Eccentric Flower:199907/Shed no tears at Gay Head

There's been a question circulating on journal-l about how much one should talk about world events, politics, et cetera, in one's journal, so let me get this item out of the way quickly and have done. I'll get to the other stuff in the next entry, leaving everyone with plenty to read on Monday morning.

I am not a Kennedy-hater by any means, but I don't believe for an instant that every single search craft and technology this country has would have been brought to bear on an ocean crash site for over two days if John James Nobody had been flying the plane. Do you?

It was obvious to anyone with any brains as soon as the first debris was found (pieces of one of the plane's seats, people. Landing gear - get the idea?) that JFK Jr. and crew were quite dead. No one was saying that. Maybe they should have. Maybe they should have told the media, "He's dead, the story's over, those bodies will more than likely never be found, go home." But then what would we put on the nightly news, eh?

Here's something else no one is saying: Our Intrepid Pilot was being incredibly stupid. Look, this is something I happen to know a little something about. One of the most accident-prone sections of aviation is civil aviation - that is, non-commercial pilots in small planes. Commercial pilots call the low zone where civil aircraft fly "Indian country" and they are generally very relieved to get above it safely. Civil pilots are dangerous for several reasons. The main one is that they think they can fly planes like they drive cars. If you get in a car and you have a three-hour trip ahead in bad weather and you're exhausted, you'll probably get to your destination okay. In a small plane, you probably won't.

I could tell you tales but I will not. Instead I will suggest that you find a book called Unfriendly Skies, written by an ex-commercial pilot under the safety of anonymity. It'll curl your hair. And, perversely, it'll also make you less afraid of commercial aviation, where despite all the cost-cutting and tomfoolery, the standards are still ten times better than with the businessman - barely regulated, barely supervised - who flies across the country several times a year in his little Cessna and thinks he's a flying ace.

Now, I personally have known several civil pilots and some of them are quite competent; I'd fly with them any day, and I have in at least two cases. But JFK Jr. was a beginner, and he was taking a trip that was beyond his reach, and he should have known it. The man was only certified to fly VFR, for heaven's sake.

That may take a little explaining. Okay. When you train as a pilot, there is a specific sequence of flights you must take and log - duration, conditions, whether you're soloing or not ... it all happens in a set and rigidly determined order. You have to log a certain number of flights with a co-pilot who's certified to train before you can solo. You have to be certified VFR. And that's still not good enough.

VFR - visual flight rules - are in effect, basically, when you can see the ground. VFR is navigation by ground landmarks. IFR - instrument flight rules - is, yes, flying by your instruments. You can do this (ideally) when you can't see the ground or anything else besides.

You can fly solo for moderately long journeys with just a VFR certification. People have argued for many years that this is a bad idea, because a lot of civil-aircraft crashes are a result of "VFR-into-IFR" - that is, it got dark fast or a fog came up or whatever. I believe that you should not be allowed to solo unless you can fly IFR. However, there's a large group of businessmen and old barnstormers who think this is ridiculous (IFR certification takes a lot longer to get) ... and the argument goes that these people would probably fly illegally if that rule ever came into effect, so why encourage them to break it?

Bah. Let the record show that it may already have been nearly IFR conditions, due to fog, when JFK Jr. took off. Let the record show he was flying a plane he had only recently acquired, one he was not familiar with. Let the record show that that the Piper Saratoga II is a lot more powerful and tricky than his old Cessna, and it has dual fuel tanks which need to be switched manually - a distracting process in mid-flight.

Let the record also show that the Globe had ten pages of coverage on this today, one of them the front page of the paper. Ten pages. Am I supposed to pretend I'm this fascinated by the death of a man who did something stupid and died because of it? Am I heartless, is everybody else starved for sensation, or both?

Okay, I'll calm down now.