O'Leary is a sort of anti-Richard Branson. Where Sir Richard uses his flamboyance to elevate and even re-romanticize the idea of flying, O'Leary strives to grind away every last vestige of its dignity. His gimmicky proposals have included on-board pay toilets and stand-up cabins. He strives to make Ryanair so low cost as to do away with airfares entirely, he has said, relying only on ancillary revenue from things like luggage fees and, well, pay toilets.

The ability to charge 15 euros -- or no euros -- for a flight to Mallorca requires that expenses be held as low as possible. To this end, O'Leary views his employees as being about as important and expendable as a paper boarding pass. Indeed, O'Leary's latest publicity stunt is a call to remove first officers (copilots) from the cockpits of Ryanair's fleet of Boeing 737s. One pilot, rather than the required two, he says, is enough to get the job done safely, particularly on shorter flights.

"Really, you only need one pilot," O'Leary boasts during a recent interview in Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. "Let's take out the second pilot. Let the bloody computer fly it."

The bloody computer. There are so many things wrong with this that I hardly know where to begin.

Regardless of whether or not his harebrained idea will ever fly (it won't), O'Leary is nevertheless perpetuating the irritating myth that jetliners are so automated that they essentially "fly themselves," with the crew on hand mainly as a backup. This ridiculous notion, forever repeated by the press, is something I've addressed many times in this column. It never goes away, and now O'Leary has given it yet another media run and another phony glimmer of plausibility.

I'll spare you another agonized dissertation, but here's a brief review:

The realities of cockpit automation are widely misunderstood and consistently exaggerated. This is in part thanks to the aerospace academics and researchers the media tends to call on. While their work might be useful and important, they often have limited knowledge of the operational aspects of commercial flying. Blame also falls on those airline pilots who, in their attempts to sound self-effacing or when trying to offer easy-to-understand explanations, come out with hokey summations like, "Aw, dang, this plane practically flies itself." They undermine their profession and give people the completely wrong idea.

Airplanes do not take off by themselves; they do not land by themselves; they do not fly by themselves. Yes, there is such a thing as an automatic landing -- an "autoland" in pilot parlance -- whereby the plane performs a hands-off touchdown. This capability is there if you need it, for those extreme low-visibility approaches, but in practice it is very rare, comprising well under 1 percent of all landings. Rare because an automatic landing is, in most aspects, more complicated and work-intensive than a manual one.

Meanwhile, the workload in even the most "automatic" cockpit can be surprisingly high. I fly mainly longer-haul international routes, and we carry along an auxiliary first officer. You'd be amazed how often all three of us are busy. As a rule, though, the busiest cockpits tend to be those on short flights. Ironically these are the very flights on which O'Leary seems to think pilots are most expendable. He's really showing his ignorance here -- if, in fact, he means what he's saying.

I'm trying to picture some poor lone pilot in a Ryanair 737 shooting an ILS approach to minimums, with a go-around and diversion to an alternate airport, having to deal with the weather, air traffic control and company communications, fuel planning, reprogramming the flight management system and setting up the next approach, and so on. Not to mention flying the damn plane. Sure, there's an autopilot, and it requires a steady stream of inputs in order to manage speed, altitude and course.

That's more or less routine. Now imagine something goes wrong. That's not a problem, though, in Michael O'Leary's view. And I quote:

"If the pilot has an emergency, he rings the bell, he calls her in."

By "her" he means a flight attendant. One extra employee on every Ryanair flight, you see, would be trained to land a plane.

I am not making this up.

To land a plane. As if "landing" is some insignificant, easily compartmentalized aspect of flying to be mastered over the course of a few hours of instruction. And with that I am forced to close my eyes, breathe easy and picture a "happy place" -- a place free of such abject idiocy and the ill-informed people who might actually pay attention to it.

I also picture a hapless flight attendant pressed into sudden duty, attempting to negotiate an instrument approach in a 737. Heck, for the touchdown, let's throw in a 20-knot crosswind just to make it interesting. This is so beyond the realm of possibility that it pains me even to address it, and I shudder to think that thousands, maybe even millions of people have read O'Leary's comments and granted them a shred of credibility.

Michael O'Leary has at last succeeded in presenting us with the most preposterous thing ever uttered by the head of an airline. Of course, no sane government body or aviation authority would consider his scheme for half a second, and I'd like to think that not even O'Leary could be brazen enough, or stupid enough, to take it seriously. But you never know. Certainly he sounds like he means it. Another provocative firecracker designed to cause a commotion and keep his company's name in the news? A cheap way of insulting his workers and reminding them who the boss is? Was he talking tongue-in-cheek?

Perhaps, though it'd be best if he simply kept his mouth shut.

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When al Soofi missed his connection at O'Hare, he was rebooked on a United Airlines flight to Amsterdam. His bag, meanwhile, was sent unaccompanied to Dulles, where it was loaded aboard the United plane to Dubai that al Soofi originally intended to catch.

There are rules banning unaccompanied suitcases on planes going overseas, however (a stricture going back to the Lockerbie catastrophe in 1988), and the Dubai-bound jet was forced to return to the gate. When al Soofi's suitcase was offloaded and rescreened, authorities became worried and alerted Dutch officials, who arrested al Soofi upon his arrival in Amsterdam.

Also arrested was Hazem Abdullah Thabi al-Murisi, a Yemeni citizen whose only crime appears to be that he shared Yemini citizenship with al Soofi, and happened to be seated near him. Reportedly the men had never met or spoken before, though both spent several years living near one another in Detroit, among the large Arab-American population there.

Do I believe that al Soofi and al-Murisi were terrorist operatives on a test run, sniffing out weaknesses in airport security? No, I don't. The evidence doesn't point that way.

Ignoring for a moment whether they were unfairly profiled (I don't necessarily feel that way, either, though al-Murisi's detention is a little hard to reconcile), I find the incident strangely comforting. As I've been writing for years, the No. 1 threat to commercial aircraft is, just as it has always been, bombs and explosives. And although we will never be completely protected -- a resourceful enough saboteur will always figure out a way to smuggle deadly components onto an aircraft -- it is heartening to see that our luggage screening protocols actually work, and are effective enough to detect what could have been something dangerous.

Also heartening is the way in which screeners in Birmingham seem to have handled their odd discovery. They checked things out and did not overreact.

Do the Dutch know something we don't, or are they the ones overreacting?

Abdul-Hakim Al-Sadah, Yemen's consul general in Detroit, says that mobile phones and watches are commonly packed together by traveling Arab-Americans (and other cultures too, I should add) as gifts for relatives and friends.

As for al Soofi's Pepto-Bismol, in the end it made sense. Turns out he probably needs it.

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I flew several segments aboard Southwest on a recent trip. At each landing the brakes were applied very abruptly, pitching us forward uncomfortably. The airports were San Francisco, Chicago-Midway and LaGuardia, none of which I would think would have runways too small for a 737.

Not too small, but small enough that harder-than-normal braking at these airports is fairly common. Especially at LGA and DCA. Landing distances aren't arbitrary or subjective. Adequate room to stop is guaranteed; pilots don't simply eyeball a runway and figure, "That looks about long enough." (There is no set length that particular aircraft type requires. It depends on weight, wind, surface conditions, etc.) Nevertheless, shorter runways leave less margin for error, and so a little extra on the brakes is sometimes a good idea.

Most of the time, though, hard braking is the result of pilots aiming for a particular turnoff. At LGA, when landing on Runway 31, pilots often attempt to clear the runway prior to the intersection with Runway 04/22. Once past that point, having to recross the active runway can add several minutes during the taxi-in. And air traffic control, for its part, appreciates a quick runway exit, especially when traffic is close behind.

Thus, long runway or short runway, braking can occasionally be abrupt. It's a bit jarring if you're not expecting it, but it is not a sign that you were about to go barreling off the end or colliding with another plane.

On many commercial aircraft the initial braking is taken care of automatically. The plane I fly has four "autobrake" options for landing, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4 and something called "max auto." Selections 1 or 2 give you a nice, gentle deceleration. Max auto feels like you've hit a brick wall, and is saved for those occasions when runways are both very short and very slick. I rarely select anything more than a 3. At some point during the landing roll, whichever pilot is flying (captain or first officer) will disengage the automatic brakes and take over manually. 

The other night, after we landed, instead of taxiing to the gate under its own power, our plane shut down its engines and was towed to the gate from a spot just shy of the terminal. I had never experienced this before. My husband speculated that the plane was probably low on fuel after our long transatlantic flight.

No, no, no. You'll occasionally encounter one of these "tow-in only" gates, designated as such because parking at one requires one or more tight turns that are difficult for a larger plane to negotiate under its own power, and/or because of the proximity of other aircraft, ground equipment or personnel. Even at low thrust, jet engines are powerful enough to wreak havoc at close range. 

I am a particularly nervous flier during takeoff. An old boyfriend, who was training to become a pilot, upon my badgering conceded that in spite of the overwhelmingly safe nature of flying, takeoff is perhaps the riskiest moment. When I asked how long I needed to be nervous during takeoff, he suggested one minute. I immediately tripled this number, and have established a ritual during takeoff whereby I count to 60 three times after the plane lifts off, after which I can begin to breathe normally again.

Statistically most accidents do occur shortly after takeoff or shortly before landing (with no real definition of what "shortly" means), but your boyfriend was right. He was more or less paraphrasing something I say in my book: "Here the airplane is making the transition from ground to flight, and its grip on the latter is much more tentative than when coming down. More fingernails are probably chewed during landings, but in deference to the laws of inertia, gravity and momentum, this anxiety is misplaced. If you insist on being nervous, liftoff is your moment."

Three minutes, though? It's more like the first 10 seconds that are most critical.

Actually, I'd back that up to take in the latter portion of the takeoff roll as well. Similar to landings, as discussed above, stopping distance is guaranteed should a takeoff be aborted up to so-called V-1 speed (just prior to liftoff). But that's a bet I wouldn't want to take on some runways in slick conditions at maximum weight. There's a point where you're safer in the air than on the ground.

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In court filings, Mexicana said it was badly hit by the swine flu outbreak last year that scared away travelers for months and by the global economic slowdown. The airline added that high jet fuel prices and labor costs contributed to its financial troubles.

Before the bankruptcy filing, the company unsuccessfully sought union agreement on pay cuts of 41 percent for pilots and 39 percent for flight attendants, along with a 40 percent reduction in employees, saying both were needed to keep the company afloat. Labor leaders rejected the proposal, saying their members already agreed to cuts in 2006.

Executives said this month that the company needed an infusion of at least $100 million to keep flying, and on Aug. 21 a group of Mexican investors called Tenedora K announced it had bought a 95 percent stake in the holding company that controls Mexicana and the domestic airlines Mexicana Click and Mexicana Link.

Mexicana flies to more than 65 national and international destinations, including the United States, Canada, Central America, South America and Europe. It transported 11.1 million passengers in 2009, according to the company's website.

"Then they came back on the intercom, sounding surprised or in shock, and said I'm not sure how to tell you this, but the wheels caught fire upon landing and the emergency slides had been deployed," Vanatta said.

The Airbus A320 landed just before 1 p.m. after a flight from Long Beach and blew two tires when it touched down, airport spokeswoman Gina Swankie said.

The plane appeared to experience trouble with its brakes, the airline said in a statement.

The 86 passengers were removed from the plane by inflatable slides then taken to the terminal by buses, Swankie said.

Vanatta said he ran to the window to see what happened and saw passengers standing on the runway near the plane, surrounded by fire trucks.

"My friend and I were able to rebook to a flight out of Oakland, so we're driving there now," he said by phone.

Xinhua quoted Hua Jingwei, an Yichun publicity official, as saying that some passengers were thrown from the cabin before the broken plane hit the ground.

The Brazilian-made Embraer E-190 jet had taken off from Heilongjiang's capital of Harbin shortly before 9 p.m. (1300 GMT) and crashed a little more than an hour later, Xinhua said.

China Central Television showed firefighters dousing the burning plane with hoses and later digging through the wreckage of the jet.

Xinhua said 43 bodies were recovered within hours of the disaster and 53 people were hospitalized, most with broken bones. Wang Xuemei, vice mayor of Yichun, told CCTV that three survivors were in critical condition but gave no details.

CCTV earlier said that 91 people were on board, and gave a lower death and injured toll, but the report appears to not have included the five crew on the plane.

Henan Airlines is based in the central Chinese province of the same name and flies smaller regional jets, mainly on routes in north and northeast China. Previously known as Kunpeng Airlines, the carrier was relaunched as Henan Airlines earlier this year.

Henan Airlines and many other regional Chinese airlines flying shorter routes have struggled in the past few years, losing passengers to high-speed railroad lines that China has aggressively expanded.

An American company, Phoenix-based Mesa Air Group Inc., was an original investor in Henan's predecessor company, Kunpeng, but divested its stake last year. Mesa operates regional services in the U.S. for Delta Air Lines, United Airlines and other carriers and is undergoing bankruptcy reorganization.

Full-tilt expansion of Chinese air traffic in the 1990s led to a series of crashes that gave China the reputation of being unsafe. The poor record prompted the government to improve safety drastically, from airlines to new air traffic management systems at airports.

The last major passenger jet crash in China was in November 2004, when an China Eastern airplane plunged into a lake in northern China shortly, killing all 53 on board and two on the ground.

An MD-11 cargo plane operated by Zimbabwe-based Avient Aviation crashed during takeoff from Shanghai's main airport last November. Three American crew members died while four others on board were injured.

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Associated Press researcher Yu Bing contributed to this story.