article_snippet: Not only are pilots smarter and better-trained than ordinary people, those stripes and caps say, but pilots also must be less forgetful than we, less distractible, better rested, not prone to irritability or sadness or smoldering resentments.
article_snippet: The truth, as the voluminous history of airplane accidents reveals, is that pilots are not different from other people.
article_snippet: pilots are not different from other people can be careless, lazy, inattentive and reckless.
article_snippet: pilots are not different from other people can drink too much.
article_snippet: When pilots talk among pilots,  the mistakes, the close calls, the disasters averted by sheer luck are favorite topics.
article_snippet: But if pilots slip up in little ways from time to time, the sweeping drama of aviation, in which pilots are the actors and we the audience, eclipses pilots faults.
article_snippet: The glitches have long since been ironed out, and the airplanes are so wonderfully engineered that the airplanes usually protect even the worst pilot from himself.
article_snippet: Nor are pilots of a higher moral type than the rest of us.
article_snippet: Despite the pieties they occasionally utter, pilots do not consciously shoulder the burden of hundreds of lives or feel more responsible for a full airplane than for an empty one.
article_snippet: Pilots, by and large, are proud.
article_snippet: Pilots identify with a full airplane; a full airplane is an extension and enlargement of the self, and the pilot feels the same motive to deliver the pilot safely to the pilot destination as you feel when driving a car on a crowded freeway.
article_snippet: A pilot values a smooth landing because A pilot demonstrates skill, not because the people in back are still alive.
article_snippet: The greatest guarantee you have that your pilot is devoted to your safety is the fact that your pilot or your pilot is in a full airplane with you.
article_snippet: if from time to time a pilot does something completely incompatible with we confidence.
article_snippet: Pilots are drawn from the diverse pool of human types.
highlights_snippet: Peter Garrison: Pilots don't exist on different moral plane than the rest of us, and the human mind is the blackest of boxes .