No not a loon. I feel for people that are required to fly for business purposes and hate flying...I couldn't think of anything worse. Have a look at Reeve Aleutian Airways Flight 8, they overcome a propeller being ripped off, explosive decompression and loss of control. They all walked away. It was on our Foxtel Documentary channel the other day. It was one of the best I have seen.
We show the Helios flight in our Emergency Procedure classes. Helios received a cockpit warning signal at around 12000 ft (they never pressurised the A/C from the onset). At 12000 ft you would still have a useable conscious time of perhaps more than 0030 minutes. The crew thought it was an air conditioning problem. As they start to climb their UCT is diminishing, at 32000 ft they would have had 30-60 seconds to react to a loss of pressure. By the time they got to this point they would have been severely hypoxic if not dead. Unfortunately this was tragedy which resulted in Pilot error.
Aww you are very kind. I'm much better than I used to be, I think flying so often really helped me.
The first time I flew after 9/11 I had the pleasure of sitting next to a pilot named Ron (not in the cockpit he was deadheading lol) who has a fear of flying website and teaches free classes. He was amazing, he and his site helped me so much!
I'll have to check out the Reeve Airways flight documentary, it sounds amazing! That pilot is a hero.