>I recently heard that joke.

It was traveling quite slow, then (didn't trust the airlines?)... I heard it in the nineties. Actually, the way ideas travel (plot lines, jokes, urban legends, memes, inventions, new words, story twists etc) would be an interesting area of archeology.

>>On the opposite end of the spectrum, there was a joke about two blind pilots who knew exactly where and how to land because they had a very good ear to deduce the needed info from passengers' screaming. They were only afraid of one thing - "what if they get used to this and stop screaming?".