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HE was one of Air France's "company babies": a dashing 32-year-old junior pilot - and a keen amateur yachtsman - who had been qualified to fly the airline's ultra-sophisticated Airbus A330 jet for barely a year. Yet despite his inexperience, Pierre-Cedric Bonin found himself responsible for the lives of 228 passengers and crew members on June 1, 2009, when the cockpit of his $190 million aircraft lit up with terrifying and contradictory alarm signals en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. While Bonin held on to the plane's “side-stick” controller and looked at his instruments in disbelief, his co-pilot,...

A man who allegedly took a plane from a Brooksville airport was forced down by a military aircraft Wednesday afternoon. According to Wendell Stephens, a supervisor at American Aviation in the Hernando County Airport, the owner and pilot of the plane was a French citizen who was licensed to fly the plane. A Federal Aviation Administration-certified instructor who flew with the man recommended that he not fly the plane because he could not communicate in English with anyone on the ground or in the air. This was explained to the pilot through an interpreter, and the pilot became indignant and...

Dear people of Free Republic, I recently had to come into this wonderful country that is your website. After reading a post about the come back of Bruce Springsteen andt the fact that you think he is anti-american and a traitor just because he dared to use his FREEdom to speak and said publicly that Bush was a liar., i told myself, that, if this wonderful country uses the word FREE to call itself, I should use this opportunity to answer and to use MY FREEdom to speak as well. I posted under “blec93” an article showing how high the...

September 26, 2003France writes itself off as arrogant failureby charles brumner New books see a country in declineFRANCE is a nation in decline, blind to its failings and living beyond its means while strutting with empty arrogance on the world stage. That may sound like the standard Francophobe rant from across the Channel or the Atlantic but it is, surprisingly, a view gaining ground in France. Doubts about Gallic supremacy have been a periodic feature of France for centuries. They have now returned, fed by economic gloom and amplified by bestselling books. France, according to the thesis, has been overtaken...