Ego Response? (Score 1)

During RADCOM school @ MCAS Miramar, I heard a story from an instructor that used to work on the flightline when the base belonged to the Navy. Not 10 hours after the Challenger disaster, Astronaut Hoot Gibson ( a 'hero' of modern aviation, in my book) flew into Miramar in a T-38 (Not Uncommon). A joke or two was told by him having to pertain about the color of Christa McAuliff's eyes (I won't repeat the punchline). When I first heard about it, I laughed my butt off. But then I realized that even though it's a moderately funny joke, you're making fun about the way someone died. I believe that jokes like this are made to compensate for our own losses. Pilots don't grieve; we just fly on. We will all gather and make jokes about near-misses (near-hits???) and bad landings to take our minds off the fact that what we do can be fatal. There's a tradition in Boeing, that before any major flighttest, the engineers go out and get drunk while watching videos of airplane crashes. It's the same thing.