now we are told it is just a THEORY that this liquid could be dangerous?
'In retrospect,' said Michael A. Sheehan, the former deputy commissioner of counterterrorism in the New York Police Department, 'there may have been too much hyperventilating going on.'
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Why They Call It The 'Tombstone Agency'
It is because the FAA, is primarily a political institution, and only secondarily a safety institution. It responds after accidents, not before, and when it responds after accidents, its response is in the interest of politics, not safety.
Consider how political the FAA's response is to the Lexington, Kentucky accident reported by CNN.
See: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/08/29/plane.crash/index.html
The airport's tower manager has told investigators that having a single controller on duty early on a Sunday morning was 'not inconsistent with their staffing levels . . . .'
'The FAA said a second air traffic controller would be added to the weekend overnight shifts at the airport beginning next weekend, The Associated Press reported. Agency spokeswoman Laura Brown declined to give a reason for the decision.'
This is the FAA's response to understaffing the tower. The tower lone operator was busy with administrative requirements and was unaware the Comair pilots were taking off on the wrong runway.
Since you cannot depend on the FAA to protect you, who can you depened on? I'll give you the word-for-word statement given to me in the cockpit by an FAA examiner. He said, 'The FAA is a 'paper tiger'. The most important factor in airline safety is the unionized pilot.'
Unlike any other situation I can think of, the captain's safety is inextricably linked with yours. It is not the same as with a doctor. You may need a more thorough examination; the doctor might have a full waiting room and a golf game scheduled. Your attorney knows you don't have 'deep pockets' so your case may not get the same priority as a client who does.
It's not that pilots are better people. It is just that the situation puts you both in the same boat. The reason that FAA examiner said that about unionized pilots is that a pilot who is not backed by a union is in no position to take a stand against corporate interest that the plane depart on schedule and be fixed later.
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Patrick Sent This For Newsletter Readers
RE: Sunday's tragic crash of a Comair regional jet in Lexington, Kentucky.
As for what may have caused the tragedy, early speculation is almost always a bad idea, but the available evidence indicates the crew tried to depart on the wrong runway - a classic and blatant case of human error. The shorter of Lexington's two runways is used primarily by general aviation craft (smaller private planes), and under most conditions is too short for a plane the size of a 50-seat regional jet. For the record, no airplane has a fixed number as to how much room is required to take off. Paul Czysz, Professor Emeritus of Aerospace at St. Louis University was wrong to tell the Associated Press that flight 5191 'needed' 5,500 feet. Every departure is different, with required length depending on weight, weather, and other variables. A plane needs at least enough pavement to accelerate to lift-off speed, then stop safely if the roll is discontinued. But regardless of whether or not the runway could technically accommodate their jet (obviously it couldn't), the crew of flight 5191 was not supposed to be on that runway to begin with.
The idea of two hapless pilots departing down the incorrect strip might seem ridiculously inexcusable, and frankly it is. Neither is it easy. You would not be penalized for asking aloud, with a tone of rhetorical amazement, 'How in the world could they take off on the wrong bleeping runway?' Plenty of professional pilots are saying the same thing. From the time a plane leaves the gate to the moment when the thrust levers are advanced for takeoff, ample checks and balances ensure such a stupid error won't be made. There are cockpit instruments, compasses, charts and computerized navigational displays that show the plane's precise orientation - to say nothing of basic situational awareness, which most pilots pride themselves on. At LEX, the intended runway and the crash runway are forty degrees of alignment apart. That's a sizeable difference, unlike the parallel strips found at some airports - even those are difficult to confuse.
At the same time, any pilot can imagine a certain scenario: It's an early morning departure. The sky is dark and foggy. You're hurrying to complete a last-minute checklist, programming a nav computer or studying the radar display while the captain taxis to the runway, himself tired and distracted. The controllers are anxious to get you moving because there's another jet on final behind you... An errant takeoff is extremely unlikely, but if it's going to happen at all, circumstances like those are liable to be present. On a stormy night six years ago in Taiwan, a Singapore Airlines 747-400 attempted takeoff on a runway clogged with construction equipment. The ensuing crash - the only blemish in the carrier's history - killed 83 people.
A flurry of questions and concerns regarding regional jets themselves have emerged. Are smaller planes less safe than larger planes? How sophisticated are these aircraft? Are regional airline crews, notoriously underpaid and often quite young, trained to adequate standards? Are the troubles of Comair, mired in Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection since last fall, somehow implicated? I could spend the next ten pages repeating myself, but all of this has been covered in past columns.
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Patrick has generously supplied . . .
. . . some links for this Newsletter to help anyone who is interested to know more about aviation.
Regional jet and commuter airline safety
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2005/02/25/askthepilot125/index.html.
Takeoff Planning
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2005/07/08/askthepilot144/index.html.
A Runway Primer
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2004/06/25/askthepilot91/index.html.
Big Plane, Small Runway
A session customized to your exact needs. I'm both an airline captain and a licensed therapist. It is my specialty to work with the most difficult cases.
Then the fourth DVD leads you through the practice sessions of the Strengthening Exercise so it works automatically. When it works automatically, it stops high anxiety and panic before either can start.
Available 10 AM until 7 PM Eastern time.
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2003/07/18/askthepilot49/index.html
In short, a majority of regional planes are reliable, multi-million dollar machines that are no less advanced than larger jets. The crews are qualified and highly skilled. If, on some level, regional flying is less safe than mainline flying, crew fatigue, not experience, might be something to look at. Having been employed as a captain and first officer at regional carriers for the better part of seven years, I'll attest to the brutality of scheduling: short layovers with no access to food followed by multi-leg days of high-workload flying. Tiredness is no excuse for what apparently happened, but I wouldn't be shocked if months from now fatigue is listed as a contributing cause for the Lexington accident.
If you're a naturally squeamish traveler, it's tempting to interpret the crash as a horrible and frightening reminder of the inherent dangers of flying. You'll be biting your nails and girding for the worst at every takeoff from now on. Try not to do that. Try to instead remember that we had gone almost five full years without suffering a serious aviation accident in North America. While not to disparage or downplay the deaths of four dozen people, we still haven't suffered a truly large-scale catastrophe since that of American Airlines flight 587 in November, 2001. To put the streak in context: twenty-five thousand commercial flights, give or take a few, depart each day in this country carrying nearly three million people.
It's poor solace for those aboard flight 5191, but in a way their deaths help to underscore the rarity of crashes in the first place, and our remarkable successes at thwarting them.
And the timing, certainly, couldn't have been worse. Justified or not, on the heels of the foiled London bomb plot, too many passengers were already tightly coiled over the ghoulish specter of terrorism. The last thing the industry needed was a deadly crash. On the other hand, it was pervertedly relieving to see the focus of people's anxieties shifted, if only temporarily, to something tangible and real, rather than more stuporous obsessing over whether or not hairspray is a deadly weapon, and whether or not your seatmate is an al-Qaeda operative.
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Is There A Lesson For Anxious Fliers In All This?
I think there is. Perhaps there is more than one. One of the lessons I would like to get across is to have you understand how entwined politics is with the aviation industry, with airline safety, and with airline security. Some anxious fliers get annoyed when I point this out, and object, and say I am causing a problem. I don't think so. There is a problem. I don't cause it exist in the world, but my reporting it may cause it to exist in a person's awareness.
Though you may think having a problem brought to your attention is 'bad', I take the position that the only way to deal with flying is a 'grown up' way, and that hiding problems from awareness is not an adequate answer. Why? Because hiding things from awareness only ends up leading to imagination that what is being hidden is unspeakably threatening. For a person who has spent their lift trying to be unaware, any fact of life may be unspeakably threatening. But I believe the only way to get over it is to come to terms with reality.
Amazingly, once a person gets used to reality, it isn't that bad. This takes us again to the basis of the SOAR Program which is, 'to experience flying just as it is, adding nothing, subtracting nothing'. In other words, when you fly, experience reality rather than what you imagine.
Imagination of disaster can be displaced by awareness of reality, just as frightening shadows in the dark can be displaced by sunlight.
If you are up for a 'grown up' way to deal with flight anxiety, this is where you can find it: http://www.fearofflying.com/store.shtml.
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What Is Flight Anxiety All About?
Let's start at the very beginning. We get our ability to calm ourselves several months AFTER we are born. Calming ones self is not innate. Getting upset is. This explains why -- though we all are very capable of getting upset -- few of us are equally capable of calming ourselves.
Psychologists put it a bit differently. They speak up 'upregulation' and 'downregulation'. We know, at birth, how to scream bloody murder; that's upregulation at work. But it is the mom's job to do the downregulation for several months. Some moms are better at it that others. If we luck out and get a mom who, herself, regulates her emotions nicely, she can calm us smoothly, and we learn to do it very well for ourselves. We kind of make a video inside of what mom does, and when she is not around, if we get upset, we play the internal video, pretending she is here and real, and that calms us.
We need help to make her presence real. That's what Linus's security blanket it all about. His mom isn't around. He needs her calming presence. He can imagine her doing it. But it isn't quite enough. He needs something physical. The blanket does it. It is soft, like she is. It may have her scent on it. He touches it to his cheek, as she touches her cheek to him. Adding the physical to the imaginary makes it real for him. He feels better.
By the way, the same psychological phenomenon can work against us! When we imagine the plane is in danger, if we keep it completely imaginary, we don't run into trouble. But if we feel something -- and it can be anything (it doesn't have to match up) -- it can make what we imagine real to us. For example, picturing the plane up high. We can imagine it could fall. But it isn't falling. So we are OK. But then the smallest amount of turbulence is felt, and that makes the imagination of fall real.
But back to how the feeling of the security blanket reinforces Linus's ability to use his imagination of his mom to calm himself.
We have -- normally that is -- access to the world's biggest security blanket. We have access to the 'ultimate security blanket'. What would that be? Well. The world. The earth. All our connections with other people are done on earth; earth, then, is strongly associated with those connections. All our ability to control things is done on the earth; those feelings of being in control depend on the earth.
So, when we get removed from the earth, we are literally -- when it comes to emotions -- fish out of water!
We lose our ability to regulate ourselves. We are missing the connections with others. We are missing the control we depend on to prevent things from going wrong. We get anxiety.
Now, the amygdala. The amygdala is like a bar code scanner. When a thought/awareness/perception is on its way into the mind, it goes by the amygdala which looks very, very quickly to see if this thought/awareness/perception some kind of dangerous threat. If not, the amygdala does nothing. If it picks up some indication of risk, the amygdala starts 'upregulates' us to get ready for running away, or for fighting, and -- get this -- it does not BEFORE your are truly conscious of the thought/awareness/perception.
For example, have you ever had your hair 'stand on end' and you didn't know why, and then you became aware of some risk. I get that with spiders in the garage when I'm looking for something. I get this shot of stress hormones and then see this think crawling near my hand.
That shot of stress hormones came as a result of the amygdala's scanning for creepy crawly things, and wiggly-snakey things.
For some reason, flying also triggers the anxious flier's amygdala. Could be you have a momentary fleeting image of a plane falling, or a plane coming apart, of crash photos, of people killed in a crash, of never seeing loved ones again. How many thoughts is that? Five.
Probably when you first were flying you had just one: a plane falling. If you pictured that, if the amygdala scanned that and saw it as a risk, it would give you just one shot of stress hormones that would take you (on a scale of zero to ten) from zero to two.
But now, as you have continued to fly, you have taken in -- and stored -- additional images of disaster, perhaps the five I listed above. So, when one comes to mind, it leads to a second, which leads to a third, etc. The first one takes you to two, the next one causes an additional release of stress hormone (thanks to the amygdala) and you go from two to four. The next takes you from four to six, etc. All the way up to panic or near panic.
Sure, there are little things you can do which give you a sense of SOME control, and that is enough to give you just a touch of relief; but it isn't enough to really make you feel OK.
What we do is completely change what happens when the amygdala scans an incoming flying thought. We 'coat' the thoughts (like coated asprin doesn't upset your stomach) with an emotion which the amygdala sees instead of the thought the emotion is coating. The emotion is one the amygdala considers calming. So it doesn't react any more to flying, once we 'install' the coating.
You can get everything you need in 'The Control of Anxiety' which is on DVD at: http://www.fearofflying.com/store.shtml.
Please order that. You can start watching it on the internet as soon as you order and the actual DVDs arrive in about three days. Look at the first video and the last one, and give me a call so I can see what -- if anything -- we need to do to fine tune the exercise.
Or, if you want, call and we can talk it over first.
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SOAR Works
Which Way Fits You Best?
Complete and comprehensive. Ten DVDs (appx. ten hours). View it on the internet as soon as you place your order. Your DVDs are shipped to your door by FEDEX or Priority Mail.
See guarantee and order at: http://www.fearofflying.com/store.shtml.
Even if your difficulty is extreme, I'm sure I can help. Please call so we can talk it over. This confidence is based on my success with over six-thousand clients in the past twenty-five years. The fee for a twenty-minute session covering the basics is $60.00, payable by MasterCard, Visa or American Express. Everything can be covered in forty to sixty minutes (fee prorated to time used).
Available 10 AM to 7 PM Eastern (New York) time. Outside the U.S. or Canada call: 203-258-4803.
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Not Ready To Order The Entire Program?
At least learn the Strengthening Exercise. It is fairly complex, but 'The Control of Anxiety' video will lead you through your practice sessions step-by-step.
For automatic control of anxiety, one thirty-minute practice session daily for a week is ideal. If time is short, don't wait. Just two or three practice sessions can make a huge difference in how you feel when you fly.
What Do You Get In 'The Control Of Anxiety' DVDs?
This set of four DVDs includes three complete counseling sessions with three volunteer clients. It answers their questions about flying, about turbulence, and teaches them The 'Strengthening Exercise' which provides automatic control of high anxiety and panic.
Order 'The Control of Anxiety' at: http://www.fearofflying.com/store.shtml.
http://www.misoapbox.com/2006/08/i_believe_i_can.html.
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Is Time Short? Don't Wait. Just call . . .
There is still time to make a HUGE difference in how you feel when you fly. We have everything you need to deal with flying.
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New York SOAR-FEST October 7th
This years New York SOAR-FEST will be at le Zie, a Venetian Trattoria located in the heart of Chelsea.
What Is A SOAR-FEST?
It is just an opportunity for anyone interested in flight anxiety problems and solutions to get together for drinks and dinner. Some like to share their personal stories about flying. Some like to just enjoy being together.
You don't have to be in the SOAR program. It is a very special discovery to find out that there really are other people who feel the way you do about flying, and to find what great, imaginative, and intelligent people they are (just like you, right?).
Dinner is at 7:00 PM. There is a bar -- a quiet one -- not like the noisy one at the restaurant we used last year. If you can, meet us at the bar at any time between 5:30 PM and 7:00 PM.
At le Zie, we will have a really private dining room upstairs, separate from the main part of the restaurant. The atmosphere is one of being in a wine cellar.
The price: $58.00 total per person (includes service and taxes). Wine or cocktails in the bar or during dinner are not included.
The room accommodates 24 people comfortably at one large table. If this is important to you, please reserve now to avoid missing out, as the space is limited.
The Menu
Appetizer:
choice of:
Entree:choice of:
Desert choice of:
Coffee or Selection of Teas
Cancellation: if you need to cancel, please call me (877) 332-7359 at least by Tuesday October 3rd. Cancellations after Tuesday can not be refunded unless we are able to find someone to take your place.
There are several parking garages in the area. Free parking on the side streets is usually available after 6:00 PM. Please read the parking signs carefully.
How To Sign Up For The New York SOAR-FEST
Just go to: http://www.autopilotriches.com/app/javanof.asp?MerchantID=60171&ProductID=3169231