Since 9/11 it's been much put about in the media that movie screenplay writers are regularly brought together in think-tanks in order to dream up outlandish terrorist plot scenarios for our security experts to muse over and possibly be 'shaken up' by.
I'm not such a writer; actually I'm a medic, and though not of any psychiatric persuasion, I have had the usual basic training during my time in the military for recognising and dealing expeditiously with what was then called 'battle fatigue'.
In the 1962 film '
The Manchurian Candidate' a former Korean War POW is brainwashed by communists into becoming a political assassin. Yes, it was only a movie.
It's a far stretch to suppose that a contemporary terrorist cell could kidnap and 'turn' the sub-conscious mind of an otherwise stalwart and socially upstanding Canadian pilot but I can't quite leave such a notion completely alone in the bin marked 'wild supposition'.
Anyway, even if such a thing couldn't actually be achieved in real life(
as has been widely debated), there's no saying it couldn't be attempted.
And the consequence of of such brainwashing following by a triggered instruction to commit an act of anti-social mass destruction would likely be a fairly florid and immediate mental breakdown of the type we have seen happen here. Might what has occurred be in reality a faulty weapon deployment?
I'm pretty certain that if such a thing was to go off 'ping' in my head whilst flying that I'd "want to talk to God and some such" pretty urgently too.
You can head me off as having a couple loose in the top pasture if you like; but I'd be much reassured to know that some sort of wise and sympathetic PsyOps/forensics team, with knowledge of the ins and outs of experimental hypnosis, were up there taking notes with the regular Co. Clare trick cyclist boys.
A bit of perspective:-Common things occur commonly, ars longa, vita brevis, occasio praeceps, experimentum periculosum, iudicium difficile and real estate
has taken a record pounding recently.