"Would you get on a plane with a pilot who has never flown?" the announcer asks. Yes, if the only other option is the guy who has proven repeatedly that he cannot keep his plane in the air:
(cartoon from The Star)
- Log in to post comments
More like this
A little after 7 am on 27 November, 2004, Lt. Colonel Michael McMahon and Chief Warrant Officer Travis Grogan boarded a small twin-engine airplane in Bagram, Afghanistan. The plane, which also had a cargo of 400 pounds of mortar illumination rounds, was operated by Presidential Airways, which is a…
I travel a lot for work, and to see my family on the East Coast. As such, I keep a fairly close eye on changes in TSA screening, and have always been a bit squicked by the backscatter machines (or porno scanners, as I've seen them called). My issue is mostly discomfort with some random person…
Chad notes, in response to PZ's rather absurd assertion that biology is the only Dumped Upon science, and that physics is so well treated in movies and TV, that "Most of the SF movies I see are lucky if they can get Newton's Laws right, let alone any of the finer points of astrophysics."
Indeed,…
Ed Dwight, Jr. – Test Pilot, Aerospace Engineer and America's First Black Astronaut Candidate
Chosen in 1962 by President Kennedy as America's first black astronaut candidate; due to racism in the astronaut program, he resigned; now is a world-class sculptor, specializing in sculptures depicting…
Thank you for reminding me that Cratering John was a careless pilot. We've had eight years of cockpit errors, and eight is enough.
Exactly how much experience, relevant experience, does McCain have?
As far as I can tell being president of the United States doesn't involve piloting jets, landing jets on carriers, flying anything over enemy territory, dropping bombs first hand, getting shot down, or living in a POW camp. So exactly how does McCain have an advantage given that he might have personal knowledge of these activities?
He has also claimed to 'know how to win wars'. Exactly what war has he won? Must have been one of those 'secret' wars.
IMHO the one thing for sure is that being president has a lot to do with management and organizational skills and experience. Which is a shame for McCain. He has never been vary good at management of an organization of more than a couple of dozen people. The failure to effectively manage his organization and budget during the primaries is indicative of his limited talents in this area.
How he will handle the much larger staff of the entire executive branch and its huge budget remains to be seen. His complete failure with just a few dozen people and twenty-four million dollars doesn't give me a feeling of confidence.
His fighter pilot reflex to gamble and double-down under stress, which explains how we got Palin as VP, is pretty scary. He still maintains that we could have won Vietnam if we would have just bombed more. Typical of most pilots he has complete confidence in the ability of air powers to win wars. A confidence not shared by historians and military experts who have studied the subject. To them air power is just one piece, often the opening gambit, of a larger strategy. You can easily start a war with air power. It is much harder to bring a war to a favorable conclusion with just air power. The political side is pretty much opaque to air power.
It is not hard to imagine that McCain's misunderstanding of the proper roll and limitations of air power could easily get us into conflicts that we cannot so easily bring to any acceptable conclusion.
All of these scary issues with McCain are only made worse if McCain should become incapacitated and Palin becomes president.