Ask the pilot

Virtually everything Jacobsen claims to have witnessed is patently and obviously explainable. That is, unless viewed obsessively through a prism of fear and politically motivated conjecture. To reiterate a point I made last time, Jacobsen's crime was not feeling anxious aboard flight 327. Her crime is trying to make the rest of us anxious more than a month afterward.

She and her partisan allies have succeeded in pushing this matter beyond the realm of air travel and onto the greater stages of politics and civil debate. It does not belong in any of these places, frankly, and thus I'm offended on two levels: first, as a pilot and air travel pasionado; secondly as an American.

As anybody familiar with my work as an aeroevangelist knows, commercial flight means more to me than any seat-of-the-pants thrill of airspeed and altitude. My infatuation with planes led directly to an infatuation with geography and travel. Studying the route maps of the airlines as a sixth-grader, I was inspired, as an adult, to visit places like Cambodia and Mali. In 2004, travelers can fly nonstop from New York City to China, Singapore, South Africa and the Middle East. Never before has air travel had the potential to so easily bridge cultures and open minds.

Whether they're intended to or not, stories like Annie Jacobsen's work to squander that potential, encouraging Americans to stay home, distrust their neighbors, and above all else be afraid -- afraid to fly and afraid of the world.

Heaven help us when terrorists strike again. By all indications we will find ourselves living in a fortress nation more resembling a Soviet-bloc police state than a liberal (with a small "l") democracy. The mail I've received of late certainly paints an ominous picture -- one of a nation in the paralytic throes of absurdity:

A United Airlines 747 jettisons thousands of gallons of kerosene into the Pacific and swoops back to Sydney, Australia, for a precautionary landing because a discarded airsickness bag, with the letters "BOB" scrawled across it, is found discarded in a lavatory. The crew interprets the acronym to mean "bomb on board."

A Canadian-Pakistani man is removed from a plane in Denver because a flight attendant reasoned he "looked like a wanted terrorist."

Military fighter planes scramble to escort a jetliner into Kennedy airport after a group of Indian karaoke singers chat excitedly and point toward the Manhattan skyline.

Buddhist monks visiting the Grand Canyon spark the alarm of tourists who worry they might be "terrorists."

A Sikh university student is detained and interrogated for five hours by authorities in Boston for taking photographs of a campus chapel.

Excavated from the rubble of Sept. 11 could have been, and should have been, a crucial and instructive lesson beyond the expected hand-wringing over security and preparedness. Specifically, a call for American citizens to broaden their horizons and develop a smarter sense of the world's mechanisms and conflicts. Instead, we appear to be growing even more insular, myopic, and unimpressed with the fact that large numbers of people despise us for reasons a tad more complex than "they hate freedom." It's a path we follow at our own peril, and it is exactly opposite to what global tensions mandate. We can't tell the difference between an Indian, a Tibetan, and an Islamic radical. More to the point, we don't seem interested in learning what those differences are.

Annie Jacobsen represents the worst of America: pandering, irrational, dismissive of evidence. Assembling a scare story based entirely on raw speculation, she has nonetheless arranged herself a bunker impervious to full discredit. Her Syrian musicians will always be terrorists, no matter the facts and no matter anyone's official statement. And when the next batch of genuine terrorists strike, whether by airplane, truck bomb, submarine or on horseback, her lowest-common-denominator strategy retains just enough vaguely rendered credibility to shout out: "I told you so."

In the end, Jacobsen and I agree on one thing, even if we concur from opposite poles: As Americans it serves us to be vigilant, cynical and skeptical. Dangerous times indeed.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.

• View blog reactions