deltabound

Heh. Well, I'd say that was an original ad homenin attack, except it wasn't. I appreciate a good string of cliches as much as the next guy, I guess. Well done!

If I failed to summarize a 300 page book in a pithy paragraph, I apologize.

However, you might ask yourself why school children and businesses practice fire drills. Or why your flight attendants are trained to YELL, not politely request, people to disembark during an emergency. Why safety briefings require a demonstration of seatbelt or emergency exit use and location use (hint: people have burned alive in airplane crashes because they panicked and couldn't figure out how to operate them). Or why you yourself are trained over, and over, and over on the same emergency procedures in a highly realistic simulator when a simple quick mental review should be sufficient (muscle memory . . but of course, an intellectual such as yourself wouldn't need that).

The book itself starts with the intriguing premise as to why hundreds of people died in the towers when they had more than ample time to exit the building. In your world, of course, they were just stupid, because after all unusual, stressful situations don't impact rationality or response.

I suggest to you that a significant portion of your airplane passengers would be terrified while evacuating an airplane that smelled of smoke and burning rubber. You seem convinced they would behave rationaly in this situation. Fortunately for the rest of us, crowd response and group behavior in emergencies is a carefully studied phenomenon (in airplanes especially) and experts have devised procedures to try and circumvent 100,000 years of evolved response to make us all safer in a crisis.

I just found the science interesting and eye opening and wanted to spark a little interest for those who wonder WHY we're trained to do what we do. I guess I was aiming a bit high there, eh sport?