I'm a terrible flier. My flight anxiety has gotten so bad that I now take this weird herbal drug that my mother found for me at GNC before take off. I fast forward past the plane-crash flashbacks in Lost. I'll never watch Cast Away again. And now this:

"Afterward, Airbus told the NTSB that it included a warning that abrupt rudder movement in some circumstances "can lead to rapid loss of controlled flight," and, in others, could break off the tail."

Ummm, isn't that a problem? Isn't that a big, gigantic, HEY COME SUE US problem? I mean, if moving the rudder abruptly can cause the tail to break off, why allow the rudder controls to move the rudder abruptly? Surely there's a program that could be written to prevent an excessive amount of input from being relayed to the mechanism.

I get the sense that airlines are like restaurants: If you could see what goes on in a restaurant's kitchen ever day, you'd never eat out again. If we really knew how the airlines worked, we'd all take Amtrak.