Kim Jong-un, Donald Trump and Lessons From Aviation

My husband is a general aviation pilot.  We have flown thousands of miles over many years.  In all that time, we only had one close call.  We were flying with friends from Yankton, South Dakota up the Missouri river.  Laura and I were in the back seats of the Cessna 172, Tom and Bill were in the front.  The front windshield suddenly was covered with oil.  A pressure seal had blown and oil was gushing out.  Without oil a plane’s engine turns into little more than a heavy piece of sculpture.   

While we have a GPS, Tom and I started our flying without one and I have never lost the habit of using flight charts as we fly.  By the time I told Tom we had just passed Springfield, a small airstrip, about ten miles east of us, he already had the plane banking in that direction.  Tom leaves nothing to chance and had programed Springfield as a way-point.  From there on it was all by the book—with one small exception. 

Tom told us if we couldn’t make Springfield we would land on one of the plowed fields on the north side of the river.  He cautioned us that landing in soft ground sometimes buries the front landing gear and the plane can flip.  “Be sure you know which was is up before you unhook your seat belt.”  He also contacted flight service, telling them our status and using the common aviation term that there were “…four souls on board.”  That language struck my friend Laura right where she lives.  A devout and practicing Catholic Laura decided she knew what her job was.  Tom was doing the three things pilots are taught to do in an emergency:  aviate, navigate, communicate.  Bill was watching the oil gauge and reading off the increasing temperature.  I was stowing gear, and Laura was praying the Rosary. 

Laura’s nerves got her only so far through the prayer.  I repeatedly heard her say “Hail Mary, full of grace”—pause—“oh, shit.”  She repeated exactly that, over and over, all the way to the ground. 

Tom had to “crab” in to see the runway, straightened out on time and “squeaked” the landing.  The fuselage was covered in oil from nose to tail and there was exactly 1 cup left in the engine.  But we landed safely on the field at Springfield just as the engine seized.  We had a happy ending because Tom is a skilled pilot and we go prepared.

In aviation there is a saying that there is nothing so useless as the air above you, or the runway behind you.  The meaning is self-evident.  You can only use the air under you to glide and maneuver.  You can only use the runway ahead of you to accelerate or stop as needed.  There are dimensions that only have future utility.  Once you move beyond that air, or that space, you have sacrificed their ability to save you.  You have lost your wiggle room.  Your choices have narrowed.  You are less in control and have, in effect, turned over that control to unreasoning fate. 

And now we have North Korea, an impoverished state the size of Pennsylvania, threatening to move the world into nuclear war.  We have Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump, emotional bookends, posturing and pissing like dogs.  Thank God, Trump is constrained by the Constitution.  Kim is constrained only by how fast his stormtroopers can reload.  Both men are using up both the air below them and the runway ahead of them while the world watches incredulously. 

We need better pilots to keep the faith.