If God Had Wanted Us To Fly

I was at the computer doing some work and heard on the radio that a small plane had hit a building in New York. As expected there was a lot of fear and speculation in the first minutes after the accident. Was it another terrorist attack, who was in the plane, was it even a plane? Some news agencies initially reported that it may have been a helicopter that crashed. Now word is out that it was a high end, private plane that was registered to Cory Lidle, a pitcher for the Yankees. When are we going to learn.

I don't get people who want to fly their own planes. Most folks I encounter have a hard enough time driving their cars, and those have limited instrumentation. Have these Orville and Wilbur wannabes, mastered every form of locomotion presided over by gravity? Is the ground so boring that they need to take to the skies? There are professionals for that. I enjoy flying as much as the next guy, but I'll leave the flying part to someone who at some point in their lives was heard yelling, ala Richard Gere, "I wanna fly jets." I'll handle the sitting in the back eating trail mix part of the experience.

There's a long history of amateur pilots meeting with bad ends. Don't people remember JFK Jr., John Denver or Amelia Earhardt? Small planes are God's ping pong balls. Don't believe me? Let's crank up some Lynyrd Skynrd, Ritchie Valens, Patsy Cline, Harry Chapin or Ricky Nelson and talk about it. Maybe God just hates musicians. The point is, there sure seem to be a lot more of these little planes dropping out of the sky than big ones that are flown by studly guys with deep, halting voices.

While I'm sorry that this happened, at least it wasn't some attack. It was an attack of hubris and stupidity mixed together, but that only affects the people on the plane. Well, them and the guy whose living room they used as a landing strip. I hope all the future flyboys who were on their way to some regional airport for flying lessons from Clem, the WWII transport pilot, caught the news and are going to get a Corvette to handle their issues of inadequacy instead of a Cessna. Later...Brian