This weekend, I flew down to San Diego in the company of Concrete Skyline himself. The last time we flew together was on a trip to New York City, way back in 1997. It was a red-eye flight on the now-bankrupt Tower Air, the discount air travel provider to New York during the 80's and 90's. More on Tower tomorrow.
The flight was slowly filling up when Gene and I took our seats. We were on the left side, next to a middle-aged guy who looked like a business traveler. As we sat through one of Tower's inevitable runway delays, Gene began discussing an article he'd read recently. Appropriately enough, it was about plane crashes.
According to the article, people who survived plane crashes were not the ones who remained calm, and tried to exit the plane in an orderly fashion. The passengers who survived were those that shoved their way to the front of the plane, knocking over the orderly people and going over them, if necessary. If our plane were to crash, Gene informed me, he would be taking out whoever he had to in order to get out.
That was when the business traveler abruptly decided to find a new seat.
We sat together again this year, on a Southwest flight. Everything was calm until five minutes before takeoff, when Gene began discussing a series of plane crash videos he'd discovered online.
In other aeronautic happenings, check out the scene at JFK in this video, from an up and coming New York Times video journalist. If hard-hitting airport footage doesn't give you a boner, never fear. There's an accompanying ad featuring Dr. Drew talking about impotence. I think he gets a keychain if enough people click the link to this story. There's also a good one on medical research in prisons.
