Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Well, as usual, Ernie has a unique perspective over the recent crash of a B-2 Spirit. This is excerpted from his website. The first part I know is true, because every government agency is the same. The second part is more compelling; imagine if it was you sitting in that airplane...(underlined areas are defunct links from Ernie's site).

By now everyone knows a B-2 Spirit bomber crashed in Guam over the weekend. This unfortunate event -- which is tantamount to the second coming of Christ at least in the military arena -- will probably be more thoroughly researched than the space shuttle crashes. The catch is no matter whose shoulders they ultimately pin the blame on, there is a laundry list of personnel who will suffer the fallout. It won't matter that they had nothing to do with what happened, or if they were on vacation two weeks before and two weeks after, or if they did their job perfectly. People are going to eat a lot of shit, and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.
First and foremost, will obviously be the pilots. Thankfully, both ejected safely so while their asses might be intact, their careers are certainly not. They, are going to be fucking fired. And it doesn't matter if the final investigation attributed the crash to mechanical failure, pilot error, or a UFO death ray. They're fucking fired, period. And I suppose I should explain what that means in the military world, since when you're fired, you're not actually sent off to the bread lines. When a military personnel is fired they're removed from whatever duties it was they're trained to do, and moved over to what will amount to be a meaningless job. They will be given a cubicle in some janitor's closet at the far end of base and will stay in this dead end career path until they serve their twenty years to retirement, or otherwise choose to bring their commission/enlistment an end. For a pilot to be fired means he will never see the inside of another cockpit for as long as they live. It doesn't matter if they graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and joined the Air Force ROTC and graduated top of their class, and have billions of dollars of training in their heads, and are the best damn pilot their instructs have ever seen. Whatever rank these pilots took off with that day, will be the rank they retire with. And when they get out of the military, commercial airlines won't touch them. Same thing goes for the wing and squadron commanders.
The rule is simple: crash a billion dollar bomber: you get fucking fired. It's the human equivalent to Sherman's, scorched earth policy.
Yes, the Air Force is going to fucking fire everyone that even came near that plane prior to its crash. Crew Chief? Fucking fired. The guy who checked the tire pressure? Fucking fired. The squadron Safety Officer? Fucking fired. The airman who drove the golf cart that shuttled the pilots out to their plane? Fucking fired. The two guys repainting stripes at the end of the runway? Fucking fired. Air Traffic Controller? Fucking fired. The guys who fueled the plane? Fucking fired. The guy with the orange cones that who marshalled the plane out onto the taxiway? Fucking fired.
The cashier at the coffee shop where the pilots grabbed a cup of java while driving to work? Fucking fired. Their mailman? Fucking fired. In fact, I bet if one of the pilot's wives is pregnant, federal agents will be dispatched to push her down a flight of stairs. Their kids will get beat up and expelled from school. There's just going to be no mercy. They would fire God if they could.
As I'm pretty sure the pilots were well aware of these consequences, I ask you to consider the following. Imaging you're an Air Force pilot. You control one of the single most expensive piece of equipment in your nation's entire arsenal. You have been
trained, retrained, and re-retrained a dozen times over. You know your job forwards and backwards. You are a walking, talking encyclopedia of answers to any "what if..." scenario that has ever been dreamed of. You are prepared for any in-flight emergency that fate can throw at you. So you're in your cockpit of your 1.2 billion dollar B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and you take off, and x-amount of seconds later, a snot load of red warning lights go off on your instrument panel. You training and instincts kick in, and you follow your emergency procedures down to the letter. But instead of improving, your situation worsens. Now somewhere in the back of your subconscious, there has to be that voice. That voice that reminds you that a B-2 has never ever been lost before and if something should happen to this plane, you would be remembered for all time as, "the guy who lost the first B-2". And I'm not even talking about survival at this point. Not yet anyway. I'm talking purely about the psychological impact of being the first guy to screw the pooch on this scale. I mean if one of these things goes down, you just fucking know it's going to make the headline of every newspaper, be talked about on all the 6 o'clock news, be raved about by bloggers... and then we get to the fun stuff... tied up in all the red tape from the official Air Force investigation and the inevitable Congressional hearings that will surely follow!
But that debate is happening in the back of your mind, and in the front you're still turning dials and pushing buttons and trying to
nurse this wounded pig back to the ground with some shred of grace. And you understand that as long as you're in that cockpit and the plane is responding to your inputs at least to some degree, you have to imagine you still have a shot of pulling your ass out of the fire. Because like I said, the last thing you want to be remembered as is the first guy to crash a B-2. But at some point -- at some point -- your mind makes the connection. Something clicks. And as your hand reaches down for that ejection seat handle, you realize that this is fucking it. There's no going back one you yank that handle... you can't get 100 feet out of the plane and suddenly go back because you suddenly realized the problem was someone forgot to turn the "crash" switch to "off". And as you're really giving that handle a good fucking pull, that voice in the back of your mind steps forward and reminds you that it's better to be remembered as the first guy to crash a B-2, than it is to be remembered as the first guy to die in a B-2.
But consider the finality regarding the pilot's decision to eject. On this side of it, there's that chance, no matter
how overwhelming the odds, that you just might walk away from this a hero for managing to get a stricken plane back on the ground. The rationalization that perhaps there's still something you can do. But once you eject, that's it. The end. Finality. So let me ask you fair reader -- average Joe Schmoe who doesn't know dick about flying or planes or stealth or aeronautical engineering -- just how many things would have to go wrong in order for you to make that distinction?

Friday, February 22, 2008

Change?


Barack Obama is running on a platform of change. Exactly what is he going to change? How is he going to change it? Whenever I hear a democrat talk about "change," I see an increase in the nanny state of being; taxpayer money going to pay for social services, like free medical insurance, free food stamps, free housing...basically making hard working people work even harder to let fat, lazy, welfare-addicted people have their way. Obama is nothing more than a rhetoric-spouting gas bag.
Another thing to ponder: A president is tasked with guarding the sovereignty of the United States, defending it against all enemies, and sending America's sons and daughters into harm's way. EVERY president should be required to have had military experience!