Saturday, September 16, 2006

Welcome aboard

Fear of flying | Welcome aboard | Economist.com

Recently back from Norway, which involved six flights, so this rang a bell...

8 comments:

harriet said...

It rang some bells with me, too. I saw a play recently in which it was said (truthfully or not I don't know) that the reason you are told to go into the 'brace position' (head down on knees) in event of a crash is to make sure your neck gets broken quickly and neatly so you don't have a protracted and painful death! The character who said this was pretty wierd and cynical so perhaps it wasn't true, but gives some food for thought.

Rob said...

...and isn't there an urban myth that the brace position leaves the teeth intact, so you can be identified by dental records? (though I never understood the idea of dental records - if you want to identify some teeth, where do you start?)

Anonymous said...

The article was bad enough to read but your comments have terrified me!

Morning Loves It - on Mum's computer.

harriet said...

sorry about that! they are probably both urban myths, anyway.

Pablo Fanque said...

They do seem to be urban myths as the Snopes site (http://www.snopes.com/travel/airline/brace.asp) has done some research on the various stories and found them to be false.

Anonymous said...

Should have put a smiley ;-)

We flew on Aeroflot a coupler of years ago and when we landed at Petersburg we had to sit on the 'plane for an hour waiting for the only set of steps they had so we could get off - and then we saw the bald tyres!!!!!

Morning Loves It

Rob said...

Bracing saves lives, then - but the stuff about landing on water is clearly absurd.

Pablo Fanque said...

"... the stuff about landing on water is clearly absurd."

Erm ... unless it's a sea-plane of course! ;-)