TWA 800

"Ah sho am glahd ah droave heyah on tha freewayah," he says in a Southern accent as thick as the gravy on any decent Southerners biscuits. We're walking a loose circle around the amazingly reconstructed TWA-800 fuselage situated in the NTSB's training center in Ashburn, VA. I've never appreciated how perilously thin the metal skin is that separates airline passengers from atmospheric pressure at 35,000 feet. I almost think twice when boarding my flight home at the end of the week. Well, not really. I'm in a class of mostly medical professionals - forensic anthropologists, medical examiners, coroners, NTSB mass disaster response agents, even an FBI agent. We're reviewing ad noseum how to (VERY CAREFULLY)sort through the rubble and debris of various disaster scenes to locate, retrieve, and identify human remains, in both associated and disassociated states. And I don't mean 'states' as in America's United. Two and a half days of slide after slide of airplane crash sites, WTC scenes, mass grave sites, nature's after-math destruction, multi-car crashes, even a presentation of University of Mercyhurst's summer class that explodes a car filled with pig carcasses to study the dispersion of debris, both biological and non. These amazing people live in a realm of death's certainty, and the accompanying pain of the residual living that are trying to cope with extreme loss. These people see in blood-and-guts detail just how calamitous our various means of transportation can be. And yet they probably burn more miles of asphalt and rack up more frequent-flier points in a month than I have this past peripatetic year. So for those of you who are particularly fearful of flying .... if these professionals have confidence in the airways, so should you. At the very least, recline your seat comfortably, adjust your little neck pillow and sleep well knowing that if the plane does go down in a fabulously explosive crash, some of the most dedicated and compassionate professionals will be piecing you back together again.