Fear is the Mind Killer

"So I'm on a plane this afternoon, flying back from an extended holiday break with my wife's family in Florida, and I sit through -- for probably the ten-thousandth time -- the extended lecture on how to inflate the emergency life preserver in the event of a water landing. Like most of you, I'm sure, I've always thought that this speech -- not to mention the accompanying demonstration -- was a bizarre waste of time. How many successful commercial aircraft emergency water landings have occurred over the past twenty years? One? Two? Certainly no more than a handful, if memory serves. So the odds of you having to use that life vest are what -- a billion to one? Plane crashes are incredibly rare, but plane crashes where the plane goes down and then everybody suits up in their yellow vests and zooms down the inflatable slides, those are beyond rare."