Last week, Salon's splashy "Air Osama" feature raised some eyebrows. (In fact some of us who missed the byline assumed it was you who penned the article.) How do you respond to the suggestion of advanced desktop flight simulators making a terrorist's job easier?

Joshua Tompkins' overblown tract on the idea of simulator games abetting the cause of terrorism was factually accurate and entertaining. I read the article with a grin, ultimately concluding, just as any terrorist would, that Tompkins has too much time on his hands and an easily excitable imagination.

The credibility of the proposition is not the issue. Equipped with a Gateway and a credit card somebody can learn the basics -- and more -- of a jetliner's operations. Big deal. The Sept. 11 cabal, not to mention past hijackers and bombers, proved there are other ways of getting it done. When, where and how an individual with nefarious designs figures out how to steer a jet toward a skyscraper is not particularly relevant. Why he chooses to destroy a plane, and to what lengths he's willing to go, are what's crucial -- the missing link, in this case, from desktop simulation to actual violence.

What's next, background checks when buying computer games? I almost feel, in agreement with a recent satire at The Onion, as if people sit around nowadays drumming up new ways to frighten the crap out of us.

Tompkins writes of Hani Hanjour, alleged pilot of the 757 that struck the Pentagon:

"Hanjour had been deemed inept even in a small aircraft by flight school instructors in Arizona and Maryland and just weeks before the attacks. When the time came, however, he handled the doomed 757 like a fighter jet, swooping down and clipping light poles before T-boning the Pentagon at high speed."

I had to chuckle because Hanjour's show-quality aerobatics have been a topic of some conversation among the conspiracy set. In his essay "The Enemy Within," Gore Vidal quotes retired U.S. Army veteran and West Point professor Stan Goff, whose similar-sounding skepticism includes this:

"Now the real kicker: a pilot they want us to believe was trained at a Florida puddlejumper school for Piper Cubs and Cessnas ... brings the plane in so low and flat that it clips the electrical wires across the street from the Pentagon, and flies it with pinpoint accuracy into the side of the building at 460 knots."

"When the theory about learning to fly this well at the puddlejumper school began to lose ground, it was added that [Hanjour] received further training on a flight simulator. This is like saying you prepared your teenager for her first drive on the freeway at rush hour by buying her a video driving game."

No, it isn't. What it's saying is he needed some luck, and got it. As I wrote in a column several weeks ago, hitting a stationary target from above at high speed -- even a large one with five beckoning sides -- is very difficult. To make it easier, the hijacker did not come directly in at a steep angle, but "landed" into the building as obliquely as possible. If he had flown the same profile 10 times, half of them he'd probably have ended up a tumble of wreckage short of the target, or else would have overflown it entirely. You may or may not care to learn that I'm not exactly buying the party analysis of the 2001 attacks (where are those flight recorders, by the way, and what was on them?). But Vidal's and Tompkins' provocations are little more than caricature.

Earlier in "Air Osama," pilot Nigel Warnick states:

"Are we still at risk of getting a terrorist into the flight deck? You bet. We are still allowed visits by cabin crew. [Flight attendants] get lazy and come in with two cups of coffee and leave the door open behind them. If you were sitting on the front row, then you could leap up, slamming the door behind you, while pushing a ballpoint pen into the eyes of the captain and first officer."

Oh.

If Warnick, who uses a pseudonym, wants to feel better, maybe he can get himself deputized, start packing heat, and spare us the scaremongering. (He can't actually, because he's flying for a British airline). The more people speak of turning the flight deck into an impenetrable fortress of steel, rivets, and firearms, the less I miss sitting in one. Warnick should applaud the efforts of Pakistan International Airlines, one of the more security-obsessed of the world's carriers. PIA is outfitting flight decks with cameras and bulletproof doors with security codes.

To digress a minute, if Warnick needed to vent, he should've taken Tompkins up for this little vocational sketch:

"The FMC [flight management computer] is the brain of the flight deck ... Pilots program most of the FMC before pushing back from the gate and usually activate the autopilot shortly after takeoff; the FMC then flies the aircraft to the destination city while the pilots baby-sit the instruments and chat about mortgage rates."

Right. Just the way your oven and stove take care of Thanksgiving dinner while you sit on the couch watching football games.

It wasn't until hitting on the words of retired TWA captain Barry Schiff that I was able to breathe easy. Schiff says, "If you wanted to point an airplane at something on the ground and crash into it, you don't have to know a hell of a lot... After all, using an airplane as a cruise missile ultimately requires more fanaticism than finesse," Tompkins acknowledges.

Precisely.

The article shows great mettle as a piece about technology, if not on games, and inspires serious thought and debate about the increased computerization of commercial flight. In attempting the ligature to terrorism it becomes 3,500 words of tumescent sensationalism.

Can a desktop simulator arm a terrorist with the know-how to fly an Airbus A320 into the Statue of Liberty? Maybe. A trip down the software aisle, or a discerning wade through the inventory at Google, can also provide you with the ability to build bombs, mix poisons, spread diseases, perform veterinary surgery or speak Urdu. How loath we are at times to harvest the strange fruits of postmodern technological evolution. On one hand we extol the world-saving glory of our gadgets and gizmos, while at the same time we're chasing down the genie and looking for witches like Spanish Inquisitors.

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