You mentioned that some smaller jetliners, including the Airbus A320 flown by JetBlue, are not equipped with fuel-dump capability. Well, why not? Wouldn't this simple system have precluded flight 292's need to fly in circles for three hours, burning off excess weight?

Whether or not a transport requires a jettison system depends on whether it can, under test-flown conditions, meet regulatory climb minimums with a failed engine. The A320 has, at its maximum certified weight, demonstrated successful departure climb capability -- and, just as important, successful missed approach (go-around) climb capability -- with a powerplant inoperative. Therefore no jettison plumbing is required. If an overweight landing needs to be made during a dire emergency, so be it; the engine-out climb ability is more critical than the stresses of a heavy landing.

If you're having trouble sleeping, the finer points of this regulation are viewable here.

Larger aircraft -- a 747 for example -- are almost always equipped with a dump system chiefly because of the vastness of their fuel capacities. A 747 can cruise for upwards of 16 hours with maximum fuel, versus about seven for an A320. Aside from those engine-out climb strictures, a widebody jet's maximum takeoff weight is usually hundreds of thousands of pounds above its maximum landing weight. Burning down to suitable poundage would entail a tremendous amount of circling time.

And here's a point that I ought to have stressed last time: It wasn't only weight, strictly speaking, that the crew of JetBlue 292 was concerned with as they circled over California. The main intent of burning off fuel was to allow for a slower touchdown. A lighter plane means lower landing speed -- a number that pilots call V-ref. That in turn means less rollout distance, which for JetBlue meant less time for the errant nose gear to gouge into the pavement.

But if the plane was able to stay in the air for several hours, why waste that time circling? Why didn't they head for their destination and make the same emergency landing at JFK?

Based on what I've been told, the nature of the malfunction meant the landing gear could not remain retracted. Having to fly with the gear extended subjects you to serious speed and altitude penalties, greatly increasing fuel burn and time en route. They'd never have made it to New York. A small regional plane might continue with the gear extended on rare occasions, but for a jetliner it's operationally impractical even on a short hop.

Now, if flight 292's gear had been retractable, then the question is more interesting. At that point it becomes a joint decision between crew and airline operations personnel, weighing the pros and cons of numerous factors: the nature of the malfunction (does it suggest additional problems might develop en route?), weather, runway length, passenger facilities, maintenance facilities, and so forth.

Your Sept. 30 JetBlue analysis missed the boat. It's unfortunately common for people with specialized expertise to assume more knowledge on the part of readers than they actually have. In this case, we wait in vain for a detailed account of just how the plane was set down. How did the pilots determine the landing angle, speed, etc? How, specifically, was this delicate operation different from a normal landing?

As I wrote on the 30th, if the crew deserves commendation, it's for the intangibles of coordination, planning and adherence to procedural protocol. Otherwise, the mechanics of the landing itself were hardly special. There were no changes to angle and no changes to technique, really, other than finessing the nose onto the pavement as gently as possible. To that end, the pilots merely avoided the use of reverse thrust and brakes, which together act to push the forward fuselage down more sharply (the same forward-acting force you feel against your body when applying the brakes in your car).

Lack of braking and reverse thrust would, expectedly, increase the amount of runway used -- getting back to the value of having burned-off fuel in order to touch more slowly. Using data from the aircraft manuals, both the crew and airline staff would have been able to accurately gauge how much room would be needed. The 11,000 feet of LAX's runway 25L were more than enough.

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Now for something different, I'd like to close by reprinting a couple of letters. With respect to the TV circus surrounding the JetBlue emergency, last week's column included the following statement from an Airbus pilot: "You'd better believe the producers at CNN, Fox and MSNBC were, on some level, wishing for a catastrophe." For the record, much as I've hurled my own share of darts at the media over its aviation coverage, I'm not quite cynical enough to claim the networks were, in whole, hoping for a crash. But certainly an element of that spirit exists out there, and so I considered the quote worthy of inclusion. Was this the right thing to do? In response came the following two e-mails (edited slightly for clarity):

"I just finished reading your analysis of the JetBlue incident. Because I'm a television journalist, I want to take exception to what I believe is an unintended slur against my profession. First, most of what you said about our sensationalist approach to the coverage is true. Our sense of industry self-respect has degraded exponentially. But, I think you are wrong to suggest that we were ghoulishly waiting for the worst to happen. In my newsroom, we were riveted to the screen, hoping -- some of us praying -- that things turned out all right. There was a whoop of joy and applause when the plane landed safely. There was no sense of disappointment that we were denied our daily quotient of mayhem. Granted, we lacked your technical expertise and perhaps created a false sense of drama, but I don't think it came from a desire to view the carnage. Simply put, it's wrong to paint my industry's interest in the outcome of JetBlue 292 as ghoulish, just as it would be wrong for us to stereotype pilots as drunks based on the few who've been caught attempting to fly under the influence."

-- C.E. Gray, Jr.

"Your comment about shameful TV-meisters and their love of carnage is absolutely true. I've seen it with my own eyes. I was a TV director for a local newscast at the NBC affiliate in Winston-Salem, N.C., in 1988 when Pan Am 103 went down in Lockerbie. As I was preparing for the newscast in the newsroom, the story came over the wires about the crash and its appalling numbers of dead. I had never seen our producer so excited, shrieking in delight about what a "great story" this was, laughing and excitedly telling us how this was the best story she'd seen in a long time. It was sick. That was the night that I decided to get out of TV news for good. As you know, things have gotten even worse since those days -- local and network newscasters have gone nuts, spending days at a time on death watches, fabricating heroes and villains, and generally making a shambles of the grand traditions of Edward R. Murrow.

-- Charlie White, Executive Producer, Digital Media Online Inc.

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