In the summer of 1996, during my short-lived American legal career, I clerked at a large Washington, D.C., law firm. Within a few days of my arrival, a partner dropped a 5,000-page bomb on my desk—the U.S. Air Force report on the plane crash that killed Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and 34 others in Dubrovnik earlier that year. As at other law firms in the city, there was interest in whether the crash had any "legal implications" (to employ a euphemism much favored by civil litigators).
I suppose I was picked for the assignment because of my background in engineering (though, then as now, I claim no special knowledge of the science of flight). By the time I was done reading the report, however, I found it had far more to say about human psychology, in particular the alpha-male mindset of elite pilots, than it did about avionics or military flight protocols. That mindset led not only to the crash of Ron Brown's plane, but also, very possibly, to the horrific tragedy that claimed the life of Polish President Lech Kaczynski and 95 other passengers flying into Smolensk on Saturday.
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