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Editorial: Connections

By Tracy Crook. Originally published in the Rotary Aviation News, Issue 3, 1997

Since “retiring” several years ago, I have not had much time for one of my favorite pastimes; playing ‘Connections’. This is a mental game I named after James Burke’s television program of the same name. In the TV program, Burke traces the path of an idea or invention between two seemingly unrelated things, like 15^th century dress makers and CNC machine tools.

In my home version of the game, I simply relax and let my head drift around to any number of subjects that occur to me and try to see some pattern to the whole mess.

The following is an abbreviated account of the latest session which started after reading the morning paper about Timothy McVeigh’s guilty verdict. Translating the mental chaos of normal human thought into words is difficult at best so don’t call the men in white coats (or FBI jackets) after reading this.

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What could drive someone to do such a depraved act, I wondered. What could have been missing in his life to blind him to the utter inappropriateness of what he did. Ultimately, we are all responsible for the choices we make, but would things have been different if he had seen things from another perspective? What if he had seen the world from the air?

The view from the air has been something I am drawn to as often as possible but I declined the Army’s offer to fly helicopters when I was drafted back in 1968. And as much as I would have enjoyed flying military jet aircraft, I would have made a lousy fighter pilot. The experience of flight completely overtakes me and I am unable to seriously contemplate any other task unrelated to the accomplishment of the flight itself. Dealing with an emergency is possible of course because that is VERY related to the flight.

And flying is so darned pretty! The whole world looks indescribably beautiful from the air. Faced with that beauty, how does one work up the aggression needed to go up and blow another airplane out of the sky? I have no philosophical problem with doing the job but I seem to be ill equipped for it. I figured the man who wrote the poem “High Flight” had the same condition. It surprised me to learn that he was a WWI fighter pilot. I wonder whether he ever saw combat before a mid air collision in a cloud ended his life here.

Flying is such a large chunk of my life that it is hard to imagine it being gone. I thought about a conversation that a friend of mine told me about some days ago. He was talking with an airline pilot who predicted that private aviation would not exist in 10 or 15 years. Not very likely, I thought. Lobbyists are portrayed as a corrupt influence on government but I’m glad the EAA & AOPA guys are in Washington trying to keep our place in the sky.

It is certainly no secret that if the airlines had their way, we (private pilots) would not be there. All those little planes are just an inconvenience to them. There are some wonderful people in the FAA who genuinely care about general aviation but as a government agency, they would just as soon see us go away. They came close to making that happen with the Mode S program, that fancy transponder system with two way data link capabilities. These devices were to have been required on all aircraft by 1992. I used to work for a company who had a large part of the contract to implement Mode S but thankfully I did not work on that program.

I have nothing against advances in technology that materially improve safety but requiring these devices on general aviation aircraft served only to eliminate them. The cost to install Mode S transponders at that time was about $10,000.00.

Sometimes ineptitude is a blessing. Due to several snafus at FAA and the contractors, the program was delayed and the requirement to install them was canceled.

We dodged that bullet but now there is an attempt to implement “user funding” of the air traffic control system. Just how much is that required weather briefing going to cost? For the time being, it would be hard for the government to simply ban private flight, but as the song says, “There must be 50 ways to leave your lover”.

My mental game had taken an unhappy turn so I shook myself fully awake and decided to go for some mental therapy at 5000 feet. Those pesky random thoughts were not quite done with me though. On the way to the airport I couldn’t help thinking about what life would be like if the sky was off limits to anything but airliners. What if my wonderful airplane was forever earthbound? I wouldn’t blow up a building but what would I do? What would you do?