I don’t know about you, but I have had a few bad flying experiences in the past. Rockin’ and rollin’ in snow storms; a wing that missed the ground by mere inches on a landing; and one nauseous experience in a sardine-can commuter flight, are but a few. Now we learn that the pilot and co-pilot of a Delta Northwest flight, not only overflew their destination but were out of touch with controllers for 78 minutes. It took a flight attendant to say something like, “Hey! Wadda ya doin’?”

It gives me some consolation that the licenses of these two pilots have been revoked. But not much. Their statements, unseemly alike, were that they were both using their personal laptops and checking out newly implemented schedules. Sure. If they were using their laptops, we can all use our imaginations as to what they were looking at, and I doubt it was new schedules. Come on, Investigators. Get to the hard core of the matter.

Unfortunately we are scheduled to use this very same airline in January. It’s bad enough that I already had some trepidation about this. Flying in January can be risky business, given the weather that time of year in the Northeast. My thoughts had roamed to how well maintenance is done on planes these days. I have read articles on airline screaming me me’s about adding new charges and the need to eliminate a lot of flights due to impact from the economy. Cripe, it has been eons since they offered those little bottles of booze they gave my parents, and I’m sure I couldn’t get through security with some in my carry-on. Just tell me that you check all the nuts and bolts, okay? And no duct tape. I don’t want to think about maintenance workers using duct tape to patch holes.

I demand Sully! Clone him; do what you have to do, but put him at the helm of our flight. It will my luck that I’ll get a Leslie Nielsen-type from the film Airplane. The NTSB better take a hard look at this industry. Maybe they can clean it up before January. Yeah, sure, when pigs fly.

—cher