Fear of Flying

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 02.09.04 | 9:20 PM ET

Ask The Pilot columnist Patrick Smith’s latest dispatch offers a look at the recent rash of flight cancellations due to potential terrorist plots. “Cynics are prone to see the warnings as either tactical ass-covering or, for those of you with more mobilized appetites for conspiracy, blatant fear mongering with designs toward keeping the populace ripe for manipulation,” he writes in Salon. “It’d be patently foolish of me to accuse authorities—be they our own Homeland Security team or European equivalents—of going the full blatant Orwell route, but general ineptitude, maybe, is a more tempting call.”