[ SOCIETY ] All you never wanted to know about flying

I hope that never happens, and not just because of the glimpse that PPRuNe affords of pilots letting their hair down. Arguably even more absorbing are the sections of the forum frequented by cabin crew, who use it to gossip in merciless terms about the three banes of their existence - passengers, pilots and airline companies: "Aah, Ryanair, the airline that does for cabin crew what myxomatosis did for rabbits ... . "

It's not all negative. Of particular fascination is the discussion about best and worst celebrity passengers, a debate from which Prince William, Noel Edmonds, Sebastian Coe and Natalie Imbruglia emerge with their reputations significantly enhanced.

Cabin crewmembers' most embarrassing inflight incidents are related at length; mainly, they involve passengers getting hit with things or sprayed with liquids, or safety demonstrations undertaken with flies unzipped. "I have had a few things happen to me," one contributor writes, "that made me almost wish for a decompression and me to get sucked out of the hole in the fuselage." If you're not careful, you can lose track of time, and read this stuff for hours - although not without concluding that a life in the skies is a rather less glamorous one than you might have imagined. If you do eventually tire of the company of airline pilots and cabin crew, you can head to the section for "freight dogs," working in the passenger-free world of cargo aviation, and learn about the challenges involved in shipping, for example, "a white rhino from a zoo in Germany to South Africa."

The only downside is what all my eavesdropping does to the unspoken contract of flight. Once the people in the cockpit stand exposed not as half-robot, half-god, but as gossipy, sometimes curmudgeonly humans, who have all experienced at least one or two close shaves at high altitudes, how can one continue to believe in their inexplicable ability to keep the plane airborne? Sometimes, a little mystery is preferable, but PPRuNe has put an end to that. Now I'm going to have to learn aeronautics.