Fears while flying: Ask the Pilot
 

Recommending 'Ask the Pilot' a weekly column on salon.com by a pilot with pseudonym of Patrick Smith. It's an insider view from the pilot's seat. Witty and informational and refreshingly iconoclastic views of travel. He appears not be affiliated with any one airline--free-wheeling all over the world.

His lively and opinionated column offers info on flying, travel locations, the politics of security, and occasional rants on events, airlines, new styles of livery even, passengers, weird airports.

He will also answer queries with information that makes you feel like a travel pro: Once when flying in India, with FA doing the safety drill, I idly realized that in all my years of flying I had never seen the oxygen masks descend. Had I been lucky? Or had I missed countless flights when there was decompression and oxygen masks dropped.
I went to Ask the Pilot: he answered it was beyond rare...and most helpful, he added that if it happened it was usually brief until cabin pressure is corrected. Now I know.
Check salon.com, and go to 'tech and business'.

It is a good column, and Patrick Smith (the author) also has a book out that's a longer version of the column. I highly recommend picking up the book - it was a good read.

For a little more info on Patrick, he's a FO on the 767 for Delta out of NYC - so he gets to go to quite a few distinct places. He's also got a nice Flickr site with several great photos.

I just learned a few weeks ago that he's a fellow alum of my high school - thought that was pretty cool.

'patrick smith'
 

Good to hear! This is a pseudonym, as I recall.

He was just in Dakar, and recently in Chile and Timbuktu (but perhaps his personal trips, not for Delta).

One great column he did recently derided news reports of a plane 'falling from the sky' and he told in detail why an aircraft cannot and does not 'plummet' from the sky. This is all useful to know when one experiencing turbulence--just as I found his facts on oxygen masks very helpful. Given the fact that oxygen mask demos commence each flight, once might imagine that oxygen mask drops are a common occurrence. According to Smith they are rare.

Not sure, but here's my high school's recent article on him: http://www.stjohnsprep.org/cf_news/view.cfm?newsid=252

You can also find it linked to each week in the Newsstand forum right here on FlyerTalk!! ;)