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eeds to get clearance from its dispatchers or maintenance staff before, as your captain so inelegantly put it, "trying again." This can take a little while, especially if a system also needs to be reset (or deferred as inoperative). There are also brake-cooling issues to consider. A subsequent attempt can take place only if the brake temperatures are below a certain value for a certain amount of time. I recently flew on Lufthansa from Frankfurt, Germany, to London. After takeoff the plane banked abruptly and repeatedly -- beyond 30 degrees, I'd estimate -- with a significant pushed-into-the-seat G-force feeling. Is the training different for European pilots? I'm just curious if certain airlines have a reputation for training pilots to fly "harder"? There are no significant differences in the way European pilots are trained. In any case, airline training does not teach basic flying technique. It teaches procedures, aircraft systems and crew coordination. What you experienced was probably just a product of the departure profile. In Europe, because of noise abatement rules, departure paths are often tightly packed with turns and climbs. I doubt your pilot would have gone past 20 or 25 degrees of bank while turning. When hand-flying, you are following a guidance device known as a flight director, and it will not command anything higher than that. If he'd gone a nudge past the commanded angle, it would have been a momentary thing. Passengers have a tendency to grossly overestimate the angles of bank, descent and climb. For turns, figure 20 degrees maximum. You'll never be more than 15 or 18 degrees nose-high, and even a steep descent is under 10 degrees nose-low. Two weeks ago, a Fokker 100 jet landed in Stuttgart, Germany, without its main landing gear. Is that kind of emergency taught and practiced in flight training, or did we see a mixture of talent and good luck? This was fairly serious since it involved failure of the main gear, beneath the wings and fuel tanks, rather than the nose gear. But there was no fire or major structural damage, thus little chance of death or injury. This is not something you can train for in a simulator. If you know the gear has a problem, you touch down as slowly and gently as feasible -- basically you make a normal landing. In an incident like this, the crew shows its mettle in the way it prepares for and carries out the emergency evacuation. The hands-on aspects of "flying" have fairly little to do with it. Landing gear (and engines too) are great sources of passenger worry, but to an extent they're an airframe's most expendable zones. Gear problems sit pretty close to the bottom on a list of a pilot's worst nightmares. If the public has become hard-wired to panic over gear mishaps, much of that is due to the televised landing of a JetBlue Airbus back in 2005 -- perhaps the most grotesquely overhyped airplane incident of all time. The plane's nose tires were cocked, and the forward strut collapsed on landing, sending a rooster-tail of sparks down the runway. It was made-to-order fare for the news channels, but a minor event from the crew's point of view. More on gear and tire dangers here, in one of my favorite-ever columns. One of the things that bothered me most about last winter's Air France crash was the lack of a Mayday call prior to the plane going down -- something you didn't address in your coverage of the accident. Does the absence of a distress call strike you as unusual? Does it mean anything? No. At the point over the ocean where the crash occurred, the pilots would have been communicating with air traffic control by voice over high-frequency radio and/or by means of an on-board datalink unit. Sending even simple messages by these methods is relatively time-consuming and is not something the pilots would have been concerned with in the heat of a serious emergency. Maybe you have this Hollywood-inspired image of a pilot with a microphone in his hand, saying, "Mayday, Mayday, this is Air France..." It doesn't happen that way. The first order of business in an emergency is to keep control of the aircraft and deal with the problem. Once in a while -- diverting off the organized "track" system over the North Atlantic, for instance -- communicating takes a higher priority, but as a rule you do not make radio calls until time and circumstance afford. GO-AROUNDS Re: Music and pop culture The theme I want to explore this week is the phenomenon of great artists tailspinning unexpectedly into mediocrity. Creative decline is to some degree inevitable and happens to everybody. It happened to my idols Kurt Vonnegut and Spalding Gray. It happened to Patrick Smi ... Well, not to everybody. But the fall is often strikingly sudden and unattributable to the usual suspects -- to old age, say, or substance abuse. We see this a lot in music, which we'll get to in a minute, but first, can we talk for a minute about "The Simpsons"? I lamented this popular show's remarkable downfall in a column a few weeks ago, but I need to elaborate. How tragic it has been for something once so brilliant to become so crass and embarrassing. Poor Matt Groening -- only those six-figure royalty checks, I imagine, keep him from drowning himself in the California surf. From 1990 through 1995, "The Simpsons" presented what was arguably the most cunning satire in the history of television. What made it so was its style -- its masterfully hewn characters, rapid-fire comic timing, and a welcome lack of the sort of self-congratulatory comic vanity the networks normally give us. The scripts were wry and irreverent but never obnoxious. "The Simpsons" was art. And then something -- I don't know what, precisely -- began to go terribly wrong. There is no single moment -- a switch of writers or producers, for instance -- that commenced the demise, but within a season or two the scripts began falling apart. By 1998 the show was unwatchable, and it has remained that way: tediously self-conscious, bloated with slapstick and annoying plots hitched cheaply to various events and celebrities (and products) drawn from popular culture. Am I the only one who feels this way? In October 1990, the openly gay actor Harvey Fierstein appeared in a fondly remembered episode playing Homer's personal assistant, Karl. Watching this episode today, you see how deftly the writing and directing were able to incorporate the theme of implicit homosexuality. Not once is the word "gay" uttered; there are no political overtones or kitschy ironic references to Karl's sexuality. By comparison, one need only to endure the 1997 guest appearance of filmmaker John Waters to see how weak and witless the scripts would become. When Fierstein was asked to appear in a sequel to his 1990 appearance, he found the script so void of subtlety and overflowing with kitsch that he refused not only the initial offer but a rewrite as w