Meanwhile, if you’ve read my previous columns, even the most squeamish fliers out there might grow bored with my repeated reminders and analogies about the relative safety of flying. As a nod to those annoyed by statistical platitudes — and being ready to indulge your morbid curiosity — I’d like to devote an upcoming column to a discussion of past accidents and disasters. Tastefully and constructively, of course. Got a question about TWA 800, the Lockerbie bombing, pilot suicides or other infamous tragedies? Let’s confront the reality that crashes sometimes occur, and perhaps a frank, full-immersion talk will quell a few of those same strange fears that so perplexed me last time.

Just prior to touchdown, our flight powered up and aborted the landing. We flew around, banking at much more severe angles than usual, approached a second time, and successfully landed. They said the airport was attempting to squeeze out too many departures. It was very unnerving. Does this happen often and do you think the airline was hiding something?

First of all, nobody was hiding anything. Second, what you experienced was something so nonthreatening that the crew had mostly likely forgotten about it by the time they’d reached the curb outside the terminal. Whether you call them aborted landings, missed approaches or go-arounds, they are nothing to sweat. Now and then, for any of various reasons, spacing between airplanes falls below the minimum requirements and a plane is required to execute the procedure you experienced. This does not, by any stretch, imply that you were close to hitting another plane.

The flying around at severe angles was nothing more than your plane maneuvering to rejoin the approach pattern. A plane being vectored back into a pattern may indeed make a few sharp turns or climb steeply to expedite its cause. Or perhaps it just seemed that way, as your nerves were already frazzled by what you perceived was a dangerous or unusual situation.

I don’t like hearing that passengers are so put off by something so innocuous. Your crew owed you more than some folksy spiel about the tower trying to “squeeze out too many departures.” I suspect people prefer a more professionally soothing explanation to a down-home shucks-it-was-nuthin’.

I roll my eyes each time the flight attendants go through their life-vest drill. Has anyone ever survived a water landing by donning a vest or using a seat cushion?

Please don’t disrespect the cabin crew. (I’m thinking now of the Replacements song, “Waitress in the Sky.”) They are forced by regulation to recite the safety briefing, and you should pay attention. My problem isn’t with the safety demo itself, but the way it’s presented — a snoozer full of legalspeak and vapid redundancies like “at this time” and “in the event of.”

But yes, there have been several instances where passengers have made use of their floatation devices. A recent example is the Ethiopian Airlines 767 that crashed in the Indian Ocean after a hijacking. Additionally, there have been times when aircraft have overshot, undershot, or otherwise parted company with a runway and ended up in the harbor of a coastal airport. So if you’re flying from New York to Phoenix and smirk when you hear “water landing,” remember that twice since the late 1980s jets went off the end of a runway at LaGuardia and ended up in the bay. There were several survivors in both cases.

Which airlines have the worst reputations for safety and service among pilots? Which are considered “gold standard?”

Let’s start with safety. Unless you’re planning to fly across central Africa in a Sudanese cargo plane, comparing accident statistics between carriers is, to some extent, splitting hairs. Pilots are more likely to compare pay scales and retirement plans than debate which airlines are safer. No airline’s pilots, as a general rule, are any more skilled or talented than another’s, though you’re likely to get an argument from many experienced pilots who’ve felt betrayed or left behind due to the women/minorities hiring quotas at some companies.

Many myths and misconceptions exist with regard to the perils of riding on foreign airlines. Rumors that European crews are allowed to drink wine with their meals, for instance, circulate even among pilots. Various overseas airlines are responsible for some dubious blunders, but the unblemished records of many will startle you.

When we get into cabin service, however, everything changes. Service on U.S. carriers, particularly in economy class, is the laughingstock of the airline world. (This may or may not surprise you.) First and business class, at least on international flights, tends to be quite good, but treatment in the back, if you haven’t noticed, leaves a little to be desired. To really be comfortable without having to sell the house, one needs to seek out the likes of Singapore Airlines, Emirates, and other world-class airlines based in Europe and Asia. I remember Thai Airways offering me a full hot meal, complete with steaming towel and a flower, on a 60-minute domestic flight from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. Such companies can’t help you, however, if you’re flying from Pittsburgh to Denver.

As if the airlines’ fare structures and fine print aren’t complicated enough, they’ve now taken to blurring the distinction between classes. Airlines like Delta and Continental no longer offer a first-class cabin on many international runs, opting for a jazzed-up business class instead. It’s better than any domestic first class, but it lacks the prestige of what’s become the international standard on long-haul services (that is, fully flat beds and other luxurious extravagances). Continental even came up with something called, in all possible befuddlement, “Business First.”

Is it true no U.S. airline flies to Africa?

For now, no U.S. passenger carrier flies to any destination in Africa, nonstop or otherwise. The last to do so was Delta, which operated a short-lived route from JFK to Cairo, suspended in 2001. TWA also flew this route for many years. In earlier times, Pan Am offered service to places like Nairobi, Monrovia, Lagos, and Johannesburg. Today, U.S. carriers fly passengers to Africa via their European partner airlines. By contrast, a handful of African carriers currently fly to the U.S., mostly to JFK.

While the bigger U.S. airlines carry half a billion or so passengers annually — far more so than any other nation — the intercontinental networks of its airlines can seem skimpy compared with those of Europe or Asia. To an extent, they have come to concentrate in particular geographic regions. Northwest and United are big across the Pacific, for example, while Delta concentrates on Western Europe. Down south, American is the biggest player in Latin America. This specialization is frequently the result of previous mergers and hand-me-down routes. In Latin America, Pan Am, Eastern and Braniff were the trailblazers. Braniff once ran a hub from Lima, Peru. As these entities failed, their networks were sold or passed on.

What is the longest scheduled nonstop flight in the world?

It depends if you’re talking time or mileage. Attempts to answer this question are bound to be met with bickering over a few kilometers or minutes, so I’ll take the easy way out: The longest flights have included Chicago-Hong Kong (United), Newark-Hong Kong (Continental) and JFK-Johannesburg (South African Airways). The Boeing 747, 777, and Airbus A340 are all common equipment on ultra-long-range routings.

I have experienced the JFK-Johannesburg route myself, as a passenger on South African’s flight “Springbok” 202 (to borrow their radio call-sign), and can attest to the ride of 14 hours and 46 minutes being less uncomfortable than you’d expect. Annoyingly, a digital timer bolted to the bulkhead and triggered by a retraction of the landing gear gave a minute-by-minute rundown of our flight time. Watching the hours tick by was a torturous proposition, until a certain passenger was bold enough to tape a piece of paper over the clock.

Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

If my explanations, which tend to be the stuff of numbers, statistics and hard facts, fail to provide comfort, then you’ll need to seek it elsewhere. I am not qualified to dissect irrationality or wavering, ambiguous fears of undefined situations (“I feel the plane is going to fall from the sky”). I cannot pretend to be a psychologist, nor, to at least one reader’s disappointment, am I able to recommend nerve-calming sedatives.

Also, many travelers are getting lousy advice. I’m losing count of how many letters begin, “My friend says …” or, “A colleague once told me …” or, worst of all, “I saw on the Internet …” inevitably finishing up with such boldly ludicrous assertions as “So what’s the point? If we crash, we’re all going to die anyway.” Who are these people, spies from Amtrak looking to drum up riders? Or are some of you loath to admit your own superstitions? There are many stories making the rounds, both electronic and otherwise, that are the aviation equivalent of “urban myth,” some of them tantalizingly believable. I realize the airlines are losing more and more respect among fliers every day, and I anticipate a level of cynicism. But please check with me before perpetuating nonsense.

In my original discussion of pressurization, I misleadingly wrote, “Normal cabin pressure aboard a plane is actually a little higher than sea level.” What I meant is that the altitude the cabin is a little higher. At 35,000 feet, the cabin altitude (not the same as the altitude outside the airplane, in accordance with the purpose of pressurization) will read 5,000 feet or so, roughly that of Denver. This changes as the plane climbs or descends, and at the point of touchdown the cabin altitude will equal that outside.

Also, a few readers rebuffed some of my answers by throwing military planes into the mix, negating this or that first or biggest plane. I assumed it was understood we were discussing civil aviation only. If such a point was missed previously, allow me to assert it, as the flight attendants love to say, at this time. Also culled from any future discussion are piston-powered, single-pilot aircraft. Following my statement that a passenger had never taken the controls after crew incapacitation, three readers were eager to debunk me by bringing up the case of the student pilot who recently landed a Cessna 402 operated by Cape Air. I was familiar with this, but had excused this category of airplane from the discussion of things “airliner.”

Would you comment on the air quality in commercial airliners? I’ve heard that the pilots decrease the airflow in order to save fuel. Also, is it true that the amount of oxygen is intentionally reduced to keep passengers docile?

Somebody is getting a lot of mileage (pun intended) from the “decreased fresh air to save fuel” bit. This comes up quite often. But while the airlines might be penny pinchers, never once, at any company, have I been instructed to cut down on air circulation to save fuel. Somehow I think a planeload of pissed off passengers negates the marginal benefit of a few saved gallons of kerosene. That said, yes, the air conditioning systems on certain airplanes are better than others, some of them notoriously deficient. But the crew has no control over inherent design, and no pilot would cut back the air to stretch out fuel.

There is no truth whatsoever to the second and far more outrageous part of the question. Keep in mind that the cockpit is not a sealed chamber with its own pressurization system. Passengers and crew are breathing the same air, and there is no way to tinker with the oxygen in the cabin without affecting the cockpit as well. The crew could don oxygen masks, I suppose, but the idea of the pilots sitting there with masks on, dialing up the pressurization to partially suffocate the passengers, is a bit preposterous, don’t you think?

What can you tell me about the process of takeoff? I live in San Francisco, where takeoffs are very nerve-racking. Can you explain how a plane takes off and why it bumps, jigs and turns, sometimes at a high angle?

Interestingly, takeoff is the more critical point than landing. Here the airplane is making the transition from ground to flight, and its grip on the latter is much more tentative than during landing.

The characteristics of every takeoff are basically the same. The plane reaches a predetermined speed, based on weight. The point at which it reaches this speed depends on temperature and other factors. The pilots then rotate the aircraft to a specific angle and begin the climb. All of this, from the rotation point to the thrust setting to be used, is calculated beforehand. After breaking ground, the pilots follow a “profile” of speeds and altitudes at which they retract the landing gear, flaps, slats, reduce or increase climb angle, etc., all while turning to assigned headings or fixes and climbing to assigned altitudes. It is probably the busiest portion of any flight.

If it seems that takeoffs from certain airports are unusually hectic, it is probably because the plane is following noise-abatement procedures on behalf of residents below. These can change the departure profiles somewhat, and usually require lower-altitude turns or steeper climbs. You are more prone to feel turns and jigs because you are climbing, close to the ground, at high power settings. The sensations tend to be exaggerated.

What is wind shear? And can it rip the wings off?

Well, to keep it simple, wind shear, one of those horrific buzzwords that scare the crap out of passengers, is a sudden change in the direction and/or velocity of the wind. It can happen vertically, horizontally, or both, as in the case of a microburst preceding a thunderstorm. A microburst is an intense, localized burst of air from a storm front. Think of it like an upside down mushroom cloud. The strength of the shear can run the range of barely noticeable to potentially deadly. Fortunately it has become easier to predict, and as a rule wind shear does not simply appear out of nowhere, flipping a plane upside down without warning.

This “rip the wings off” business is something I can’t begin to address. It’s like asking, “Can a wave break a ship in half?” Theoretically, yes. Practically speaking, no. In the case of wind shear, pilots are not worried about losing wings, they are worried about losing speed when a certain number of knots from a headwind suddenly “shear” to a tailwind. But again, conditions in which this will happen are generally predictable, and pilots are trained to deal with them. Wind shear got a lot of press in the 1970s and 1980s when it was still a misunderstood phenomenon. The crash of Eastern Flight 66 at Kennedy Airport in 1975 is considered the watershed accident after which experts began to study it more seriously. The last major accident attributed to wind shear was in Dallas in 1985.

Is it helpful to speak up about something that doesn’t look or sound right? Is it even possible that a passenger could discover something the crew doesn’t know about?

Customers pass along concerns like this all the time. Never once have I known a pilot to sneer or mock anybody’s well-intentioned query. The only time crewmembers take offense is when it’s done arrogantly, such as when a guy pokes his nose into the cockpit and mumbles, “Hey, your tire’s flat,” and then walks off. (Of course, the tire is not flat.) It’s never happened to me, but I’ve heard of instances where a passenger discovered a minor mechanical discrepancy. Usually it’s just a missing rivet or some such, but always the information is appreciated.

Often it seems like the airlines only want to fly in good weather. Yet the weather service routinely flies low-tech planes through hurricanes. How much of avoiding weather is safety, and how much is the airlines just not waiting to scare the passengers? I would rather endure a few bumps and arrive on time, than sit at the airport for three hours.

While NASA or the weather service may occasionally fly research airplanes through hurricanes, it is not anything you want to try, trust me.

The vast majority of weather delays are caused by traffic congestion at destination airports, or en route saturation along routes, or “airways.” In the first case, separation requirements change as ceilings and visibility go down, and aircraft must be funneled into instrument approach patterns. Fewer aircraft can land in a given stretch of time, backing up the arrivals. In the second case, even high-altitude routes often become blocked by storms, and so flights are diverted around them, causing backlogs. Often these two situations occur simultaneously, and the congestion can reach a point where departing flights are held on the ground so they don’t exacerbate the gridlock.

If a flight is diverting around a weather cell, it is not doing so to placate squeamish passengers. If that very airplane were empty but for the pilots themselves, they would be making the same decisions.

According to several accounts, pilots are notoriously cheap. Wanna take a swipe?

If pilots are cheap it’s because it often takes them years and years of slugging it out at low-paying commuter airlines before they ever make a halfway decent blue-collar salary. The pilots on the upper parts of a major airline’s seniority list indeed make a good living, but it didn’t come easy. Those working for smaller regional carriers often make embarrassingly poor salaries, and it can take many years before they join the ranks at a better-paying major airline, if ever.

Flying, it has been said, is much like acting, painting (or writing for online magazines), etc. Rewards loom for the fortunate, but many pilots are suffering for their art.

Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

ALPA and other unions embarked on a full-throttle campaign to legislate the arming of pilots, and were rewarded on July 10 when the U.S. House of Representatives ruled overwhelmingly in their favor.

But is the underlying presumption that guns in the cockpit would have prevented the air terror attacks of Sept. 11 actually correct? Certainly, unfortified flight decks made it easier for skyjackers armed only with box-cutters and knives, but the men could just as well have resorted to more lethal, more carefully choreographed means of overtaking the pilots and flight attendants. Intent on commandeering or destroying airliners, a gang of clever enough terrorists probably would have found a way.

There are plenty of reasons why arming pilots makes sense, but there are also plenty of reasons why it doesn’t. For every act of violence deterred by a pilot with a loaded gun, there may be another that is actually created by the presence of firearms in the cockpit. Ultimately, debate over the issue is as much ideological as it is practical — if you’re pro gun, you’re pro guns in the cockpit. But the real question should be: Is arming pilots the best way to stop hijackers? And that’s not clear at all.

ALPA, backed by most of its 59,000 members, initially endorsed something called House Resolution 4635, the Arming Pilots Against Terrorism Act. This came after a May 21 conclusion by John Magaw, director of the newly formed Transportation Security Administration, that refused to authorize the arming of pilots, an opinion more or less in keeping with the Bush administration’s position. Bush, meanwhile, has not stated an intent to veto any congressional approval of the idea, should the Senate follow the House’s lead.

The House resolution backed by ALPA, aggressive and provocative as it may have appeared at first glance, was in fact a cautious one. Rather than immediately handing out side arms to each of the nation’s 70,000 airline pilots, the union’s “Qualified to Fly — Qualified to Defend” campaign (watch for stickers on those black leather flight cases soon) asked for a two-year test period during which a maximum of 2 percent of pilots, about 1,400 in all, would be voluntarily trained and deputized. Rules and protocols would be laid out by the Transportation Security Administration, while pilots with military and/or law enforcement backgrounds would get preferential selection.

Lawmakers from both sides, however, found the measure inadequate, removing both the trial period and the 2 percent cap. “What sense does it make to arm a tiny, tiny fraction of them?” asked Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. This paves the way for the widespread distribution of weapons to pilots, albeit on a voluntary basis. Airlines would offer pilots the option of carrying either a handgun or nonlethal stun gun, pilots reserving the right to refuse either.

Many people are uneasy at the prospect of flight crews packing heat beneath their blue polyester jackets. The idea of an airline employee — even one with a combat background entrusted to operate jet aircraft — appropriating the role of law enforcement officer does not sit well with everybody.

But it is not by definition a bad idea. Importantly, the role of onboard guns will not be to break up squabbles or scare unruly passengers into submission. While episodes of air rage are indeed potentially dangerous, brandishing a weapon is to be an absolute last resort tactic used only after a cockpit has been trespassed. The point is to save the airplane. “Once deputized,” explains a pilot for a major U.S. airline, “our jurisdiction will be only in the cockpit.”

In the confines of a pressurized cabin aloft, far removed from the nearest police station or call for help, there does exist a precarious vulnerability. Is it truly anathema to the concept of safety that the crew be given an effective means to protect the aircraft from destruction?

Some argue that a fortified cockpit, perhaps augmented with a security camera giving a view of the cabin, is the key. But the flight deck is not, and never should be, a sealed capsule. Pilots emerge for designated rest breaks or to use the toilets, and flight attendants too require access. The potential will always exist for somebody to gain unwelcome admission. This past October, hardly a month after the events in New York and Washington, a deranged man rushed the cockpit of an American Airlines 767, forcing the widebody into a dive before he was subdued.

In many ways, the entire issue thrusts itself back to the matter of concourse security screening. In a report made public at the end of June, screeners at major airports failed to detect smuggled weapons nearly a quarter of the time in recent tests. On the face of it, the ease with which guns can be sneaked onto airplanes seems to highlight the need for a matched response. Sky marshals are useful here, sure. But with 30,000 flights taking off and landing each day across America, it’s foolish to expect — or even want — a marshal on each and every departure. Deputized pilots would offer an added margin of protection.

Meanwhile, the fallout of September’s diabolically creative use of legally carried items has turned our airports into scrap metal depositories, where everything from a corkscrew to a nail file is now considered a dangerous weapon. The presence of armed crewmembers might allow passenger screening to concentrate on more sensible and effective procedures, reducing hassle and embarrassment for everybody. Can the airlines once again offer their customers the dignity of usable silverware?

Crews, too, would take advantage of a renovated screening process. As it stands today, pilots are among the very few groups of airline employees still subjected to the comical rigors and needless indignities of the x-ray belt and metal detectors. Captains entrusted with hundreds of lives and aircraft worth hundreds of millions of dollars are asked to hand over their umbrellas and Leatherman tools while their roll-aboard bags and flight cases are inspected. “Stripped defenseless,” as ALPA puts it; “forcing us to cooperate with terrorists.” Histrionic for sure, but the idea of uniformed, on-duty pilots undergoing pat-downs and underwear inspection is ludicrous and wasteful. And bypassing this nonsense would, in turn, speed up the process for the public.

Concerns have been raised over the danger to the integrity of an aircraft should gunfire erupt en route. “I am against having guns in the cockpit,” says a 767 captain. “At cruise altitudes, the pressure vessel [fuselage] is a bomb waiting for a detonator. A bullet is that detonator.” The decompression he is alluding to conjures up Hollywood-style scenes of screaming passengers being sucked through openings in the fuselage. But such possibilities have been overemphasized. A bullet hole in an airplane will not, in all likelihood, cause it to crash. Certainly a round piercing some important equipment, or shattering a window, could result in a hazardous situation. But any circumstance grave enough to bring about use of a weapon in the first place, it must be assumed, offers an even worse conclusion.

In light of the above, some have suggested the use of nonlethal ammunition or stun guns, which would be effective against a person but not result in that nasty scene where passengers are being sucked into the sky. “In my view,” says a second officer with a major airline, “we need to have a pistol with nonlethal ammunition onboard each aircraft.”

Other pilots advocate the use of “smart guns,” nonlethal arms operated via pre-coded wristbands, which would allay fears of missing handguns finding their way into the terminals or being turned against crewmembers. To some of us, though, any high-tech idea prefixed by “smart” intimates a lot of money, research and dubiously successful trial-and-error exactly when it’s least welcome.

Meanwhile, general knowledge of a loaded gun up front, whether or not it’s discharging lead, rubber bullets or electric current, doubtless would have an impact on the collective psyche of a cabin full of anxious or angry passengers. Perhaps the more violent incidents of air rage would decrease, and that effect could be measured as an unintended benefit.

But here is where we start running into trouble.

The downside could arise when, for instance, an excitable captain decides to exercise his absolute — and quite deserved — control over the ship by breaking out a gun when survival is not, in fact, in the balance. It would be tough to resist the lure of using a pistol to help subdue an enraged and/or intoxicated passenger who had assaulted fellow travelers or crewmembers. Later, at whatever hearings or investigations are in order, it would be equally tough to doubt a captain’s insistence that the flight was in grave danger. Thus, it’s not inconceivable that the use, if not necessarily the firing, of a gun can become less of a last-ditch gesture of desperation than was intended.

And what, exactly, defines last-ditch? Without access to a locked and secure cockpit, a likely scenario involves a hostage-taking in the cabin. Is the crew to engage in a gun battle at 35,000 feet to save hostages? No, according to the underlying rules. But at what point might a pilot open fire, perhaps engaging a lone attacker in an unnecessary and dangerous firefight? To save the life of a flight attendant? An off-duty pilot or family member in the cabin? A child? Attempts at such gallantry, even when an airplane is not imminently pointed for the ground or a skyscraper, could be hard to resist. Skyjackings, in one form or another, have been taking place for decades. Nobody is recommending a captain or copilot set his sights on a gang toting grenades and AK-47s, but the potential exists for a deadly exchange that could otherwise be averted.

Ironically, many flight attendants also feel jeopardized by the idea of a cockpit-only restriction. What’s to stop the murder of passengers or cabin personnel if it’s assumed that pilots will not respond?

And while persistent security breaches at the nation’s terminals are cause for alarm, do we hand a critical new responsibility to pilots, sky marshals, or both? How many guns are too many? Would cockpit firearms supplant, or supplement, the weaponry of sky marshals? Is the prospect of three or more armed individuals aboard an airliner a bit of literal and figurative overkill?

The more theoretical scenarios are offered up, the more the stun gun idea, rather than a traditional live-round handgun, seems a more appropriate solution. It would be ideal for the close-at-hand defense a cockpit intruder would necessitate, and would eliminate a host of collateral implications. But in its July 10 vote, the House rejected this very idea, considering it too weak a defense against potential attackers.

Finally there exists the possibility, however remote, of purloined weapons being turned against their owners, or rogue crewmembers turning guns on one another or themselves. At least two air disasters were allegedly the result of pilot suicides — the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990, and Silk Air 737 that crashed in Malaysia.

Pilots’ unions seem to have widespread support from their memberships. At ALPA, 73 percent of pilots approve of their organization’s enthusiasm. Interestingly, this roughly three-quarter split can be traced cynically, if not scientifically, to opinions and ideals that exist outside the workplace. It’s not uncommon to spot red and gold emblems of the National Rifle Association on the luggage and paraphernalia of pilots. Are these fellows the marrow of that 73 percent? This author’s own casual queries among fellow pilots show an almost uncanny break along political/cultural lines. Those most eager to carry pistols aloft seem to be right-leaning types with military backgrounds. Those more hesitant tend to be less aligned with the more fiery and rhetorical aspects of post-9/11 patriotism.

Not all Democrats are squeamish about weapons, of course, and not all former military fliers and Republicans are pro-gun. This was demonstrated by the bipartisan congressional support of the recent legislation, and it would be foolish to overemphasize a left/right division when labor unions are leading the push. As one pilot at an ALPA-represented cargo carrier noted, “A few of the pilots opposed to the idea are retired military guys.”

But to remove culture from the context is to do a disservice to the entire debate. And do we press forward with an idea when a quarter of the participants think it’s a bad one? As a group, airline pilots aren’t generally known for subtlety or abstraction. The business has its closet intellectuals and bookish types, but your typical pilot is more likely a NASCAR fan with a suburban ranch house and a Jeep, than the kind of guy who relaxes in a turtleneck next to the fire reading St. Exupery. How this plays into the gun debate is hard to gauge, but there is a curious ideological undercurrent that betrays the matter as one less of safety, and more of emotion, than some pilots would admit.

In the ALPA call-to-arms, its typically articulate and well-reasoned opinion occasionally dips into cowboy blather. One of the points on its Web site proclaims that the mix of pilots and pistols is “a deterrent to terrorists and crackpots that believe breaching the cockpit is a freebie in America.”

Stick that in your pipe, Osama.

But in the end, the kernel of the argument isn’t one of patriotic posturing, shattering windows or the sovereignty of a flight deck. Rather, how useful and important is the idea in the first place? Are we giving valuable time and money to a red herring no different than the corkscrew confiscation already sucking up so much of our security resources? Are we distracting ourselves by pandering to a hunger for perceived safety?

Pilots, their unions, the FAA and the airlines should be worrying more about bombs than about terrorists or crackpots invading the cockpit. It wasn’t a gun that kept Richard Reid and his explosive sneakers from bringing down a fifth airplane last December. One post-September inspection revealed that during tests, explosives were making it past security screeners 60 percent of the time, much more frequently than either guns or knives. One would assume that other proposed safeguards, such as explosive-resistant luggage containers, would have received equal time with the haggling over guns.

In any case, the likelihood of another kamikaze-style attack has already been greatly reduced. An armed individual attempting to seize an airliner would likely not make it three steps up the aisle before succumbing to the panicked tackle of passengers or crew assuming nothing less than an outcome à la Sept. 11. In the words of one pilot, “God help the next son-of-a-bitch who tries something.”

Granted we can’t quantifiably gauge the deterrent factor, but some would argue that an accident is more likely to be caused by a cockpit firearm — whether by accidental discharge, suicide, or any of the aforementioned — than prevented by one.

Arming pilots is not a bad idea as much as it is a less crucial one than all the talk would imply. The small scale of the originally sought trial period, with its 2 percent cap, seemed to run up against much of pilots’ own rhetoric, in a way underscoring a degree of irrelevance. How much of a deterrent would be in place when a crew was most likely not armed?

Either way, the cost of implementing and regulating an armed pilot force is something the airlines and government balk at footing. Pilots would have to be trained and retrained. Procedures would need to be written and approved. Federal regulations would require overhaul. Company manuals would have to be amended and updated. All of this, to some extent, detracting from the pilots’ — and the airlines’ — foremost mission, which is not law enforcement or the oversight of firearms inventories, but the flying of airplanes.

The best result, in line both with common sense and a “Qualified to Defend” appeasement, is to keep the matter as voluntary as possible, and away from becoming an airline- and/or government-mandated requisite like seat belts and fire extinguishers. By deputizing pilots individually, at their choosing, albeit under some exacting rules and supervision, it would be possible to limit the scope and cost of what is, in the end, a somewhat relevant safeguard.

Pilots and their passengers face many potential, albeit unlikely dangers, and skyjackings are one of them. But at the risk of tempting another bug-eyed, fist-clenching testimonial on the dastardly deeds of last September, I ask what about the others? What about pressing for more comprehensive detection of explosives and bombs? What about the many weighty issues not related to security at all? Crew (and passenger) exposure to in-flight radiation, for instance?

We should take no offense at any pilot group’s push to protect both itself and the flying public. But I wince, ever so slightly, at the push of this issue and its seeming importance in the public eye. No pilot should be armed, and not a minute should be wasted, at the expense of a more deserving cause.

Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

Airplanes helped me appreciate the world. They turned me on to geography, travel and culture. By studying the route maps of the “corporate bullshit airlines” as a young kid, I was inspired, later in life, to travel to places like Peru and Botswana and India, trying to get a sense of the world. It was a direct connection, and my intention was to remind people of that potential.

I also was chided by a couple of readers for a less-than-scientific explanation of what indeed keeps a vehicle full of fuel, passengers, and cargo aloft. In my hands-out-the-car-window scenario, I misleadingly suggested that wind striking the bottom of the wing is what kept it flying. A more correct explanation would describe how a varying flow of air both above and below the wing, due to its curvature, allows for a situation of higher pressure from beneath. The resulting upward push is what we call “lift.”

How much turbulence can a typical 20-year-old passenger jet take before something really important breaks? And what actually goes on in the flight deck during a crazy wind-whipped landing? Do the pilots sweat bullets?

A typical airframe — even an old one — can take a remarkable amount of punishment. In talking to nervous passengers, I have found that turbulence seems to be the most frequently brought-up topic. Yet pilots, as a matter of routine, would not consider it a “safety issue.” People often will say, “Wow, what a bumpy flight that was,” yet a pilot may have little or no recollection of it being bumpy at all! There’s is nothing like a good jolt of turbulence to remind a passenger he or she is aloft and at the mercy of the workings of an aircraft. But turbulence is not going to break off a wing or otherwise knock an airplane from the sky. Planes are built with rough air in mind, and what may feel like a serious airborne pothole to you is probably nothing to the airframe. That said, really strong turbulence (it is graded from “light” to “extreme”) has damaged airplanes and injured passengers in the past. And keep in mind that rough air and so-called “wake turbulence” are very different things.

What you experience during your wind-whipped arrival is probably nothing too exciting on the flight deck. Just as you don’t suddenly grab the wheel in a white-knuckle panic when your car drives over a gravel road, pilots don’t sweat during in-flight bumpiness. Airplanes are inherently stable, wanting to return to their original spot in space when disturbed by a jolt of turbulence. Thus, the crew is not wrestling with the beast as much as simply riding it out. The crew or the autopilot may be flying a particular approach, but either way there’s usually not much tension up front. A crosswind landing is a matter of routine — a little extra input on the controls to allow for the “sideways” touchdown that is, in fact, the properly coordinated technique. And a firm touchdown is not necessarily a bad landing.

I try to avoid flying on those puddlejumper commuter planes. How unsafe are they compared to large jets?

Pilots bristle at the term puddlejumper much the way an environmental scientist would take offense to the term “tree-hugger.” Generally, the regional jets and turboprops most of you hate to fly on are at least as sophisticated as most large jets. To attempt to correlate size and safety is, in this case, to delve into statistical minutiae.

What is a turboprop?

Virtually all modern, propeller-driven commercial airliners are turboprops. A turboprop engine is, at heart, a jet. But in this case, to provide better efficiency for lower-altitude and shorter-distance flying, the compressors and turbines drive a propeller rather than generate thrust directly, or via the large fan you see on a pure jet. There are no pistons in a turboprop engine.

When a flight is delayed due to weather or mechanical problems, who makes the decisions whether to delay, cancel, etc.?

This is an excellent question, and close to the heart of much of the friction between the airlines and their customers. Weather or traffic delays usually come directly from Air Traffic Control (which is to say the FAA). During delays, things are coordinated from the airline’s dispatch department. Teams of trained and licensed dispatchers, who work in a huge room that looks like NASA control, handle the nitty-gritty of these situations. Via radio, phone or computer, they are in constant contact with the flight crew, even while aloft, conferring to coordinate weather delays, monitor the progress of maintenance, etc.

The interplay between dispatch, the crew and the agents at the counters is where things often become messy. Remember than an airline is often handling the logistics of hundreds of flights at any one time, resulting in the need for some daunting choreography. If airlines seem reluctant to dispense information during delays, it’s usually just a case of simply not knowing the details of if, when and how. Passing on the complexities of a situation is often going to confuse people more than placate them.

What happens when lightning hits an airplane? (Or maybe I don’t want to know the answer.)

Usually, a strike will not result in any catastrophic trouble. Planes are hit by lightning more frequently than you might think, but are designed with this in mind. The energy does not travel through the cabin, electrocuting the passengers; it is discharged overboard, partly through discharge wicks along the trailing edges of the wings and tail. There have been rare instances where damage has occurred, commonly to the plane’s electrical systems. In 1963 lightning caused the crash of a Pan Am 707, after which various protective measures were mandated.

What would happen in a situation where entire crew was incapacitated? Are there any situations where this has happened?

“Is there a pilot onboard?” As far as I know, however, this has never occurred, except maybe in the movie “Airport ’75.” I doubt it would be possible for a non-pilot to land an airliner. Perhaps if the person were somehow able to establish communications, and were talked into setting up the aircraft for an auto-land situation. But the odds are against a happy ending.

If a large commercial jet loses engine power, can it glide to a landing, or is it pretty much all over?

All commercial airplanes — jets and turboprops alike — are certified to fly, and even climb after takeoff, following an engine failure. But if all the engines were to somehow stop working? Yes, the airplane can certainly glide to a landing. In fact the glide performance of a large jet is no worse than the glide performance of, say, a small Cessna. It needs to perform this maneuver at a higher speed, but the ratio of altitude lost to distance covered is roughly the same. And while it may surprise you, it’s not the least bit uncommon for jets to descend at what a pilot would call “idle thrust.” That is, the engines are run back to a zero-power condition. They are still operating, but in a way that basically produces no power. A glide, no different than your scenario above.

How is a cabin pressurized? Why is it pressurized? Does this have anything to do with the size and shape of the windows?

Without pressurization, there would not be enough oxygen for passengers to breathe. As you go higher, the amount of oxygen in the air decreases. Pressurizing the cabin re-creates the conditions on the ground (or close to it, as normal cabin pressure aboard a plane is actually a little higher than sea level). Otherwise, imagine having to sit there with one of those plastic masks strapped to your head. Also, a pressurized cabin allows for a gradual equalization as you climb and descend, making it more gentle on the ears. Pressurization is maintained via air from compressors in the engines. It is regulated through various valves in the fuselage.

The small size of the cabin windows is due to the necessity to withstand the forces of a pressurized cabin. This is why, for example, the windows of Concorde, which operates at a very high cabin pressure, are so tiny. The roundness allows for an even dispersal of the energy.

The giant double-decker one, scheduled to be flying in 2006: Is it a revolution in air travel waiting to happen? Will it restore some glamour of the jet set with options such as a bar and a gym?

Many readers were curious about the new “super jumbo,” the Airbus A380, which will take its place as perhaps the ugliest widebody airliner ever built. It seems Airbus gave no real attention to aesthetics. The plane is bulbous and ungainly, without any of the elegance of the 747. And no, it’s not a revolution waiting to happen. When the 747 made its debut in 1969, it was more than twice the size of the largest existing airplane, and brought with it a whole new concept of flying — the widebody, long-range jumbo jet. The A380 will only be about a third bigger than the 747, and for the most part will rely on existing airport infrastructure and facilities. And bars (some with pianos), lounges and the like are not a new idea — they were found on upper decks of many early 747s.

Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

If one could choose a single point at which the thrill and the glamour of flying were at last rendered quaintly obsolete, the doors of the terminals flung open to the proverbial unwashed, it would have to be the moment when, in the fall of 1978, President Jimmy Carter put his name on the Airline Deregulation Act. Prior to this moment, even with tarmacs growing crowded with widebodies and leg room shrinking away, it still was possible to find vestiges of, in the words of author James Kaplan, “the days when people climbed those moveable staircases to get into silver skinned planes. Before the days when international airports would be jam-packed with Swedish kids with shorts and backpacks.”

In the years to come, deregulation would unleash a wave of upstart airlines. Most were doomed to failure or corporate absorption (think People Express, New York Air, Air Florida), but nonetheless they collectively invaded what was once the coveted territory of the well-dressed businessman or bourgeois tourist, fatally mugging a token or two of the entrenched establishment in the process (think unfortunate Luddites like Braniff and Pan Am).

Where would Southwest Airlines, a former niche player whose route system barely breached the confines of Texas, be today without this late-’70s revolution? Today, for 69 bucks, college kids and retirees can hop a Southwest jet from St. Louis to Tampa, Providence to Baltimore. And wasn’t this, after all, the point? How very egalitarian. What a symbol of freedom, as Southwest’s schmaltzy television ads so incessantly remind us.

The trouble is, not only did flying become cheaper and more accessible, but it became immensely more uncomfortable and tedious, prone to all the breakdown and hassle one might have expected when 250 million people suddenly have free run at a particular infrastructure.

The going cliché, as concourses grow more crowded and profit margins slimmer, is a frustrated comparison of the airport terminal to the downtown bus station. How much longer before air travelers have to endure the same dreary disrepair and stained seatbacks of the Greyhound depot? Today, to properly savor the irony here, a passenger need only pay a visit to Boston’s renovated South Station, for example, with its polished granite floors and elegant skylights, and then take a walk through Terminal C at Logan International.

Most people in 2002 do not enjoy flying; not because of inherent danger aloft, but because planes are uncomfortable and airports chaotic. This is the ultimate realization, perhaps, of a fully evolved technology, whereby flying itself has become secondary to the experience as a whole.

Here I am, sitting in a Boeing 747, a plane that, if it were tipped onto its nose, would rise as tall as a 20-story office tower. I’m at 33,000 feet over the middle of the Pacific Ocean traveling at 600 miles per hour, en route to the Far East, a voyage that once took seven weeks in a sailing ship. And what are the 400 passengers doing? Complaining, sulking, reading the paper and tapping grumbly rants into their laptops. The man next to me, having paid a $5,600 business class fare, is upset because there’s a dent in the lip of his can of ginger ale.

Progress, one way or the other, mandates that the extraordinary become the ordinary. In the case of commercial aviation, luxury and privilege were distilled into common vinegar for the masses. But don’t we lose valuable perspective on our own capabilities and triumphs when we begin to equate the commonplace, more or less by definition, with the tedious? Don’t we forfeit a bit of our pride when we sneer indifferently at the sight of a jet airplane — something that is, at heart, a world-changing triumph of industrial design?

A passenger points to the turbofans slung from the wing of a Boeing 777 and calls them “those spinny things.” Those spinny things are multimillion-dollar turbofans, high-tech power plants the size of a two-car garage. Ask most passengers for the specs on flying, and you’ll get an answer running somewhere from a blank look and a shrug to a pseudo-technical invocation of sci-fi hooey.

Most people can’t tell you how a TV works either, even though everybody has one. Something to do with signals being beamed in and repositioned to form a picture — like the teleporter on “Star Trek” or that scene from “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” However, we don’t routinely trust our lives to the mechanical workings of a television set.

In the worst cases, mix a little ignorance with some well-earned distrust, and you get an attitude of pure contempt, a witch trial in every airliner’s cabin. Few people trust the airlines. Yet few people can tell you how the airlines, or their airplanes, actually work.

By attempting to alleviate fears and apprehension, airlines have helped created a cartoonish caricature of themselves. And what kind of a statement of sad inevitability was it for a European consortium to name their product the “Airbus”? Even pilots, frontline defenders of whatever respectability happens to remain in the business, often dumb down the complexities of both airplanes and the system.

“Folks,” says the captain as a delayed flight waits at the gate, “it’ll be just a few more minutes. We need a mechanic to come out and take a quick look-see at a light bulb here in the cockpit, and then we’ll be on our way.” Once, sitting at the gate in Amsterdam, a crew informed a planeload of anxious passengers that a mechanic needed to “drop some oil into one of our motors.”

Passengers imagine a buzzer going off in a tin shack where a group of men in greasy overalls are playing cards. One of them runs out with a toolbox and an aluminum funnel, swings open a metal door in the belly of the plane, maybe gives a twist to an old brass valve.

Chatting gate-side with a frequent flyer, a pilot hears, “But do you really do anything? Doesn’t the autopilot do all the flying?” Next time a person lays out an elaborate Thanksgiving dinner, try this: “But did you really do anything. Doesn’t the oven do all the cooking?”

Airplanes are complicated, sophisticated and, dare the biased enthusiast suggest, beautiful (well, some of them). Lack of knowledge toward the workings of planes can seem a bit, well, uncivilized, or even disrespectful to those who bestow passion upon them. And that’s not the adrenaline-charged passion some might feel at the sight of a motorcycle or muscle car, or the way a collector might coo lovingly while oiling the barrels of his rifles and handguns. Planes can be sexy, I say, but spare me the blather about phalluses and hormones.

I’m talking about a passion that takes all of humanity into account: the routes of the world’s airlines bridging the continents, linking all the nations and peoples of the world.

Sound hokey, or far-fetched? I suggest a stroll through the International Arrivals Building at Kennedy Airport during the nightly transatlantic departure push: a round little microcosm of El Mundo itself — Sikhs, Moroccans, Colombians, Arab women with their faces covered, all in a frantic, teeming mingle while muscled Port Authority cops look on suspiciously. It’s an illusion, of course, a forced integration that lasts exactly until final call once again splinters the masses into their respective creeds and colors. But as the departure lobbies fill and the check-in lines swarm, it’s a snapshot of multicultural nirvana that would make any campus radical cry with happiness. Outside, the crazy colors of a hundred different airlines line the tarmac. The inter-terminal bus at Kennedy says it all, its stops along the necklace of terminals so saturated with international carriers that the P.A. blares not the airline name, but the country it serves. Hungary. Ghana. Pakistan. Romania. South Africa.

And what’s at the root of all this weepy culture-bridging? The aircraft itself, the graceful ship docked outside that nobody is paying attention to. But how many world travelers with their passports full of stamps and visas can tell you the difference between an A340 and a 777? How many can tell you which is the world’s oldest airline (KLM), the largest plane (still the 747), or whose face that is up on the tail of EgyptAir (it’s Horus, the ancient Egyptian sky god).

What a shame, for the means to be so coldly separated from the ends, for people to find travel so valuable, important or enriching, but to find a certain irrelevancy in the tools that actually get you there.

An old friend of mine, an artist, found my fondness for aircraft to be utterly perplexing. While I could see urbane elegance in the lines of a 747, or a heady significance in the color scheme of a prestigious airline, she analogized airplanes not as works of art themselves, but merely as the painter’s brush. The sky was the canvas — flying, traveling, the journey.

I disagree, for the two indeed are inexorably — and quite beautifully — linked.

In an effort to remedy the widespread lack of appreciation for the wonder and beauty of airplanes, the author is more than willing to field questions from readers having to do with any aspect of air travel.

Here are a few sample responses to some of the more common questions, misconceptions and mysteries of commercial flying. Whether this will encourage a traveler to meditate appreciatively the next time he or she is stuck on a clogged taxiway for 45 minutes, wedged into Row 37, is unknown.

How do heavy metal tubes with tons of passengers and cargo stay in the air?

Ah yes, the semi-whimsical musing that forms the philosophical kernel of every layperson’s general curiosity about aerodynamics. But the answer is an easy one: Next time you’re driving down the highway in your Honda Accord, stick your hand out the window, parallel to the ground, and “fly” it along like a wing. Bend it upward slightly, and it rises, no? Not getting the Accord off the ground? OK, but now imagine your hand is really, really, big. And imagine the Honda has enough horsepower to go really, really fast. See? It’s all in the wing, which is carefully sculpted into an airfoil, and augmented with flaps, slats, slots and other doodads, to maximize lift. Great big wings produce great big amounts of lift. Enough to lift a nearly million-pound 747 off the ground once it hits about 150 knots.

What’s a knot?

A knot is a mile per hour. Except it’s a nautical mile, not a statute mile. Nautical miles are slightly longer. And bigger, heavier planes do not necessarily need more knots to take off. The size and lifting capacity of the wing rises roughly in proportion to the size and weight of the plane. And the faster a plane is going, the more lift it is generating. That is why, during takeoff or landing, when the plane is going slowly, the flaps, slats, etc., are deployed. These increase the lifting properties of the wing, but are retracted once you’re moving more swiftly.

Our pilot told us we were taking off on Runway 22 at LaGuardia. Are there really 22 runways at the airport?

No. The numbers correspond to the runway’s magnetic (compass) orientation. To figure out which way it’s pointing, simply add a zero. Runway 22 is pointing 220 degrees, roughly toward the southwest. The opposite end of the same strip would be designated 4 (or 04), pointing 40 degrees (040), or northeasterly. (A directly northbound runway is 36, by the way, not 0 or 00.) When runways are laid in parallel, they are given a letter suffix of “L” or “R” designating left or right.

Do you have questions for Salon’s aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.