It's funny how a thread title conjours up an image.
I assumed that "flying half staff" was either aeroplanes without enough crew or alternatively a Morris Stick Dance query - as in "what happens when the broken end of a stick flies off over or into the crowd of onlookers?".
So - to us in Great Britain - who has died, and is it anyone we should know anything about?
We fly flags "half mast" in cases of an official death, of the football team dropping a bollock.
Quack!
GtD.