Make Up Our Minds

A flight was delayed for 13 hours when the crew refused to fly the plane. There are regulations that stipulate how many consecutive hours a flight crew can work and what the recuperative time between flights must be. The crew had spent the night in a hotel.

It seems that the hotel was on party mode and the flight crew did not get the requisite rest. When they reported for duty, they claimed they were unsafe to pilot and crew a long flight – from New Delhi to London. If it were a direct flight, it would take a little more than ten hours to get from India to England.

There are reasons to take safety measures before cramming a bunch of people into a tin can and launching them a few miles above ground level to wing across the globe for most of a day. There were 210 inconvenienced people who were put up in hotels, some of them having to share rooms with total strangers. They are outraged.

They are alive.

If the tired crew had taken off and winged westward and then crashed the dang plane, 210 grieving families would be suing the pants off British Airways. They would be demanding that BA take some action and also pay them lots of money. Because the pilots and crew did what they were supposed to do, 210 angry people are probably going to sue BA and demand they take some action and pay them some money.

While not trying to be trite, I'm looking at this past week. There are over 30 people dead in Virginia. Some people who have thinking quirks are asking why the school didn't do more to "help" the murderer. He was a troubled young man and he was not treated with kindness, caring, and dignity. The fact that he was nuts but laws made it impossible to physically incarcerate him are of no importance. It is society's fault. We let this troubled young man down. Oh yeah, and all his victims. He was not responsible for his choices.

School officials worked the system as much as they could. The guy was whacko and probably a schizophrenic. He should not have been free to walk around in polite society unless and until he was able to adjust his behaviors into something resembling normalcy.

It is my opinion that the glorified dude who will not be mentioned here by name made preplanned and psychotic choices and they he, and he alone, is responsible for them. He was offered help but it wasn't enough. The taunting from high school, it seems, festered for eight years and then …

So on the one hand, we have a flight crew that wouldn't fly against regulations and BA apologizing all over itself because they didn't crash and kill 210 people, and on the other hand, more should have been done to prevent a tragedy. Odd.