[Ol' Dan Tucker]

Read for comprehension.

Let's examine what you wrote and what it means:

I bet if you were assigned to a work project where you were locked into a small room with little to do except talk to your lone coworker locked in with you for hours on end, and tape-recorded constantly, you might deliver something less than Ciceran oratory at some point too.

Who locked them into the small room against their will? Who forced them to do the job? Are they working under these conditions against their will, or did they knowingly accept these conditions as a part of the job? Are their conversations being secretly recorded or are they aware that everything they say will be recorded for posterity?

Now that the insults are out of the way, my point was that even people who are highly trained professionals can joke around on the job without compromising their work. If a surgeon puts on some rock music or tells a nurse a joke, and his patient later dies because the life support machine fails, is the surgeon an "idiot" or unprofessional?

People like you always resort to insults, so it doesn't surprise me to read them here.

Non-sequitor. I said nothing about jokes, nor did I insult them. I only pointed out that no one forced them to be sitting in the cockpit, just like no one forces you to be there.

If they didn't like the conditions, they could've walked away from the job and there would've been a hundred more in line to replace them. If you really are a pilot, you'd know this to be the case.

[Turbopilot]

I'll make one more run at this before I'll assume it's your intention to miss the point. They were actually locked in by the TSA when they instituted the secure cockpit rules. However, I recognize your point that no one forced them to be there, which is completely true and correct. You're also absolutely correct that at that level of aviation career there are literally tens if not hundreds of pilots vying for each job who would love to replace them.

None of that, however, has any bearing on the point I was trying to make, which was that making a joking comment in the work environment doesn't mean you're taking unsafe or illegal actions. They obviously thought it would be neat to take their aircraft to the highest altitude they had been trained was safe to fly at, because they normally didn't get the chance to do it. They were obviously excited about that chance. I still see no reason that being excited about that chance, and joking around about it, is a reason to insult the deceased.