American Notes TEXAS

At another time and place the conversation might have been considered typical banter among co-workers. As they prepared to take off from Dallas last August, the crew of a Delta Air Lines 727 joked about subjects ranging from Marilyn Quayle's looks ("She looks like she's from Texas. She's got that horseface") to Jesse Jackson's presidential campaign ("It's scary that someone like that could get as far as he did") to the power of the news media ("They're such vultures . . . they're too powerful") and the dating habits of flight attendants ("In case we crash, so the media would have some kind of a juicy tidbit"). Moments later, the plane crashed, killing 14 people. The crew had apparently failed to extend the aircraft's wing flaps properly.

The runway rap session came to light last week after a Dallas TV station asked a state judge for a copy of the tape from the plane's cockpit voice recorder. The National Transportation Safety Board, which had released a highly censored transcript of the conversation, asserted that disclosure of the entire conversation might hamper investigations of airline disasters. The Air Line Pilots Association warned that pilots might disable their voice recorders to prevent future "invasion of their privacy" but later added that legislation to ban the release of tapes might be proposed instead. What jittery airline passengers were supposed to make of the crew's chitchat, no one could say.