Posts by John J. Nance

Just last week one of the stories my network (ABC News) was grappling with concerned yet another explosive encounter involving airline passengers.  This time it was an angry man who randomly punched an innocent passenger who had just stepped off the underground inter-terminal train at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.  A few weeks before, in the same airport, two…

“So, what’s really going on with air safety?” As ABC’s Aviation Analyst, it’s a constant refrain I hear these days. So let me take it head-on. Airline safety is not coming apart at the seams, nor is flying becoming more dangerous. What IS happening, though, is that the effects of severe operational strain resulting from…

I’ve been in the middle of the fight to improve the safety of medical patients (read: all of us) since the late 1980s, including the opportunity to be one of the founding board members of the National Patient Safety Foundation in 1997. By 1999, the medical profession began to acknowledge that there was a huge…

There was a profound amount of head-scratching going on among outbound airline passengers Wednesday morning, and it was motivated by confusion. The confusion wasn’t about the fact of cascading flight delays and cancellations – the increasing hemorrhage of flight listings turning to red on the reader boards bore out the deteriorating status of the system.…

Most of us who remain in love with flying in any reasonable form have to be feeling a bit helpless these days regarding the march of articles and reports (including a few studies) documenting declining enrollment in basic pilot training courses.  It goes way beyond that, however, because when you peruse the figures, you see…

I’ve had several people ask about the mountain I featured in the story: Long’s Peak, which is essentially a gigantic granite monolith sitting at the southern end of one of my favorite spots on the planet: Rocky Mountain National Park.  The official height of the summit has traditionally been 14,255 feet above sea level (although…

As pilots, I suspect each of us hear voices every now and then, or at least one in particular: the voice of that one special flight instructor whose words or wisdom will never evaporate into the mists of time separating then and now.   Sometimes, as with my Dad flying B-25’s in 1944, the voice is…