I might be wrong about that one, I admit. I suppose it depends to a certain extent on how one defines "panic". As has been pointed out, the word is used differently, depending on whether you're speaking about ordinary "panic" or "panic disorder" which, I believe, is a very different beast.

I tend to think of panic as referring to a situation where you have ample time to come up with the right answer, if only you could get your brain to settle down and do its job properly. The driver who jammed his foot down on the accelerator when he finds the car careening towards a crowd of people, thinking he's pressing on the brake, is not necessarily - IMO - "panicking". He's doing the right thing - pressing on the brake as hard as he can. He's simply too pressed for time to carefully and methodically think through all his options. Perhaps, even as the car slams into the crowd of people, his hand is already reaching for the ignition to shut off the engine, or the handbrake to try and stop the car. In that case, I would submit, he is not panicking, but thinking very clearly. ("Brakes not working; how else do I stop the car?")

A better example, perhaps, might be an Airbus that crashed in the French Alps. The pilots who died in that crash probably never did figure out what went wrong - it probably never occurred to them in their worst nightmares that an engineer would be stupid enough to have a single programmable display that could be put into either of two modes. In one mode, you set the glide angle of 3.0 degrees, which is the normal approach angle for an ILS instrument landing; in the other, it set the descent rate in hundreds of feet per minute. The pilots set what they believed to be an approach angle of 3.0 degrees, and the next minute they were suddenly descending toward the mountains at 3000 feet per minute (50 feet per second or more than 34 mph). There were, as I understand it, only two visual clues in the entire cabin display to indicate what they had done wrong; one was a red light that wasn't lit, and the other was a decimal point that wasn't there. I doubt very much that the flight crew would have been "panicking" at that point, as I understand the word. They may not have been thinking as calmly and clearly as usual, but I'll bet in the 90 or so seconds they had to live, they processed thousands of hours of training and experience, and tried anything and everything they could think of to halt the descent.

I agree that reverting to a lifetime of training in a crisis can lead to panic, and sometimes panic can lead to this automatic response; but I don't think the two necessarily go hand in hand.

A soapbox is a sturdy wooden box that was often readily available and that orators would stand on when addressing a crowd, to make themselves more easily seen and heard. I suspect it was associated more with "unofficial" speakers, such as union leaders, who did not have formal podiums (podia?) from which to speak.