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One of the Blue Angels Aviation 101, After Class 3 crashed and burned
yesterday at an airshow in South Carolina. If you want details, you can watch TV or check a news source online.
Naturally
this kicks me in the head. My first thought was: was anyone else hurt? Because unless the pilot ejects, and he did not, he
is not going to survive hitting the ground at four hundred miles per hour.
My second thought was of the children at
the airshow.
And my third thought was that this is exactly why I have been to five minutes of one airshow in my entire
life. I love aviation, I love flying, I understand flight and I understand what happened.
However, I hate airshows
because the one I did attend, the people were gruesome. They were actually watching jets "almost" crash and while I can admire
the precision of flight, I cannot stand my species when they are sitting there drooling, waiting for the pretend dogfight
to become reality. And it does happen, like it did yesterday. The pilot wasn't demonstrating fighting tactics but his crash
was exactly what some people are waiting to see.
At the airshow I attended, I truly could not look up at the jets
without having a panic attack. I had to leave. But before I did, I heard an older gentleman, in a uniform that may have been
any branch of the service, say: "Whoa! Almost clipped him on that one! Didja see? Didja?" while slapping his buddy's shoulder.
Poor guy. There were no crashes that day.
As a United States Marine, my husband witnessed the practice of
the Blue Angels and also watched, in Yuma, as they crashed into the desert floor at 460 mph. He was in charge of the "clean-up."
The Angels follow the lead jet and if his directions are off, theirs are as well. And that's what happened in Yuma.
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(I actually heard someone once ask my husband if "any of the pilots died" in that crash.)
The Blue Angels and the Thunderbirds are mostly a recruitment action. That's fine. They do not deny this,
it's on both websites.
You could not possibly train as a pilot, take the extra training and then join the Blue Angels
not knowing that your odds of dying "at work" are a helluva lot higher than mine.
I do not diminish the grief of the
family of that pilot on this. I respect that they are in a world of hurt.
But that pilot crashed in a neighborhood,
something that is truly avoided at airshows. One of the most touching things I ever heard was the final transmission of an
acrobatic pilot who was crashing and he was so calm, he asked if he was reasonably safe from hurting civilians and when ATC
said "Yes" he said, "I'm taking her down. Thank you, gentlemen." And he crashed, dead instantly. Had he ejected when his mechanical
problems became evident, he'd have survived. But innocents would have died. I find that beyond brave.
I love the Blue
Angels, I have them as my screen saver now (Thunderbirds get every other month). I am sorry for what happened.
Precision
flight takes incredible skill and courage. In time of war, it's necessary.
Whether or not that young pilot's life
was simply a necessity for recruitment is up to you. It's pretty clear what I think.
I'll watch the Blue Angels on
videos, I have no problem doing that because if they had crashed, the video would say so. But I will never attend an airshow
and many of my friends and acquaintances have asked why, when I so so love aircraft, when flight excites me so much.
I
just wrote why.
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