The CBC story, Air Canada flight attendant helped land plane after co-pilot breakdown, isn’t as bad as most of the American coverage which says “stewardess”, but it is all pretty juvenile.

Yes, she had allowed her instrument rating to lapse, but she was still a licensed commercial pilot, although it is doubtful that she had been checked out on a 767. Suggesting that it was miraculous that she was able to act as a co-pilot during one landing, is fairly stupid. If you have a commercial license, you have flown multi-engine aircraft, and modern airliners are all quite similar by design, so that airlines don’t have to re-train their pilots from the ground up when they buy a new aircraft type.

The big hurdle is knowing what things are called, and what the basic instruments are telling you, because there is a check list for landing that tells you when to do things and in what order.  This is not exactly fodder for an Irwin Allen disaster flick.

So apparently the future President read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book, Team of Rivals, and decided that he would model his cabinet after Abraham Lincoln’s first cabinet.

Abraham Lincoln was a great President and politician, but that was in spite of what happened with his cabinet. Matthew Pinsker fills in a few of the gaps, the little things that Ms. Goodwin left out of her book. The book isn’t quite in Harry Turtledove territory, more along the lines of George Washington and the cherry tree.

I personally preferred the biography, Lincoln by David Herbert Donald which is a more truthful telling of Lincoln’s story and the story of his cabinet.

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This may come as a shock to some, but the Pentagon photoshops pictures. The BBC reports on a recent example: Row over altered US Army photo

The Pentagon has become embroiled in a row after the US Army released a photo of a general to the media which was found to have been digitally altered.

Ann Dunwoody was shown in front of the US flag but it later emerged that this background had been added, and that her uniform details had been changed.

The Associated Press (AP) news agency subsequently suspended the use of US Department of Defence photos.

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