So, Friday, I am driving on the freeway to get the wife from work, cruising down the 101, i see low flying planes over downtown, strangely low, but not unusual. It's the pattern they have the incoming jets on due to the wind. The thought crosses my mind as to what would happen if one of these planes crashes on the way in, into a densly populated area........what happens yesterday, a plane in Burbank skids of the runway and stops inches from killing a few motorists and a gas station....does this happen to you?

Did you really have to bring up plane crashes,when you know I,m scared to fly?I found out we are taking a charter plane too.I just know I,ll get too sedated to remember a fucking thing.

look at it this way. it's all a numbers game, so the fact these incidents have happened as of late, increases your chance of having a safe flight.

or perhaps it's all due to increasing UFO activity around the globe.

well, considering there have been several crashes in the metro LA area recently, Alaska Air, two civilian planes colliding and now this Southwest Jet, the chances that my flight in May will have any problems is next to nothing. I embrace crashes I am not on.

That's like the gambler's fallacy. The odds of one plane crashing are independent of how many planes have crashed recently. Just like the odds of winning a blackjack hand are independent of whether you won or lost your last hand. But people think that if you've won several times in a row, you can't win again because the odds have to even out. No, they don't. Just like it's probabilistically possible to flip a coin ten times in a row and have it land tails up all ten times. The odds of that happening are just very very low. Just like the odds of a plane crashing are very low, so you don't really have to worry about anything anyway.

I figure if I've already been hijacked and crashed, that no more plane diasasters should be heading my way, so I'm safe. Anyway. If my plane to London crashed, I'd be really annoyed.

anyway, for what its worth, this incident is most likely pilot error. I am very familiar with this airport. i used to live a mile away from it and when I was unemployed i would ride my back to the exact spot it crashed through on on the exact opposite side of that same runway. Depending on wind, I would wait for in in coming jet ans see if i could muster the earth shattering sound as it flew 20-50 above me. I almost always cringed or shuttered when it boomed overhead, despite my attmepts to tough it out, god damn. I can only imagine what it would be like on take off when power is at 90% as opposed to 20-30% on landing. the runways are surprsingly close to main roads. Most likely, in this case, the pilot overshot the runway and landed to far towards the middle of the strip. Imagine if it had happened opposite, if he had been short and touched down 1000 feet before the runway, little ole me, standing there fascinated by it's mechanical might would be crushed. the runways are that close and i have never seen runways, for commercial jet liners that close to civilian traffic. Eitherway, that pilot is in a whole lotta hurt right now. He can expect some serious law suits coming his way. I contemplated driving up there yesterday and snapping some photos, just for fun...i wussed out. I did get some neat photos of the fires that occured several months. Journalistic photos like that can be fun.

It looks like we're on opposite sides of the photography thing. I spent a couple years freelancing as a photojournalist (I went through the Iowa Photojournalism Workshop, unloved stepcousin to the writer's workshop) culminating in sanpping pics in Afghanistan in the late 80s (which was really just an excuse to go there and see the war for myself before the Soviets pulled out). I liked the immediacy of the form, the challenge involved in it. Now I've been wanting to get back into B&W of the human form, especially nudes, but until I can set myself up again with a darkroom, I'm not even getting started. I saw you had a bit on your website about the film and paper you're using; I'd be curious to see how the actual prints come out. Have you seen Ewing's Love and Desire:Photoworks that came out last year? It's got a wide span of stuff in it, some interesting, some not.