It's a strange relief to realize that this airline disaster, though tragic, was almost certainly not caused by terrorism. The crash of Flight 587, which killed at least 260 people on board and 6 on the ground, appears to have been caused by old-fashioned mechanical trouble. No suicidal pilot, no bomb, no missiles. The Airbus 300-600 mostly likely had a catastrophic engine failure from which the crew could not possibly have recovered.

The loss of an engine could easily have damaged the plane in such a way that it broke apart, creating the four separate debris fields that investigators are currently combing. As the engine fell away, it could have torn off a control surface, sending the plane into an "unusual attitude" that quickly became aerodynamically unstable. "If the aircraft was out of control and turned in such a way that it had a sideways attitude to the airstream, the structure might not be able to handle it," points out Todd Curtis, founder of Airsafe.com and a former airline safety executive at Boeing. It's likely the departing engine ripped open the hydraulic lines, and then the pilots wouldn't have been able to control the airplane at all.

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The question, for me, about this horrible tragedy is not "How could it happen?" but "Why didn't it happen sooner?"

When I first heard news reports, I assumed that two very small airplanes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon. After all, single-engine planes like mine have been flying for years along the Hudson Corridor. It's the preferred route to keep clear of the jumbo jets using Kennedy and La Guardia. On my trips along the East Coast, I always request the corridor, fly south from Boston to Sing Sing prison, turn right and fly over the river past Shea Stadium, Central Park and the Statue of Liberty, then head for Verrazano Bridge and continue south toward Atlantic City, N.J.

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The report's glib summary makes the crash sound like an easily preventable accident. Several factors, the NTSB concluded, pointed to the pilot's "failure to maintain control of the airplane during a descent over water at night, which was a result of spatial disorientation."

Having speculated about what might have led to the crash a year ago, I approached the NTSB's exhaustively researched report with more than average curiosity. Was there anything Kennedy could have done to avoid the crash that killed not just him, but his wife and her sister?

Spatial disorientation is aviation's top pilot-killer. With little warning, it can strike any pilot, who must then draw on tremendous confidence and training in order to survive. As a pilot without much flight time, Kennedy hadn't yet built up either.

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On that hot day, the plane wallowed in the sky, slow to climb and loath to turn. I had to pitch the nose up high to keep the plane level. The airspeed dropped drastically. I quickly sized up the level of my emergency -- the engine was running fine, I could easily turn and make it to the airport. What was making my sleek plane fly like a truck? I tuned out my chatty passengers and started assessing my problem.

On a much larger scale, thats pretty much what the two Alaska Air pilots did before crashing into the Pacific Ocean on Jan. 31. But a $75,000 lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of one passengers widow claims that the troubleshooting was "improper." Rather, the suit claims, the pilots should have "immediately  land(ed) the aircraft upon first notice of difficulty in operation."

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"Someone trusted you with their lives, and you let them down," he says. "You just hope that they find it was something that couldn't be helped, something beyond anyone's control." Statistics don't bear out that hope. Most often, it's the pilot's fault. Less often, a mechanical failure.

At this early stage, it appears that mechanical trouble reported by the pilots contributed to the crash of Alaska Airlines flight 261. Industry insiders agree that the airline has always run a responsible company, not some sleazy little cut-rate upstart.

But even the top-flight airlines, the "majors," as they're called in the trade, don't have perfect maintenance records. Keeping aging jets airworthy is an expensive and time-consuming job, one that glides in and out of gray areas. And given that the airlines are motivated mostly by profits, it's always been surprising to me how much leeway they get from the Federal Aviation Administration on maintenance issues.

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For years, the members of my extended family have been relentless in their attempts to stay in touch with me. Theyve tried calling, writing, passing messages to me through each other; but its a losing proposition. When my workday ends and the kids in bed, Im exhausted. What I really want to do is sit and breathe in front of my television, not string together cogent thoughts for a phone call or letter.

At the office, however, when Ive had enough coffee and the days problems are keeping me alert, I can zip off half a dozen quick e-mails while I bolt my lunch. Not only is e-mail cheaper than long-distance calls, but Im a writer, after all. Im happier talking with my fingers than with my mouth.

Clearly, its the best way to reach me, which is why I get over 300 e-mail messages a day. Adding a few more from my family wouldnt be so tough, I thought. So I patiently explained to them the mysteries of ISPs and POPs, addresses and attachments, killfiles and sig files. "Trust me," I promised. "Its easy."

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If the Federal Bureau of Investigation takes over the EgyptAir Flight 990 investigation later this week, it won't mean much of a change in the daily job of NTSB investigators. The change is mainly a matter of politics -- the FBI will decide which leads to pursue, while NTSB experts remain on the case, analyzing clues and submitting a standard final report. The FBI has followed the investigation closely, which it does with any crash that starts to look fishy. The NTSB normally gives up control of an investigation in one of two situations: When an American-based plane crashes in a foreign country, or in cases of suspected criminal activity.

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Pilots and investigators held high hopes for that voice recorder, expecting it to explain the many problems of this crash. Early flight data hinted at some sort of pilot-induced cause, a possible intentional crash. While news yesterday focused on the seemingly normal banter between the pilots as something went wrong with the flight, today's news about the utterance of a prayer before the autopilot disengaged remuddles the waters.

Were the pilots acting together, brilliant saboteurs who played the game all the way to the ground? It's doubtful, when they simply could have disabled the voice recorder, as an apparently suicidal pilot on Indonesian carrier Silkair did before pointing the nose of his 737 straight down in 1997, killing all aboard.

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Pilots and investigators held high hopes for that voice recorder, expecting it to explain the many problems of this crash. Early flight data hinted at some sort of pilot-induced cause, a possible intentional crash. But the 30 minutes of recorded casual chatter only makes the mystery murkier.

Were these guys just terrific actors, brilliant saboteurs who played the game all the way to the ground? It's doubtful, when they simply could have disabled the voice recorder, as an apparently suicidal pilot on Singaporean carrier Silkair did before pointing the nose of his 737 straight down in 1997, killing all aboard.

As a pilot myself, I was convinced that the voice recorder would reveal a frantic cockpit battle as one pilot struggled to save his craft while the other fought to nose in. I believed it not because of erroneous newspaper reports about how the recovered control surfaces pointed in opposite directions, which led "experts" to conclude that the pilots must have been wrestling over the yoke.

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Tom Wolfe wrote in "The Right Stuff" about the denial of pilots, the eagerness to find fault with a dead pilot as a means of protecting yourself against disaster. "What a stupid idiot," we say when one of us dies. "I'd never take off and fly into thunderstorms, of course he died." He was stupid, you're not, therefore you will survive. In an accident like this that's a dangerous game to play. Which of us pilots hasn't taken off a half-hour later than planned; struggled to get comfortable in a more complex airplane the first time we soloed in it; discovered that the weather along our route was worse than forecast?

Admittedly, I'm more experienced than Kennedy was. Part of that experience comes from studying accidents and learning from them. I've been thinking about that, thinking about how this flight must have gone, how pieces of it went like so many flights I've taken. And how I can learn from it, learn to do things differently if I'm faced with similar circumstances.

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Once I crossed the shoreline, I lost it. The blurry ocean and fuzzy sky blended
together into a bright mass without the usual sharp horizon line bisecting my
windscreen. I tensed my hand on the yoke, trying to keep the airplane from
turning, but inevitably turning it as I tensed. With no outside visual cues, I
couldn't interpret the flailing needles on the cluster of instruments. Obviously
the airplane was doing something, and doing it pretty quickly. But what? I
couldn't tell.

Ever since I heard about the crash this weekend, I've been thinking about that
flight -- thinking about the pilot's inky last few moments, frantically scanning
instruments and ransacking his brain for a pertinent flight training tidbit.
Every pilot I know has been there, in an open sky full of panic. But we're still
alive. It's that slim margin between life and death that fascinates me, that
unknown combination of timing and training that kept me alive and killed John F.
Kennedy Jr.

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Then you find the justification for handing in your notice: a Web site
that calculates how much your family will save if you stay home. Plug in a few
numbers and presto, you're going to come out ahead once you stop paying for that
extra car, that expensive vacation, the take-out pizza after a long workday.

But the bottom line, when you really crunch the numbers, isn't that simple. If you want to quit your job, more power
to you -- but don't do it thinking you're going to be all the richer. It hurts
family finances when one spouse quits working, and I'll tell you why.

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And then, we had a baby.

I can hear you chuckling already. Most of my parenting friends did, too. They told me about what happens once you have kids -- you forget about Mount Everest and start sending away for the Disney brochures. "We like to stay home," they warned me. "Raising the kids is our top priority right now." What they really mean is that traveling with small children is just an exercise in expensive damage control, and who has the stomach for it?

I did. I swore that this baby wasn't going to wean us off our little junkets. I swore some more when we actually went on some of those trips. My intentions were noble but I came to realize, for example, that even a well-behaved 2-year-old will run screaming through the Uffizi after 35 minutes of staring at Titians. Later, instead of saying, "Thank goodness, Mommy, you've finally found the only vacant hotel room in all of Venice and now we can finally get some sleep," this same 2-year-old will instead keep us all awake by screaming the A-B-C song well into the morning. If the aforementioned toddler is potty-training, she will always have to pee immediately after boarding a subway.

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Rounding up the kids for a ride in the family plane isn't most people's typical extra-curricular activity. Maybe you take the kids camping instead, or fishing or boating. But if your dad taught you how to fly, like mine did, you grow up with a speed jones and spend your weekends out at the airport. My hope was that my daughter, Lily, would take to flying like an older friend of hers, whose parents are also pilots. Amelia's dad used to take her up in his aerobatic plane, and it was Amelia's greatest thrill to command him, "Go upside down, Daddy!" These moments, when a little girl realizes she has the power to turn the world head over heels, are what shore up her self-confidence before the madness of peer pressure and girlish insecurity set in.

"Yay! An airplane ride!" Lily shouts. "The propeller is so big! I'm
going to fly the airplane with mommy and daddy! Can I get in now, please,
please, please?" That's pretty much how I feel about flying, too, so
it's great to have a companion who's just as enthusiastic.

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We live alone. What I mean is that my mini-family is stuck up here in
Boston, far from in-laws in the Midwest and generations of my family in
the Southeast. Sure, we have friends, but no doting grandparents ready
to offer advice or dandle the baby while Bill and I share some rare and
valuable face time. When Lily started at the center, that all changed.
Suddenly we had not only baby-sitting but a coterie of experienced
advisors.

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