“Learn from
the mistakes of others, because you will not live
long enough to make them all yourself” is an old
adage tossed around aviation circles. Heeding this
advice, I read National Transportation Safety Board
(NTSB) aircraft incident reports where I have
decided the truth is rarely discovered if the pilot
survives the accident. We aviators tend to color our
side of the story so as to tip the scales of second
thoughts in our favor. Several years ago I read a
report which makes me chuckle every time I think
about it.
Intending to take two buddies for a sight-seeing
flight, a novice pilot landed his Cessna 172 in a
freshly harvested hay field. Depending on their
waist and inseam measurements, the three souls on
board may have pushed the anemic 145 horsepower
Skyhawk over its gross weight limit. The pilot
started his take-off roll and was rapidly using up
his alfalfa runway when his left wing struck a round
hay bale causing the plane to veer to the left. This
is bad. Suddenly, his right wing struck a bale
thereby re-aligning him with his imaginary runway.
This is better, but still not good. With nearly all
the field behind the plane and still lacking
take-off airspeed, the aircraft plowed through a
barbed wire fence, bounced across a gravel road and
through another fence before an irrigation ditch
sheared off the nose wheel. The pilot concluded this
written testimony with the Mount Rushmore of
understatements, “…then I lost control of the
aircraft.” Apparently, through the pilots rose
colored Bausch & Lomb’s, the take-off was going just
as he planned until he lost his nose gear.
In retrospect, a view unavailable prior to takeoff,
had there been one less backside in the cabin, a
little more horsepower, or had the hay bales been
moved off the airfield, the flight might have been a
success. However, due to the pilot’s inexperience,
poor judgment, or an obstinate refusal to recognize
the obvious, a catastrophic event occurred; exactly
as is happening today in Washington D.C. and this
brings me to my point.
I launched my first campaign for public office and
published my first Rambling of a Conservative Cow
Doctor op-ed column on March 1st of 2006. Back then,
our national debt was an outrageous and
unsustainable 8 trillion dollars and for seven years
I have repeatedly penned columns warning our great
republic is about to shear off her nose gear. Blind
to the obvious, Washington D.C. politicians keep
loading fat backsides into the aircraft thinking the
Federal Reserve can print enough money to repeal the
law of gravity—just as Peter Pan does with Pixie
dust. The passengers are so mesmerized chatting on
their new Obama phones they cannot recognize the
danger. Today, our national debt is nearly 17
trillion dollars, so America’s ill-fated airship of
state has already bounced off two hay bales and is
plowing through the first fence. Spending is the
problem, I see it, perhaps you see it, but
Washington does not.
In the face of this catastrophic debt, President
Obama and Washington Democrats are hell bent on
growing government with the implementation of
Obamacare; loading even more weight into our over
gross weight airplane. Apparently there has been a
rash of successful spine transplants in Washington,
because a majority of Republicans are holding fast
to their pledge to stop Obamacare. For the moment,
they have voted to fully fund government only if the
not-so-Affordable Care Act is removed, delayed, or
at least forced on members of Congress exactly as it
is on the little people. Knowing the state run
media, the propaganda wing of Marxism, always
protects the political left; the Democrats have
refused all negotiations, rejected all three offers
and blamed the shut down all on the Republicans.
With America at her debt limit, our government has
shut down. Well, not exactly shut down, it’s more of
a slim down with essential services continuing to
consume tax dollars. Both President Obama and all
Washington Democrats either cannot see the perils of
their spending flight plan, or they see it clearly
and want American free-market capitalism to shear
off her nose gear and crash so a new, socialist
utopia can emerge from the ashes. Which is it?
Whether ignorance or intentional, either choice
should disqualify them as a pilot of our great
American experiment in freedom. We can unload excess
cargo now, or sort through what is left of America
at the crash scene.
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