After Work Flying and the Cost of 9/11

I used to have a job where I didn't have to dress up in business attire and, even better, my commute home took me right by the airport I flew from. Some days I would stop off at the airport on the way home and go flying. Now, none of those are true and I rarely fly during the week. In the main, in these days of 100LL which costs over $4/gal and an airplane that burns 9gph, maybe that's not a bad thing.

But I do miss it.

What brought this back to mind was my hearing an airplane just a few minutes ago. From the variations in the propeller and engine noise, it seems as though the pilot is doing aerobatics. I've not had access to an airplane I could fly like that, so I'm not trained in it. My airplane is rated for some light stuff, such as spins, but I can't do the things I used to be able to do when I was young and I imagine my airplane may be the same way.

Airplanes, to me, are freedom machines, or they were prior to 9/11.

(Rant follows)

Because a bunch of Saudis hijacked four heavily loaded large airliners and weaponized them, those of us who fly small airplanes are viewed by the Feds as a serious security threat. It was close to two months after 9/11 that a lot of us could fly again, with no real changes other than pop-up no-fly zones and a very large air defense zone around Washington, D.C. The security boffins wanted to expand the D.C. ADIZ even more, but after over 20,000 comments were made to the notice of rulemaking, the vast majority being negative comments and after a few public meetings that involved the verbal flaying of those who put forth the proposal, even the security types had to back down. (This is still a representative democracy, at least for the time being.)

We have had two other terrorist attacks in the last fifteen years and both of them were with rented Ryder trucks. As far as I know, there have been no meaningful controls imposed on renting trucks. You can still rent a truck and stuff enough stuff into it to make a major-league crater, but the Feds have a fixation on small airplanes.

I think I know why, and it comes back to freedom. Security forces hate freedom, that impulse runs through all security organizations and there is nothing that is freer than flying. You may notice that whenever a politician wants to enact stricter gun controls or gun confiscation laws, that political creep surrounds himself (or herself) with a sea of blue uniforms. It's always the same, no matter what freedom or liberty they want to restrict, it is always for the God of Security. Those who would protest the government are also targeted by security forces, as the NYPD so aptly showed during the 2004 GOP Convention. And it doesn't matter if your group is comprised of Catholic nuns or Quakers, they will spy on you, because any protest is a threat to their minds. The mere existence of freedom is a threat to security.

We have to be vigilant that those who profess to defend our freedoms don't destroy freedom in order to save it. For they will.