My Vote: Sex, Nap, Sex

I’m not usually very interested in news reports, but I’ve spotted a few over the past few days that have caught my eye.

I’ve been skimming Google News more often lately, which is probably why. I can’t stand to listen to broadcast news, since there’s just so much going on that I could care less about.

Such as: ‘Was the death of the local girl (insert name here for your locality) the fault of the parents?’ Let’s endlessly debate this from every conceivable angle until I might just confess myself to make it all stop.

So yeah, Google News, with the good and skimming along until you find something that attracts your interest (there are automated news alerts you can set up, for any key words you like – Google will email you links to the stories containing your keywords).

This story is about a plane that stopped responding to radio transmissions for 88 minutes, and flew 110 miles past the airport where they were to due to land.


Supposedly, the pilots were distracted by a discussion about airline policy. Sounds unlikely.

What could they have been doing for 88 minutes?

Let’s see:

Having sex with one another
(Men? Sex for 88 mins? Maybe 8 mins)

Having sex with ‘sexy stews’
(See above)

Dealing with a hijacker
(Possible)

Testing a remote-override control to deal with future hijackings
(Possible)

Dealing with a UFO
(An unidentified flying object, not an alien spacecraft)
(Possible)

Dealing with an alien spacecraft
(Possible)

Flew through a distortion field of some sort which rendered everone unconscious
(Unlikely - passengers were awake the whole time)

The story mentions that an airplane's black box only records for 30 minutes, after which it is written over - so this could mean that they were perhaps struggling with an issue for 58 minutes, and then the pilots felt the need to wait an additional 30 minutes for the recording to begin its overwrite.

Only 30 minutes on a black box, seriously? In a day & age where I can walk into my local electronics store and purchase terabytes of storage capacity, there's no excuse for this. New rule - every microsecond of every flight is going to be saved, stored forever, reviewed, and scored down to the tiniest detail. 30 minutes, good grief.