As Air France pilots fought for control, the doomed A330 dropped 38,000 feet, rolling left to right, its engines flat out but its wings unable to grab enough air to keep flying.

Aviation industry sources told Reuters that this action went against the normal procedures which call for the nose to be lowered in response to an alert that the plane was about to lose lift or, in technical parlance, 'stall'.

"A stall is the moment at which a plane stops flying and starts falling," ... "why did the pilot flying (the aircraft) appear to continue to pull the nose up[?]"

It isn't too hard to see that the world economy is stalling. Belarus has devalued their currency, Greece is near default, Spain has massive unemployment, Pakistan can barely keep the lights on, third world countries can't even afford food and water. In the US jobs aren't really coming back, housing isn't really coming back, car sales aren't really coming back, and the Wall Street Journal lets an oped writer call it stagflation instead of whatever new sort of -flation it is. But we continue to try to pull the nose up. We continue tax cuts to the rich, the financial sector creates more commodity bubbles, even with food, the Fed issues ever more debt, we're mired in expensive resource wars but the media assures us that business will continue as usual if we keep believing.

Why can't we drop our nose and try to regain speed at a lower altitude? Because we're not the only jet in the sky. If we slow down, another nation, probably China, would surpass us. Our middle class people, even our rich people, might have to live with less. We would have trouble paying our debt, which was borrowed for a growth economy not a steady or contracting economy. Our military would be less feared.

So we're all flying along with the nose pointed high. We know that we're running low on fuel, but we're being told that we are still maintaining just enough airspeed, and working on better engines, and we don't dare look away from our screens to the porthole windows.