Plane Conversations

There is recent news about the development of algae-based biofuel to be refined into jet fuel being promoted by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), an office of the US Department of Defense. In addition to DARPA’s funding, Exxon is also investing heavily in the research and development of this alternative to fossil-based fuel. 

This holds promise for all aviation industries to provide a stable and environmentally friendly fuel source for jet aircraft.

Quoting from a post in the UK Guardian (guardian.co.uk, Saturday 13 February 2010): 

Unlike corn-based ethanol, algal farms do not threaten food supplies. Some strains are being grown on household waste and in brackish water. Algae draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere when growing; when the derived fuel is burned, the same CO₂ is released, making the fuel theoretically zero-carbon, although processing and transporting the fuel requires some energy.

The industry received a further boost earlier this month, when the Environmental Protection Agency declared that algae-based diesel reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 50% compared with conventional diesel. The Obama administration had earlier awarded $80m in research grants to a new generation of algae and biomass fuels.

For Darpa, the support for algae is part of a broader mission for the US military to obtain half of its fuel from renewable energy sources by 2016. That time line meant that the Pentagon needed to develop technologies to make its hardware “fuel agnostic”, capable that is of running on any energy source including methane and propane.

Unlike corn-based ethanol, algal farms do not threaten food supplies. Some strains are being grown on household waste and in brackish water. Algae draw carbon dioxide from the atmosphere when growing; when the derived fuel is burned, the same CO₂ is released, making the fuel theoretically zero-carbon, although processing and transporting the fuel requires some energy.

The military anticipates testing of the fuel to begin next year with full scale production in 2013.

Commercial Aviation has been plagued with unstable pricing of both Jet Fuel and Aviation gasoline. The extreme price swings have wrought havoc on the profits of the airlines and air charter providers around the world.

DARPA is projecting that this fuel can be produced initially for around $3.00 per gallon which is not too far off the prices we are currently paying. Initially the fuel will be supplied to the military but if proven commercially viable, why can’t the rest of aviation benefit as well?

This makes sense for the United States to produce and develop fuel supplies domestically, keeping the money and jobs at home.  

Whether you are in the global-warming environmentalist camp or not, you have to agree that it would be great to have a fuel supply that is not based on buying fuel from countries that are not so friendly to the U.S. Let Hugo Chavez and the terrorist supporting states in the Middle East sell their oil to someone else.

Highlight any portion you want:

The airlines and congress can’t agree on who will pay for the cockpit upgrades that will be required to implement the NextGen Air Transportation System technology. While my belief that airlines create a lot of their own misery leaves me often unsympathetic, in this case, I believe that they seem to have a reasonable argument for help.

Melanie Trottman and Andy Pasztor of the Wall Street Journal  write that “despite years of industry lobbying, the proposal contains no provisions to help cash-strapped airlines pay for billions of dollars in new cockpit technology, a gap that could slow implementation and delay benefits to passengers for years.

Like legislation previously approved by the House, the Senate bill aims to chart a course for transforming the current system of ground-based radars and controllers into a new generation of satellite-based technologies able to handle larger numbers of flights more efficiently and with less environmental impact.

Dubbed NextGen, the network is designed to allow aircraft to fly shorter, more direct routes with pilots taking over some of the core functions of controllers.

The government already has pledged to spend some $20 billion on the new system’s backbone. According to the latest FAA projections, the system essentially would pay for itself through 2018 by reducing total anticipated flight delays more than 20% and saving airlines 1.4 billion gallons of fuel.”

 The article also says, “Gerard Arpey, the chairman and chief executive of AMR Corp.’s American Airlines, said at an FAA conference last week that he was “dumbfounded” that the stimulus bill didn’t provide financial help to install new aircraft equipment. Industry estimates peg such annual costs at $1.5 billion or so through the middle of the decade. If “we are willing to spend billions of general tax dollars for high speed rail,” Mr. Arpey asked, “why not a few for high speed aviation?”

The airline industry, with more than $30 billion of losses in the past three years, seems unwilling to bear the cost. “This is about the complete overhaul of an infrastructure, said Dave Castelveter, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, a trade group continuing to lobby on the topic.

So far this government has been willing to save financial giants including AIG from their own incompetent and borderline fraudulent activity with a bailout which was big enough to have funded the NextGen system twice over!  The government is also planning to spend billions on high speed rail which will be a direct subsidy to the companies providing passenger train service. How about helping the airlines who are already providing a critical component of our national transportation infrastructure?  

As a small business, if our company was required to spend big money to upgrade our aircraft, it would be devastating to us coming out of a deep recession.  Additionally, I don’t see too many banks willing to loan small businesses money to fund anything, much less something like aircraft avionics upgrades.  So, where does the money come from? No one in any sector of the aviation industry has the ability to print money like the federal government!

Commercial aviation providers pay taxes into the system every day in the form of Federal Excise Taxes at the rate of 7.5% of the price of an airline ticket or 7.5% of the cost of a charter flight. For individuals or corporations flying their own aircraft, there is a fuel tax of $.24 per gallon. How about using some of that funding on NextGen cockpit upgrades as opposed to spending it on congressional pork projects?

Could the guys in D.C. at least offer some no-interest or low-interest loans to the airlines to fund their end of the deal? If the airlines profit from the new system they can and should pay it back.

Highlight any portion you want:

My mother was a chemistry teacher who, much to the dismay of her chart memorization-minded colleagues, left a copy of the periodic table uncovered on the wall for student reference.  I’m sure that period table memorization is just another circle in Dante’s Hell, but I digress.  Mother’s belief was that the students would end up remembering what they needed from using the chart.  Those that didn’t probably weren’t going to be chemists, anyway; so, it didn’t matter in the long run.  Her belief was that if they used information and skills, students would learn the basics in a more organic way than by memorization.

In his book Fate Is The Hunter, Ernest K. Gann describes crossing the North Atlantic using basic navigational tools of a watch and a sextant.  Certainly, today’s aviators have it much easier using radio beacons and even GPS.  Glass cockpits have replaced many gauges and dials with heads-up displays and automatic computation.  Once at cruising altitude, aircraft fly themselves, as some Northwest passengers unwittingly found out.  But what happens when these automations are interrupted?  Are today’s pilots comfortable enough with the basics?

When cell phones were new technology, people talked about losing reception due to solar activity.  Since normal cell phones don’t actually use satellites, dropped calls may have been more the result of the lack of a tower than a solar flare.  However, today’s technology is worlds different and global navigation systems do use those satellites to triangulate signals to pinpoint a location.  In a BBC News article, author Jason Palmer points out that the navigation systems use signals that are “incredibly weak and, as researchers have only recently begun to learn, sensitive to the activity on the Sun. … Solar flares – vast exhalations of magnetic energy from the Sun’s surface – spray out radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from low-energy radio waves through to high-energy gamma-rays, along with bursts of high-energy particles toward the Earth. The radiation or waves that come from the Sun can make sat-nav receivers unable to pick out the weak signal from satellites from the solar flare’s aftermath.”

While Business Week’s Jeremy van Loon contends that solar activity is currently at its lowest point in the century, Stuart Tiffen of Das Welt quotes Dr. Dirk Soltau of the Kiepenheuer Institute for Solar Physics as saying that sunspots seen on the face of the sun in recent months indicate that the star is at the beginning of another 11-year cycle.  Using past cycle activity to predict the behavior of this one, “by 2015, more charged particles from the sun will be interacting with the ionosphere in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. This can lead to the ionosphere thickening and interfering with orbiting satellites, Soltau said.”  However, Tiffen notes, many global agencies are working towards a solution, including the European Space Agency (ESA), which “recently launched the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), which improves the accuracy of satellite navigation signals over Europe. … Using EGNOS, signal accuracy can be improved down to 1.5 meters, according to ESA.”  And Mark Petovello and Joe Kunches add in Inside GNSS, that agencies are constantly monitoring solar activity and are constantly moving satellites to avoid or diminish the effects of the increased radioactivity.  Clearly the global navigation industry is taking the situation seriously and is actively planning solutions.

What does this mean for aviation?

Since many aircraft currently use some sort of global positioning device for navigation, devices disabled or misdirected by the sun’s interference could wreak havoc with the entire system.  As antiquated and inefficient as the current ATC system in the United States is, it is less vulnerable to solar activity than the proposed NextGen system based on satellite communications.  Now, I’m no Luddite; so, I’m not about to propose that we stick with our current system any more than I would propose that we go back to flying low, following highways and train tracks.  The vulnerability of the system does make me a little uneasy, though, particularly given the newest generation of pilots who, while certainly capable, have not been trained to navigate the old-fashioned way.  What sort of back-up system do they have in their knowledge bases to deal with an outage of computer navigation systems?

Stay with me now, I’m going to make a big leap.

Colgan Air lost flight 3407 as a result of many factors culminating, according to the extensive NTSB investigation, in pilot error.  The pilots’ error was not leaving the autopilot engaged when they encountered icing conditions (as I originally asserted), but (as a reader John Herbert pointed out) “continuous violation of the sterile cockpit rules, resulting in a total loss of situational awareness, so that the flight crew let the aircraft speed decay until the plane stalled. When the aircraft tried to recover automatically, the pilot overrode the nose-down stick and pulled back, basically dropping the airspeed to zero.  Fatigue and limited training and experience were also involved.”  In response, the US Congress proposed legislation in H.R. 3371 requiring, in part, that pilots “have at least 1,500 flight hours to qualify for a certificate.”  To be honest, I’m not sure that section of the bill really needs to be there since both of the pilots involved in the event prompting the measure had more than 2,000 hours.  Earlier sections emphasize training, which is a more important issue.  After all, you can have 50,000 hours of flying tourists in the tropics, but that’s not going to help you in Sweden.  It’s not all about experience.  Training plays a huge role.

Now, let’s get back to solar flares.  How many pilots today routinely receive navigation training using any method other than global navigation or other systems vulnerable to solar activity?  Not that many.  So, unless we want to find ourselves back on the train, I would propose that pilot training include more navigational basics.  It’s not quick.  It’s not sexy.  But it works.

Highlight any portion you want:

On the day that Joe Stacks flew his airplane into the office building in an apparent attack on the IRS, many of us in the general aviation community have been holding our breaths, waiting for the attack on our industry to come.  It was a little longer in coming than I originally thought, but it’s here.  On the day that I wrote the blog about Thursday being an ugly day, my original draft included instances of people using their cars as murder weapons.  (Go ahead.  Search for stories on people killing others using their cars.  You’ll find lots of them.)  I scuttled the draft, though, because I was rebutting an argument that had yet to be made.  Well, it’s been made now and here’s what you’re saying:

From the Aviation Forum, Zing says,

“It’s already started here in Arizona. At least two of the Phoenix stations have their “investigators” doing promos about the high risk to the public posed by the “thousands of small airplanes sitting unsecured on airports” and the amount of damage they can cause.”

Micki Woolley, Business Development Manager at Grass Roots Marketing

“Not here in New Jersey, which is a bit surprising being that flight 93 on 9/11 departed from Newark Airport and the media does enjoy tying every negative aviation incident to that day. It was treated as an isolated incident, reported on but without any outcry of security lapses or need for reform. Maybe we are jaded, maybe we have other things to focus on, maybe we just have seen the logic and the light. I certainly hope so. This particular incident in TX was a small aircraft owner flying HIS OWN plane. No amount of airport security would have stopped this particular troubled individual from flying that day, and the media should not twist it into anything more.”

From the Aviation Professionals Network,  Ed Foster

“Great article and Ben is as right today as he was back then.”  When asked what the media in the Orlando, Florida, area was reporting, he responded,”Oh the typical sky is falling mentality, need more security and (wanting the government) to “do something”.  AOPA, NBAA and the other industry groups really need to step up the damage control and show the value of GA along with stressing the need for owner/operators to be diligent about security.  Just publicizing the GA response to Haiti alone would go a long way towards showing (most people) that private/corporate aircraft have value and that not all owners are rich greedy fatcats.”

So what can we conclude?  One: that, as Jeff Schwietzer put it, ” Airplanes Don’t Kill People, People Do.”  And two: that as an industry, we have got to get in front of this thing, educating the non-GA community about what our industry actually does before they buy into the agenda-spun stories like those of sensationalist mainstream media.

Highlight any portion you want:

In an attempt to regulate the airlines on the issue of leaving passengers sitting on aircraft on the tarmac for extended periods of time it appears that the DOT may end up making things worse.

Michael Fabey of the Travel Weekly online magazine says in a recent article:

As a result of new federal rules limiting tarmac delays, airline officials and analysts predicted that in coming months, airlines are certain to cancel an increasing number of flights for bad weather or for a host of other reasons, rather than face heavy new federal fines for holding passengers too long on a tarmac.

The new Transportation Department regulations, which take effect April 29, subject U.S. airlines to fines of up to $27,500 per passenger in instances where the airlines fail to allow passengers to deplane after three hours on the tarmac or fail to provide those aboard with food, drink and other comforts.

“For us, that could be as much as $4.4 million for one flight,” said American spokesman Tim Smith. “No one’s going to play with that. There will be many more cancellations as a result. Everyone is gearing up for this.”

So did the “experts” in congress and the DOT solve the problem or create a new one that is worse than the old one?

Being more of a free-market capitalist, it seems to me that this is one they could have left alone. I mean, if the airlines mess things up badly enough, often enough for long enough, it costs them money and customers. They don’t want that with or without any intervention from the federal government.

A veteran airline dispatcher commented to the article by stating:

“The new regulations will demonstrate the Law of Unintended Consequences, and I say this as a 35+ year airline dispatcher. There have been a few past irregular ops events (NWA/DTW, JBU/JFK, CoEx/RST, and AAL/AUS) that generated huge delays (7+ hours) and were all admittedly intolerable and handled poorly. The lunacy of the new regs is that in the effort to preclude such rare 7+ hour delay events (apples), an “all delays are equally evil” tact has been taken, with the “solution” to now apply with more common 2-4 hr. delays (oranges) one sees when weather, and airport/airspace constraints occur. Pre-emptive cancellation for snow are one thing, but thunderstorm season is another, and no airline is going to let a flight blow the 3-hour limit and incur a $3M+ fine for each flight. Cancellations? Count on them, but don’t blame the airlines–all the non-airline “experts” drove them.”

I wonder if anyone at the DOT or in Congress asked any of the dispatchers and operations people at the airlines what they thought about the solution(s) to the problem prior to making a new rule. Probably not! What?  Go ask the people who deal with this every day? Heaven forbid! They probably had a hearing and heard from the senior management of the airlines (whom they don’t trust), then from a panel of experts (whom they do trust in spite of the fact that the experts may have no practical operational experience).  After hearing from both groups, but without talking to the people who make it happen day after day, Congress drafted and enacted a new rule.  

It was a parade-inducing headline for proponents of the measure, but the people in the operational trenches don’t see any parades in the practical applications.

All of this was done in an effort to appease the public who is fed up with the broken air mass-transit system.  So, instead of actually fixing the problem in cases of the rare, extreme delay, they’ve created the problem of cancelled flights in the case of the common delay.

Highlight any portion you want:

People regularly quiz us about FAA and self-imposed safety regulations, trying to define and understand them. And, now and then, they ask us to bend the rules “just a little bit” to accommodate an extra hour in their schedules or an extra couple of hundred pounds of payload.  With an eight ton aircraft, what’s a couple hundred pounds between friends?   After all, it won’t make much difference, right?  I am surprised at how often they are surprised when we say no.  Statistically, flying may be safer than driving, but bending the rules “just a little bit” isn’t how it stays that way.  We stick to the rules because they are there to keep us, our aircraft, our crew, our passengers and the people on the ground safe.  Bottom line – the cost of being wrong is just too high.

So, last night, when I was watching the news and I heard an adorable little exchange between a child in the air traffic control tower at New York’s JFK Airport and a JetBlue airliner full of passengers, I was absolutely dumbstruck, which you know is quite a feat if we’ve ever met.  Hundreds of people’s lives were involved in that little exchange between a child who had gone to work with a parent and an airliner in an ACTIVE FLIGHT!!!

The Associated Press’ Joan Lowy wrote about this incident and others that shine a rather harsh light on Air Traffic Control and raises the question: Who’s watching the watchers?

In the case of Tiny Tyke ATC, the FAA has suspended both the controller and his supervisor pending an investigation, and the NTSB is  holding a forum this spring to discuss pilot and air traffic controller professionalism.  Do I think that the aircraft was in danger?  No, the licensed controller was right there and the child was clearly repeating only what he was told to say.  Now, do I think that it was an instance of colossally poor judgement?  Absolutely.  And, in this industry, more than in many, instances of colossally poor judgement cannot be ignored.  The costs are simply too high.

Highlight any portion you want:

It looks like Congress may finally get back around to figuring out how to pass a bill that will fund the Next Generation Air Traffic System (NexGen). Hopefully, I will see this happen in my career, I still have 15 years left if all goes good.

It is frustrating to me that the lawmakers want to wrap up controversial provisions into a bill thats primary purpose is not controversial. Everyone in aviation agrees that the traffic control system needs to be modernized. It will save fuel and time in the air which is both green and more productive for our economy. It will also increase the margins of safety with better traffic management. Both general aviation and the airline industry support the development of NexGen.

So, what is the hold up?

Somehow congress can not seem to simplify things and get something done.

They have to add in provisions that we can’t all agree on so things get stalled and nothing happens. What can we not agree on?

• Who pays for it? GA versus Airlines
• Should we be auditing European Repair Stations? A Union Protectionist Issue
• Should we make it easier for FedEx employees to unionize? Another union issue. Big company against the union
• Passenger Rights? The People versus the Airlines
• Pilot Work Rules and the Oversight of the Airlines: Pilots versus the Airline Management and additional regulations 

In that list that I just mentioned, which of those issues, if any,has the first thing or, for that matter, anything at all to do with modernizing our air transportation system through the deployment of new technology? With the exception of who pays for it, none! And I will bet you that we can come to some solution on who pays for it.

Maybe I am simple-minded, but why can’t these guys in D.C. simplify this and pass a clean bill that funds what we all agree needs to happen and fight it out over the rest in separate bills? Is there some legislative rule against simplicity? If there is, then we need to change the rules.  Or maybe we just need to fire the rule-makers and vote in some new ones who understand how to get things done.

Highlight any portion you want:

A Saturday, February 27th article in the Columbus Dispatch, by  Marla Matzer Rose covers the story on NetJets and Warrens Buffett’s letter to the stockholders regarding the company’s performance.

I posted on November 17 about the announcement of NetJets pilot layoff. At that point, revenues were off 41% and new aircraft sales were off 79%. Since that post, more layoffs have happened and in this article, the following is stated by Warren Buffett about the financial situation at NetJets:

“In the eleven years that we have owned the company (NetJets), it has recorded an aggregate pre-tax loss of $157,” Buffett said in his letter. “Moreover, the company’s debt has soared from $102 million at the time of purchase to $1.9 billion in April of last year. Without Berkshire’s guarantee of this debt, Net Jets would have been out of business. It’s clear that I have failed you in letting NetJets descend into this condition.”

Buffett said he had been “bailed out” by David Sokol, whom he appointed CEO of NetJets in August after the abrupt resignation of longtime CEO Richard Santulli.

Buffett praised Santulli for instituting “top-of-the-line standards for safety and service” at the company that are being continued, but said that the leadership of Sokol, who is chairman of Berkshire-owned MidAmerican Energy, and considered one of Buffett’s likely successors has been “transforming: Debt has already been reduced to $1.4 billion, and, after suffering a staggering loss of $711 million in 2009, the company is now solidly profitable.”

Buffett echoed what Sokol has said about NetJets, that it is “likely to operate at a profit in 2010, assuming there is no further deterioration in the U.S. economy or negative actions directed at the ownership of private aircraft.” For 2009, NetJets posted a $711 million loss. The losses were largely due to write-downs on the value of aircraft, with a smaller amount attributable to the cost of laying off workers.

Much like the financial performance of the airline industry, NetJets has not made a profit in aggregate for the past 11 years.

Something is wrong with a business model that has an aggregate loss over the long haul and we are plagued with it in both the airline and private aviation industries. More money has been lost than has been made, and because the industry is glamorous, more money will pour into bad business models in the future.

According to Mr. Buffett, the company is now solidly profitable since all of the cuts in both pilots and overhead. So what has changed about the business model to fix it? Do they shrink their way to profitability?

What created the situation in the first place? Was the model broken to start with and just needed a deep recession to make it obvious? How do you lose more in one year that you can make in 10 years? 

On this site we talk about the airlines and their broken system but private aviation has its fair share of issues and financial problems. Something has to change if we are to sustain long term viability as an integral part of the national transportation system.

Highlight any portion you want:

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Scott McCartney talked about security taking longer than the flight.

Ever since the December 25 bombing attempt, travelers heading to the United States have had to face much tighter security.  The federal government issued new rules which made inbound travelers have to go through a number of screening processes which include some pretty intrusive searches.  And the crazy thing is people adjust.  We have all become indoctrinated to this.  We don’t like it, but we just have to do it.  

I know this because I flew from Brisbane, Australia to Los Angeles a week after the attempted bombing.  I was told that I would have to be at the airport three hours prior to my flight.  I went through a number of searches, pat-downs, emptying out of personal belongings and carry-on luggage.  I removed my shoes about four times.  My teenaged son, who happened to be walking ahead of me alone, with his hands in his pockets, wearing a hoodie over his head, was approached by security to have an explosives test.

The article says:  “If you’re coming inbound to the U.S., it’s going to be a tough summer unless we get some creative change in the security rules,” said Steve Lott, a spokesman for the International Air Transport Association, a Geneva-based group that represents airlines around the world.

Airports, airlines and government agencies around the world have hired more screeners to perform the “enhanced” security that the U.S. now requires for any flight headed to or flying over the 50 states.

Airline officials said that government agencies and airports in North America, Europe and Asia have promised that they will staff up enough to prevent long lines and delays as travel picks up this spring and summer. “All we’ve got at this point is their word and we hope their word is good,” said an official at a U.S. airline. “It’s a concern.”

This affects not only those traveling to the US from overseas, but also domestic flights around the country.  So, what’s the alternative to removing your shoes and standing in long security lines?  You could always get a bunch of buddies, or other business travelers heading your way, to charter a private aircraft.  You’d be surprised at the price of dividing a charter flight by six or eight.  And you’d love the fact that you can drive to the FBO, grab a coffee and board the plane from the ramp 15 minutes before wheels up.  And I haven’t even started on the luxury of the experience yet.

Highlight any portion you want:

It is a little too early to tell how this situation, involving the use of a small single engine aircraft by a suicidal man who wanted to get back at the IRS, will affect general aviation.

Every time something happens with an aircraft the media jumps on the hype wagon and starts sensationalizing the event. The politicians soon follow with the idea they can create a new law or rule that will prevent what just happened from ever happening again. Let’s hold another congressional hearing and turn the TSA loose to solve the problem!

An Associated Press article headline says, ” Texas Plane Crash Exposes Gaps in Air Security.” Give me a break here! You could just as easily say, “Texas Car Crash Exposes Gaps in Ground Security.”

Some of the recommendations coming in from “the experts “say that we should not be able to fly small aircraft without filing a flight plan. In this case, that would have made no difference. If you understand the flight plan system, as  many in the press do not, you would know that.

This event is a sad and tragic for the families of those who have been affected but it does not deserve some new law or rule change that will affect general aviation.

General aviation and a small single engine Piper Cherokee (not a private jet as reported by many media sources) are not the cause.

The aircraft was the tool of the day that this man chose, sadly enough, to use to get revenge and kill. He was the owner of the aircraft and in that case no different than anyone who owns cars and trucks. No rule and no amount of security can get inside a man’s head to determine the day he will decide to use a personal means of transportation (or any other device or piece of machinery, for that matter)  as an instrument of destruction.  

This deranged man could have just as easily walked into the building with weapons or explosives and done more damage in terms of lives and property damage. It happened that way in Huntsville, Alabama, two weeks ago when a college professor shot and killed three colleagues and wounded three more. All it took was a pistol. It happens that way more times than we want to think about.  Mr. Stacks could have also used his car, a motorcycle, or a truck like Timothy McVeigh and caused massive damage.

So, as a society, we cannot say that the aircraft was the problem and that we can prevent this from happening again if we change all the rules to keep people from freely flying their aircraft. What next? I can no longer drive my car down the road because it might be used as a weapon by some crazy person bent on seeking revenge in a suicide attack?

Hopefully cooler heads will prevail and the ambulance-chasing media and “experts” with an opinion about the dangers of aviation will not take over the conversation.

As a society, we have to acknowledge that we are vulnerable and that we cannot totally protect ourselves from every possible danger.  We do the best we can do without destroying our liberties and freedom, and then go on with living our lives.  As Benjamin Franklin counseled over 200 years ago, “The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either.”

In the meantime, those of us in the industry need to be prepared to defend ourselves and our freedom to fly in this country.

Thanks to AOPA for jumping in there to defend our industry. http://www.aopa.org/aircraft/articles/2010/100218crash.html

http://www.aopa.org/aopalive/?category=latestcontainer&watch=A0YnY3MTrDq8rUrycPqf1GLG7LjUMpPC

Highlight any portion you want: