I woke up long before dawn the day after Alaska 261 crashed into the Pacific.
  It doesn’t bother me that my wife and I had been passengers on an identical Alaska MD-83 precisely 24 hours before the crash. What bothered me was that the names of passengers and crew had not yet been released, and I know too many pilots at Alaska to rest easy not knowing.
  There is at least this one true thing in life: News accounts of anything having to do with airplanes will be chock full of errors. Even so, pilots read every word and listen to every sound bite, just as everyone else does.
  Even with incomplete information and information they know is probably incorrect, pilots try to imagine what it was like in the cockpit when whatever happened happened. We try not to second-guess the dead crew, but it is impossible not to, so we do the next best thing and keep our thoughts to ourselves.
  It is one thing to sit in a comfortable chair in a house firmly anchored to the ground and, with all the time in the world and all the information arrayed in order around us, decide what we might have done differently. We have the additional advantage of knowing that what the crew decided to do did not work.
  It is not fair to the dead crew, but it is an important exercise, for the same reason that it is important to learn from pilots who, when things go wrong, by luck or skill survive.
  Aviation is as safe as it is because of knowledge accumulated over a century.
  In the beginning, every man or woman who took to the air was a test pilot. There was little knowledge, less experience, and a universe of mystery and ignorance.
  There is something irrational in us that makes us fear death in airplanes more than by other means. Far more of us will die in cars than in airplanes, yet a hundred people killed in a day or two of driving does not grab our attention the way the same number killed in an airplane does.
  Perhaps that is because driving is so dangerous and death in cars so commonplace that we are simply accustomed to it. Or perhaps it is because, while cars kill many singly and in small groups, large airplanes kill their relative few all at once.
  Or perhaps it is simply uneasiness in being high in the air.
  Much of the store of knowledge and understanding of flight has come from pushing back the edge of darkness and surviving to teach others. But much understanding comes from analyzing crashes.
  Few airplane accidents are so sudden that the crew has nothing to do, explosions such as the one that destroyed TWA 800 over the Atlantic a few years ago. When there is anything left to fly, pilots try to fly it all the way to the end. What else is there to do?
  Pilots are fascinated with detailed crash post-mortems. Part of the intense interest is the question, “Why them and not me?” But more than that, and more than a morbid fascination with death is a need to know all the factors that led to the crash so that, if a similar situation ever happens to them, they might be able do handle it differently and survive.
  Whatever went wrong with Alaska 261, the pilots did not give up. They used every bit of training, experience, knowledge, and skill to try to save their airplane, and, while doing all that, had presence of mind to ask for a route over the water so that, if they ultimately failed to overcome their airplane’s betrayal, they’d not risk crashing into people on the ground.
  Some good will come out of this crash, some bit of good that will seem all too small an exchange for the 88 people who died.
  It may be a better understanding of how to build airplanes, or it may be another brick in the library of knowledge of how to cope with mechanical failures, but there will be something.