I ran across an interesting editorial recently at Landings.com. I have no idea of the author's qualifications nor of the accuracy of his source material, but it was the editorial, rather than the subject matter which interested me.

The subject of the editorial was the recent Swissair 111 crash. You may recall that the crew reported smoke in the cabin, and that 15 minutes later the plane crashed. The author suggested that the cause of the crash was physically separate from the cause of the smoke. He suggested that the problem was peripheral and that the crash resulted when the pilots were overloaded with checklist tasks and unduly distracted from the job of flying the airplane

He discussed the perils of the "smoke in the cabin" checklist, wherein the pilots don a full- face oxygen hood and then execute a challenge- and- response type checklist wherein all aircraft electrical systems are disabled one by one. By the end of this checklist, the huge and powerful airliner, flying hundreds of people through a dark and cloudy night, is reduced to the equipment level of a Cessna 150.

Towards the end of this procedure, the pilots find themselves looking out through a plastic mask, which may well be fogging over due to nervous perspiration, at a instrument panel covered with fish eyes. All the usual instruments lay dead, sitting at odd angles, while the gauges at the periphery of the panel tell the only true story. Instrument lighting through the emergency system is likely to be inadequate. All the automatic systems are disabled, and the mechanical and flight controls must be attended to manually, while external demands of navigation and communication mount steadily. Don't forget that the pilots still do not know if the plane is on fire or not.

The author made a compelling argument that the flight engineer, missing from airliners for more than 20 years should be reinstated. This pilot, the third man of the crew sat at a station behind the pilots, and tended all the airplane's mechanical systems. Most of his jobs were taken over by automatic systems, and the rest of the engineer's responsibilities were assumed by the pilots as electronic wizardry made their jobs easier too. The author asserted that the presence of the flight engineer would have allowed one pilot to concentrate on flying the airplane.

I agree, except that back in the days of three man crews, accidents still happened when the entire crew was so distracted by a minor mechanical problem that they failed to attend to the flight of the airplane. The biggest such lapse that comes to mind is the Eastern crash that occurred decades ago when a crew of three men, fretting over a failed "gear down" indicator, allowed their plane to belly unattended into the Everglades.

A three man crew might have saved Swissair, or maybe not. It depends upon exactly what happened up there on that dark night. In retrospect, it always appears sensible to have done the one thing which would have saved the day, regardless of its overall cost or practicality. The so called "investigative" TV shows such as 60 Minutes have made their livings by using hindsight to embarrass people and institutions this way.

Just as a reminder, there is no such thing as perfect. No perfect beauty, nor perfect love, nor perfect idiot. There is no perfect safety, either. There are only so many things that we as individuals or a country can afford to spend time worrying about before worrying consumes all our productive lives. We must strive to do the best we can, to be wise and prudent, but we shouldn't have to retreat to a life of boiled fish and bottled water.

There is danger all around us, but is it overstated and sensationalized? For most of us, the bottom line is that we will live long enough to survive incontinence before succumbing to cancer or heart disease.

To contact Bob Tilden, send an e-mail.