While many of us would like to believe that we live in “the real world,” a world of concrete and stone and wood and metal, that’s only true in the strictly physical sense. Psychologically, we live in a different world, one that’s created for us inside our head, a world that’s infused with meaning at every level. Everything we see, touch, hear or smell is festooned, by invisible and irresistible psychological processes, with significance. We can’t help it. When we see a picture of a loved one, we don’t just see the contours of their nose, eyes and cheeks; we perceive their entire essence, in a way that not only imparts information to the visual cortex but causes a surge of hormones in the bloodstream. When we take a taste of a Coca-Cola, we don’t just taste the sugar and the fizz; we literally taste a whole lifetime’s worth of associations with the famous red-and-white logo.

Much of the meaning that infuses our world is obtained passively, as a result of everyday experience. But, uniquely among animals, we also have the ability to consciously craft meaning. This is the art of the storyteller. Instinctively, pre-consciously, we create narratives to make sense out of the randomness that surrounds us. It’s just how our brains are built. Even that basic unit of human thought, the declarative sentence, is a kind of mini-story: a subject did a verb to an object. In telling stories, we impart order and meaning on the world where before there was none. Have you ever had the experience of not knowing how you felt, until you started telling someone?

Stories give meaning and purpose not only to our individual lives but to the entire culture. Without a poetic vision of our times, life is worrisome and unsatisfying. In his movie Midnight in Paris, Woody Allen tells the story of a hopeless romantic who feels disconnected in the present tense and longs to go back to the storied past of Paris in the 20s, a time and place abuzz with famous writers and artists. By stroke of movie magic, he does return in time, only to fall in love with a woman who is equally disenchanted with her own time, and longs to go back to the even more distant Golden Age of the Belle Epoque.

I think we can all relate to the characters’ sense of dissatisfaction with the present tense. The petty quarrels and opaque maneuverings that swirl around us all seem so meaningless. But that’s precisely because it takes time for artists to come to grips with a changing time. We haven’t yet assigned significance to our experience. All we feel is chaos.

Of course, it was only after Hemingway, Picasso, and Stein created their art that Paris in the ‘20s acquired its special halo. Before that, like every other present tense, it was a seething cauldron of randomness and worry. More so than most, in fact. The world of the 1920s had been upended by the slaughter of the First World War and by new technologies such as the automobile, the airplane, and the radio. The old poetic visions simply didn’t apply any more.

The world needed a new kind of art, and the artists rose to the occasion. To make sense of a world that had been turned upside down, the Modernists stood painting and literature on their heads. Later, their heirs the Beatniks and Abstract Expressionists came along to make sense of the tumultuous ‘50s. And later still the civil rights movement and Vietnam and women’s lib called forth a renaissance of rock music and a flowering of independent cinema.

Today we live in a slow time for great art. Where is a painter whose cultural urgency rivals Picasso’s? Where is the writer who can cast a shadow as long as Hemingway’s? It’s not like we don’t need them. After decades of quiescence, the gears of history have begun once more to gnash. We feel that we are on the edge of a great confusion. Economic catastrophe looms. Technology is sweeping us up in its whirlwind. The world has become once more a strange place. As the poet Auden once observed from the edge of an earlier abyss, “Defenceless under the night/Our world in stupor lies.”

Yet they will come. In a few years, or maybe more, we will begin to hear voices. We will hear stories like we’ve never heard before, songs that will stir a part of us we didn’t know we had. And we will recognize ourselves again. We will say, “So that’s what it has meant, all along.”

Of course, by then, time will have rolled on. The familiar will already have begun to seem strange. The present tense will be confusing. And before long the lost and discontented  of the age will think back to our time and imagine that back then it all made sense.

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 Back in 1976, when Mr. Bloomberg was training to become a pilot, he nearly encountered disaster as he flew alone off the coast of Connecticut.

“I wasn’t sure what was going on in the engine compartment behind me, but I certainly knew I was falling and couldn’t breathe. I was going down,” he wrote in his autobiography. He landed on an island and ultimately put out the helicopter fire himself.

“Was I scared?” he wrote. “Well, there’d been no time for any emotion when I was in the air, and on the ground I was safe. So the answer is no — unless of course you count the internal shaking I couldn’t stop for the rest of the day.”

Funnily enough, a very similar story came up at a talk I gave just two days ago at my flying club in Poughkeepsie. I gave a brief presentation about the different kinds of fear that I’ve encountered as a pilot, and the mechanisms that underlie each. I said that I imagined that every single pilot has felt intense fear at one time or another, and that that was a good thing. Fear focuses our attention on what’s important and helps us to survive.

After the talk some of the guys shared their experiences. I found it particularly interesting that two of them discussed how they felt after unexpectedly losing engine power in the club’s Cessna 152 and having to make an emergency landing. Those stories brought a lump to my throat because apparently they happened quite recently. Last summer I took the plane on a long flight to Indiana and back, a trip of more than 1000 miles all told. I’d always assumed that the chance of losing engine power in a well-maintained, fully certified airplane was essentially zero. There were a few stretches along the way in which an engine-out would have put me in a dire predicament indeed.

At any rate, one of the pilots raised his hands and said that he while he thought there was a lot of sense in the points I’d made about fear, there was one major area where he thought I’d got it wrong: that we all naturally are bound to feel fear at some time or another. He said that he’d had one hair-raising flight that had the potential to go seriously wrong, and he hadn’t felt any fear at all. He just did what he had to do, and then didn’t feel any emotion at all until he was back on the ground.

“And how did you feel then?” I asked.

“Like I was going to keel over,” he said.

Basically, he had had the same kind of emotional response that Mayor Bloomberg had when he started to lose power over the Connecticut coast. Essentially, his fear response kicked in so strongly that it wiped out his sensation of emotion altogether. It was only when he was safely back on the ground, well away from the danger that had threatened him, that he was overwhelmed by a flood of feelings.

In researching my book Extreme Fear, I encountered many such stories. One of the case-studies I relate, for instance, is the experience of Dave Boon, who survived an avalanche that swept his car off the side of the mountain. He and his wife were severely bruised, but managed to survive without serious injury. At the time the accident was unfolding, he felt no emotion of fear – it was almost like he was watching himself in a movie. It was only, he said, when he went to see his car in the junkyard that the latent flood of emotion was released. “When I saw my car, my legs just buckled. I just sat down in the middle of the parking lot,” he told me. “That’s when it set in for me. I thought, holy crap, how did I get out of this?”

Fear can have many different manifestations, depending on the individual and the particulars of the situation. But one of the most helpful things in can do for us is to automatically focus our attention on what’s important and on doing what we need to do. One result of this is “cognitive tunneling”: everything apart from the relevant peril (a charging bear, a gun aimed at us) becomes invisible. Irrelevant thoughts vanish. Many people facing life-or-death moments report feeling an incredible sense of being focused, alive, aware, and present in the moment.

Another distraction we ignore is pain – we just don’t feel it. And, of course, in many cases we don’t feel fear. It’s not that the emotion isn’t there. It’s just that the primitive part of our brain that has evolved to help us survive in such situations has extraordinary power over what we do and don’t consciously perceive. When we’re totally focused on keeping ourselves alive, the emotional sensation of fear won’t help us, so it gets thrown out.

Only when we’re out of danger, and the ancient fear center switches off, is the censorship removed, and we suddenly feel the effects of all that cortisol and adrenaline coursing through our bloodstream. Another person I talked to for my book was Tucson resident Tom Boyle, jr. Boyle wasn’t in physical danger himself, but when he witnessed a bicyclist getting hit by and pinned under a car, he raced to the scene and lifted the vehicle high enough that the cyclist was able to get free. The intensity of the situation gave him preternatural focus and strength. But as soon as the victim was taken away in an ambulance, it was as though someone had pulled an electrical cord out of its socket.

 Boyle collapsed onto the ground. “Hon,” he said to his wife, “I’ve got to get home. I feel like I’m going tothrow up.”

Have you ever experienced intense danger without any accompanying feeling of danger? If so, please share in the comments — I’d love to hear about it.

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My friend John Cook at Gawker alerted me to the story by Twitter, and asked for my input. My immediate reaction was: this doesn’t pass the sniff test. At all. For a couple of reasons:

1)  The machine that Smeets built is called an ornithopter — that is, it propels itself by flapping its wings. Ornithopters are an ancient dream, dating back to the Greek myth of Icarus, but have proven incredibly hard to pull off; it’s a matter of debate whether any human-carrying ornithopter has ever truly flown. I wrote about one attempt a while ago; you can read about it here.

2) Given the difficulty of the undertaking, it would be astonishing if this guy managed to eke out a small altitude gain. In contrast, he freakin’ soars. That’s a steep climbout. This guys has power and performance to burn. First time on a back-mounted ornithopter with a short wingspan and practically no visible powerplant? I doubt it.

3) Maybe a small thing, but: why do his friends run away from his flight path? Wouldn’t they want to see what happens, and maybe help him if necessary? (Look at where people are standing in those iconic photos of the Wright Brothers taking off). Also, why are they so giddily happy? He hasn’t done anything yet, dudes.

4) My biggest annoyance with this story is all the talk about how he linked together “an Android phone and Nintendo Wii controllers” in order to accomplish this amazing feat. To me, that’s a huge red flag: to rig a contraption this way would mean being incredibly clever to be incredible stupid. If you’re going to amplify human motion through power boosting — as the Pentagon has long been investigating, in hopes of building real-world “Iron Man”-type powered suits — the biggest problem by far is the issue of latency. Basically, the machine needs to correct its output virtually simultaneously with your altered input. Sensing someone’s motion using a Wii is a ridiculously complicated and latency-adding approach when you could much more easily do it the way engineers have been doing it in aviation for more than a century: using cables or push rods.

To its credit, Gizmodo has incorporated some skeptical takes in its updated version of the story. Still, the fact that it promoted this hoax in the first place is evidence of its credulousness.

UPDATE: The perpetrators of the hoax quickly gave up the game. In the aftermath, I interviewed a real, live ornithopter pilot for the Pop Mech website about why such craft are so difficult to pull off.

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As 35,000 people learned firsthand that day, the Wrights’ “first airplane” was such a poor flyer that it barely qualified to be called an airplane at all. It only managed to get off the ground back in 1903 because there happened to be a strong wind that day. In retrospect we now understand that the Wright brothers made many wrong guesses in configuring their design. The propellers were in the back, instead of the front; the elevator was in the front, instead of the back; the wings angled downward, instead of upward. The plane was barely controllable.

Does that mean that the brothers’ first 12-second hop was an historical irrelevance? Not at all. The brothers did accomplish something epochal that day. Until that moment of quasi-flight, no one really knew whether a heavier-than-air flying machine lay within the realm of possibility. After Kitty Hawk, they knew. The Wright brothers may not have had all the details worked out, but they had one foot through the doorway.

Time and again, similar moments have changed the course of history – achievements less important for what they actually accomplish, than in what they reveal to be possible. Before Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile in 1954, it was a goal that lay in the far fringes of plausibility; today, it’s a baseline for any competitive middle-distance runner. Before Edmund Hillary climbed Everest, no one knew if the human body could endure such punishing conditions; today, it’s an obligatory feat in the resume of every ambitious adventurer.

When reports of the Wrights’ achievement leaked out, they electrified a group of European engineers and inventors who had been working for years to solve the problem of flight. They had no details about how the Flyer worked—the Wright Brothers were legendarily secretive, and didn’t display the planes in public until 1908—but knowing that what they were tackling was definitely possible, they redoubled their efforts. On October 23, 1906, a Brazilian-born inventor named Alberto Santos-Dumont took to the air in a craft he called “14-bis.”

A similar dynamic holds true for us as individuals. We each live a life bounded by a sense of what we know to be possible for ourselves. Everything else lies beyond, in the realm of Things That We Might Not Be Able to Do. And then, one day, we cross over the line, and our personal domain is forever enlarged.

Personally, I loved writing when I was growing up, but never dared to imagine I could make a living at it. Then I fell in with a group of young men at college who had grown up in New York City, knew people in the publishing industry, and were fully confident that they themselves would get jobs in the business. Hearing that, I felt what I imagine Alberto Santos-Dumont must have felt when he heard the rumors about Kitty Hawk. He didn’t know the Wrights’ secret, but he understood that what he dreamed of could be done. And less than three years after Kitty Hawk, he was airborne.

In America, we tend to obsess about the square footage of our houses, but maybe we should worry more about a different kind of real estate: the scope of our own sense of the possible. Every day, we can make a habit of doing something we’ve never done before. It can be big or small. Try a new kind of food; book a flight to Kathmandu; take a jazz dance class at the gym. Whatever we try, it’s not important that we do it skillfully or well. We can even do it so poorly – as the Wright Brothers did in 1903 – that there’s some question as to whether we’ve really done it at all. What’s important is that the precedent will have been set. The doorway will be open. And for us, the world will be just that much bigger.

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What my wife and her team had suffered from was a failure of prospective memory – the inability to keep in mind every aspect of a goal that one sets for oneself. If you’ve ever walked out the door in the morning and realized you’ve left your work papers on the kitchen counter, you’ve suffered a failure of prospective memory. This type of mistake is all the more vexing for being so common and seemingly avoidable. I’ve never felt so flat-out dumb as I did the day I locked my car keys inside the car. I’ll never forget that horrible feeling of shame, seeping over me like hot acid, as I realized that with a shove of the car door I’d done something that could not easily be undone.

And it’s a good thing I’ll never forget. Mistakes are things that we learn from. I’ve never locked my keys in the car since. And my wife has never sent off a cover that’s missing a crucial element. From that day on, the company instituted a procedure that demanded that staff run through a written check list at every critical phase of production.

Right now I’m working on an article about mistakes, and why we make them, and I’d love to include lots of vivid mistakes from all walks of life. Do you have a favorite mistake? That is, not to say one that you’d care to repeat anytime soon, but that has been burned so deeply in your memory that you’ll never repeat it? I’m not just looking for failures of prospective memory, but any screwup that’s left you feeling hot-faced with shame: a bad judgment call, a missed opportunity, an attempt to show off that ended badly. If so, please drop me a line, either here or on my Facebook page, or post it in a comment. You can be anonymous if you like!

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To see the evidence, let’s take a trip. Start with a visit to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. On the fourth floor, just inside the entrance to the Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs, you’ll find a chunk of Montana dirt with dark and light bands layered like Neapolitan ice cream. Not very exciting compared to the huge creatures on display nearby. But one thin, grayish-beige layer might explain what exterminated these great beasts: It’s the impact residue of a 6-mile-wide asteroid that struck the Yucatán 65 million years ago. “In its aftermath we see extinctions of everything from single-celled organisms to the largest dinosaurs,” says Mark Norell, chairman of the museum’s paleontology division. Could another one seal our own fate? Or could some other extraterrestrial catastrophe bring us death from above?

Or maybe it could come from below. Twenty-two hundred miles west, in Yellowstone National Park, one of America’s most popular tourist attractions, is another ominous harbinger of destruction. About once every hour, the pool around the Old Faithful geyser explodes in a fountain of spray 145 feet tall. It’s a cool effect, until you consider what powers it: geothermal energy radiating up from a subterranean plug of magma. Every 500,000 years or so, the Yellowstone supervolcano erupts and rains lava and ash for hundreds of miles. An eruption 250 million years ago in Siberia may have released enough carbon into the atmosphere to cause the largest mass extinction in earth’s history, the Permian-Triassic, which wiped out 96 percent of all sea life.

In the cruelest of ironies, the gravest threat to human life on earth may be other life on earth—the microbial kind. Let’s turn our tour of all things apocalyptic to the Netherlands, where virologist Ron Fouchier at the Erasmus Medical Center recently synthesized an airborne version of the H5N1 avian flu. The lethality and frequent mutations of H5N1 make it a serious pandemic threat. The last big influenza pandemic, the Spanish flu of 1918, is estimated to have killed more than five times as many people as World War I. The possibility of a naturally occurring global outbreak is ever present, but the threat from labs is becoming more frightening. “The cost of synthesizing a new organism goes down every year,” says Dr. Ali Khan, head of the Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “A bad guy could make his own smallpox.”

Although imminent destruction seems all around us, the probability of extinction in any one year is vanishingly small. Our long-term prognosis, however, is far darker. Very few species survive through the eons like the alligator and the coelacanth. “The safe bet is that we won’t make it, because 99.9 percent of things don’t,” says Timothy Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., an asteroid- and comet-tracking organization.

We’ve got some time, though. On average, vertebrate species stick around 4 to 6 million years, and modern humans are only about 200,000 years old. And we’re not your typical vertebrates. Our science and technology might ultimately migrate off this little planet altogether. So maybe we’re just getting started.

What are the 12 threats that could end life as we know it? Read the rest of my Pop Mech story here.

But despite all that, I think that Facebook is failing.

Do I think that Facebook is going to go bankrupt tomorrow? Far from it. I’m sure that it will continue to print money for years to come, based on sheer momentum alone. (Hey, AOL still exists.) But if you listen to the way that people talk about Facebook you sense – or at least I do – that its cultural moment has passed. This is just based on a very unscientific analysis of my own very small circle of acquaintances, but once upon a time, Facebook was this awesome cool thing that you just had to try. Lately, all everyone seems to say about Facebook is “I don’t get it” or “I find it annoying but I feel like I have to go on once in a while.” Facebook, in other words, is heading the way of MySpace.

Becoming MySpace, of course, is the specter that haunts the nightmares of every Facebook investor. The company has been super aggressive in trying to avoid that fate by trying to metastasize into something grander than an automated blogging site, sending out tentacle everywhere in order to become a ubiquitous presence that binds together every aspect of the internet experience. They have striven for immortality through intrusiveness. And this, I think, will be their undoing.

At its heart, Facebook is about gossip. In the movie The Social Network, the promethean spark of Facebook’s creation comes when a fellow student asks Mark Zuckerberg to find out whether a certain female student is attached or not. That’s it, Zuckenberg realizes: what people really want is the inside scoop on their peers. Who’s available for a potential hook-up? Who has committed a gaffe, or proven themselves untrustworthy? Who requires solace?

The desire for this kind of information is a fundamental aspect of the human experience. As E.O. Wilson argues in his new book, The Social Conquest of Earth, it is our talent for maintaining tightly knit, altruistic groups that allowed human beings to outcompete all the other hominins that once shared the earth with us. Gossip is an important tool in that process. It allows us to negotiate the complicated and treacherous shoals of social subtext. Keeping abreast of our contemporaries and maneuvering for advantage without being seen to do so requires an intricate dance. Though we may scorn it in public, most of us secretly crave it, and one recent study suggests that it may actually be good for us. In a paper published last month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, UC Berkeley researchers found that when subjects witnessed a person engaged in dishonest behavior, their stress levels shot up—but they calmed down considerably when they were able to pass the information along to others who were at risk of falling victim.

Facebook, then, should be a focus of our online experience: it should be the irreplaceable source of the up-to-date social information that we so instinctively crave. Imagine some long-ago villager who knew exactly what everyone was up to, and could give you the low down, without boring you with useless facts about people you didn’t care about. This is the person you’d want to spend time with. This would be the person with savvy.

Once upon a time, Facebook felt like this. But the longer I use it, the less savvy it seems. Most of the information that crawls down my home page is about people I don’t even know. The information they’re conveying is stuff I wouldn’t care about, even if I did know them. Someone read an article; someone joined a group; someone commented on her own photo. The signal to noise ratio is too low. Facebook has gone from being the village yenta to the village idiot

In another moment from The Social Network (hey this is a blog post, how in-depth do you expect my research to be?) Zuckerberg mind-melds with Sean Parker after the veteran tech investor groks what Zuckergerg’s own colleagues don’t: that the most important thing for Facebook is that it be perceived as cool. Selling ads, figuring out revenue streams—everything else is secondary. Facebook must be cool. The minute it loses the respect of the public, it will face a severe downward slide. Who wants to share gossip with a loser? Once you lose the cred, there’s no getting it back, no matter how much you spend. Just ask MySpace.

If Facebook hadn’t overreached by trying to turn every damn thing we do into a social moment—a rather pale substitute for juicy gossip—it wouldn’t have turned into such a crushing bore.

In order for its grandiose ambition of universality to succeed, Facebook would need to be able to do something that every successful yenta can: arbitrage information. It would have to be able to filter out the interesting information from the boring, to know who wants to know what, and who wants what to be known by whom. Can computers carry out such a task? It’s way beyond the ability of current artificial intelligence. But like everything else that computers can’t yet do, it’s only a matter of time.

Someday, there will be a social network that dominates not just because of a Romneyesque sense of inevitability, but because it actually feels compelling and irreplaceable. Maybe that network will be called Facebook. But I’d wager that, given the life cycle of such things, by the time this era dawns, Facebook will lie buried under six feet of digital dust in some forgotten corner of the internet.

UPDATE: The ever-interesting Alexis Madrigal has a piece up on the Atlantic that points to an even more rapid erosion of Facebook’s cool quotient. In short, he posits that in order to justify its $100 billion valuation, Facebook is going to have to get more aggressive about extracting value from its users.

…when Facebook was merely trying to grow its user base, the incentives between Facebook and you, as a user, were pretty tightly coupled. Now, particularly in the United States, user growth is slowing and getting more money for each user is necessary. My guess is that Facebook’s need to monetize at higher levels and users’ desires will come into conflict more often the higher its revenue per user climbs.

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For example? Here are some perceived dangers that get blown out of proportion:

Cell phone radiation. Uncertainty is a powerful trigger of anxiety. When new technologies reach a broad public, they can seem uncomfortably mysterious, and hence ready targets for health-scare furors. Remember Alar, silicone breast implants, electromagnetic fields from power lines? In the case of cell phones, the word “radiation” adds additional emotional baggage. The fact is, numerous studies have failed to turn up any conclusive evidence that cell phone emissions pose health risks, and the physics suggests it’s most likely impossible.

Vaccinations. We tend to be less afraid of things that provide an immediate, palpable benefit. The problem with vaccinations is that we never really know if they’ve helped us or not. What’s more, we’re intuitively suspicious of things we perceive as artificial rather than natural. These biases have helped stoke widespread panic about childhood vaccinations, which in turn expose kids to very real risk.

Terrorism. Specific, reliable information is a powerful defense against fear, while vague or untrustworthy information increases anxiety. Though the government has provided no evidence that organized Muslim terrorists are operating within the US, air travelers are still told that the threat level is “orange”—whatever that means.

Conversely, some kinds of threats consistently fail to trigger our inner alarm system, so we’re apt to endanger ourselves by overlooking them. Some of the more pressing:

Driving. A sense of being in control suppresses fear, so most of us feel invincible when we’re behind the wheel. In reality, we’re at risk of other drivers and other hazards. Last year, 82 Americans died every day on our roads.

Obesity. Because we don’t directly perceive the link between taking that extra bite and the catastrophic lethality of a heart attack or stroke, we find it hard to generate an emotional reaction to the dangers of obesity. Worse, because of a psychological phenomenon called “optimism bias,” we tend to overestimate our ability to change our eating habits. That’s unfortunate, because obesity is one of the worst and fastest-growing health problems facing this country.

Nuclear war. For decades, Americans worried that they might be wiped out in a nuclear attack. After the fall of Communism, that danger seemed to melt away. But thousands of nukes remain on standby. Many experts in the field of global risk assessment rank the danger of nuclear war as one of the few threats that could credibly end civilization in the near future. But since hardly anyone talks about it anymore, we can’t easily imagine an Armageddon scenario, fear it, or push for something to be done about it.

In his book How Risky Is It, Really?, risk management expert (and fellow PT blogger) David Ropeik dubs the difference between fear and actual risk “the Perception Gap.” This discrepancy can not only lead us to engage in dangerous behavior, he says, but can foment health-damaging stress. The first step to responding more intelligently is to recognize how instinct steers us wrong. “Just as we use a seat belt to protect ourselves in a dangerous environment,” Ropeik says, “we can use knowledge of the cognitive biases to help protect us from dangerous misjudgment.”

That’s what he believes, at any rate—it could just be the optimism bias talking.

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Thanks to the cockpit voice recorder, we have a pretty good idea of what the pilots heard, and the instrument data gives us a pretty good idea of what they saw. But what about the passengers in the back? Their perspective was very different, so I’d like to offer a few speculations about what the final moments of the flight might have been like for them.

The plane had taken off from Rio de Janeiro at 7.30 in the evening, local time, and had been flying for about four hours when it first encountered the weather system that would precipitate the final crisis. It was nearly midnight, then, by the internal clocks of most of the passengers; a few were probably reading, or watching a video, while the majority were probably sleeping, or lightly dozing. The captain himself had just left the cockpit to go take a nap.

As the flight neared the line of massive thunderstorms straddling the Inter Tropical Convergence, any passenger who happened to be awake would probably have felt some light turbulence. Those looking out window would have watched the plane fly into a bank of clouds, then out into clear sky, and then back into clouds. At six minutes past midnight, one of the co-pilots made a call back to the head flight attendant, alerting her that the plane would shortly be entering an area of turbulence. He made no such announcement to the passengers, however.

The turbulence grew worse. In the cabin, the flight attendants would have been strapping into their seats.

As a frequent traveler, I’ve experience similar moments many times before: the sudden, unanticipated jolt, followed at irregular intervals by more lurches of varying magnitude. I invariably remind myself that turbulence alone has never caused a modern airliner to crash, but it does little to soothe my nerves. Fears are, after all, irrational, and there is something primally disturbing about being tossed around without any clues as to why, or when the next bump will take place. I imagine some passengers might have been roused from half-slumber; others might have tightened their seatbelt, or tossed back the half-finished drink to keep it from spilling.

The main drama began at 10 minutes past midnight, when the speed sensors became iced over, the autopilot disengaged, and the pilot flying the plane pulled back on the controls, sending into a steep climb. The passengers would have had no explanation for the sudden lurch, nor would it have been easy for them to know in the minutes that followed if they were climbing or descending. One of the most difficult things about piloting a plane in darkness or clouds is the body’s inability to accurately determine its orientation or whether it’s going up or down; this spatial disorientation was the main factor behind JFK Jr’s death. Once an aircraft is in a steady descent or ascent, it feels just the same as flying level, just as an ascending elevator feels the same as one at rest. Few of the passengers could have guessed that after the plane reached its maximum altitude it began a very rapid descent. Indeed, even the co-pilots themselves, with their panels full of instruments and indicators, seemed uncertain as to what exactly was happening, several times discussing whether they were actually going up or down. Until the moment AF447 hit the water, none of the passengers could have known what was in store.

It’s also worth pointing out that, though the plane several times achieved an angle of attack exceeding 40 degrees, this does not mean that the passengers would have experienced themselves as tilting steeply backward, like roller-coaster riders climbing the first hill. The angle of attack is the angle between the wing and the air through which it’s moving; the reason that the value was so high during AF447′s final minutes was that the aircraft was practically dropping like a brick. Its orientation, however, was only about ten degrees up. It probably didn’t seem that remarkable, or even noticeable given what else was going on at the same time.

What the passengers would certainly have felt, and been alarmed by, were intense buffeting and turbulence. Remember, the flight was passing through the top of a major thunderstorm. Making matters worse was the fact that when an aircraft wing is on the edge of an aerodynamic stall, it naturally experiences a kind of buffeting, or trembling. Add to this the fact that a plane is very difficult to control at stall speeds, so the pilot flying the plane was making big side-to-side movements of the flight controls, causing large-scale lurches to the left and right.

It’s a testament to the integrity of the Airbus that it withstood the forces it was subjected to; in his book Erreurs de Pilotage (Volume 5) Jean-Pierre Otelli makes the case that a lesser airliner would probably have been ripped to shreds. But it can’t have been an easy ride for the passengers. I know from experience that in heavy turbulence a moment comes when a particularly violent lurch seems to release the anxiety of the cabin en masse; a gasp seems to erupt from everywhere at once, and a contagion of fear takes over. People begin to cry, to pray, to quietly sob. All at once, everyone has entered a new emotional domain.

One reader commented, shortly after my Pop Mech piece went up, that she hoped that the passengers hadn’t suffered. I think it’s true in a sense, that they didn’t know that the plane was doomed, and that the force of impact was so great that most or all were killed instantly. Psychologically, though, it must have been a terrifying ordeal — though for none quite as much as for the pilots, who alone knew what was about to happen to them.

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