NewsCut

The view from the cockpit

When you end up sitting on an airplane for six hours (much of it on the ground), what's going on up there in the cockpit?

A pilot/blogger at a regional airline offers a fascinating glimpse of his flight during that snowstorm a week and a half ago, full of in-air diversions and on-the-ground gridlock, security agents that go home, and passengers who can't get food or drink.

It's a first-hand account of just how broken the nation's air-traffic system is.