Married To A Proximity Alert

I think all airline pilots should have wives, and the wives should be their co-pilots. This would be a good use of a widely available human resource, the back-seat driver.

I have found that it is nearly impossible for my wife and I to go anywhere without a variety of shrieks and epithets concerning my driving, the truck in the next lane, the center divider of the freeway and nearly all obstacles to our progress, real and imagined. That we get anywhere at all, is hardly worth the drive. Of what value is it to try to get to a doctor's appointment if I die from a nag attack along the way?

That aside, it is an odds-on presumption that engineers devising the current generation of collision avoidance devices are all single. If they were married, they would realize that the female gender has a radar system orders of magnitude more sensitive than the ones they are using today.

For example, my wife can see and hear a car threatening our vehicle before it's driver has started the engine, much less merged onto the freeway. She tells me to lock the doors when we approach an intersection in a seedy area, because she knows full well the threat inherent in the hooded indigent asleep on the bus bench. These threats all seem to sense, as well, our preparedness and never materialize because of that.

Also, no emotionless, digital voice can possibly convey the urgency that a real woman in fear for her life can. A shrieked, "Jesus, Mary and Joseph!" is infinitely more unnerving than a computer-generated "Collision alert."

This very human ability crosses all religious and cultural lines. And the sentiment is generally conveyed in all languages. In fact a major testing institute has determined that women who do not speak the language of the driver of the car, have no difficulty at all in scaring the living daylights out of said driver, with exclamations in whatever language they are screaming.

Therefore it is the recommendation of this writer that the airline industry consider the use of spouses in the cockpit. The incidence of mid-air collisions should be dramatically reduced...at least if the pilots will keep their hands on the controls and off their wives.