Visitors to the Air and Space Museum on the Mall in Washington, D.C., encounter a pristine version of the Wright Flyer. It stands today looking very much as it must have looked on the morning of Dec. 14, 1903. That was the day Orville and Wilbur chose to step into the realm of the test pilot, risking life and limb in an attempt to actually fly.
Wilbur managed a short up and down hop that was too brief to be considered an actual flight. Yet, the attempt resulted in damage to the aircraft. Repairs were needed before another attempt could be made. Wilbur was more or less unharmed in the accident.
Three days later they flew. Four times, in fact. The known potential of human and machine expanded dramatically thanks to those two visionary boys. Then a gust of wind tumbled the Flyer across the sand, destroying the most successful prototype vehicle of its day. It never flew again.
Jubilation and despair often go hand in hand. Such is the reality of balancing risk and reward. With each success there is failure. With each win there is loss. That is how life works. It did then, it does now, and it will continue to be so in the future.
Everything changes. Sometimes for the better. Sometimes not. Our burden is to accept that reality and work with it as best we can.
On March 14, 2020, the COVID-19 crisis was just beginning to enter the public consciousness. News reports told us the elderly population of Italy was taking a beating. Politicians and news reporters on this side of the Atlantic began to shift from the denial of weeks before, when they were encouraging Americans to go out and socialize as normal. It seemed that might not be so wise after all. And so, the great social slow-down of 2020 began.
That was a gorgeous spring day in central Florida. At 9 a.m. I found myself in a large hangar at Kissimmee Gateway Airport (KISM) surrounded by a cluster of Rusty Pilots seeking enlightenment and entertainment on their path to becoming current again.
It was a day filled with laughter and good-natured fist-bumps. Much of the laughter was a direct result of that newly adopted method of greeting.
Shaking hands was out, washing hands vigorously and often was in. A new virus had come to town and the sophisticated, technologically aware residents of the 21st Century were as unsure of what to do about it as the villagers of the 14th Century had been when the Black Death rode through the city gates.
Like you, and your neighbors, your friends, and family, I have been more or less hidden away for the past seven months. What began as a temporary, two-week lock-down to flatten the curve of infection and hospitalizations has become a new way of life. As a nation we have more or less accepted the limitations we have imposed on ourselves. Self-preservation has become a conscious thought, as has the desire to protect others from ourselves, should we be counted among the unfortunates who have become infected.
For the lucky ones, work from home has become the new order of the day. For the unlucky ones the shutdown has effectively locked them out of employment options. Zoom meetings have proliferated in the office worker’s world, causing the company’s stock to rise almost as surprisingly as Jeffry Toobin’s has fallen. Restaurant owners and workers are struggling financially.
Forrest Gump’s momma was right. Life is like a box of chocolates because as she lovingly told her special young man, you never know what you’re going to get. Life is a scary, wonderful, cornucopia of risk and reward that some of us navigate well, some of us anguish over, and none of us survive beyond our time. That’s the harsh truth of it.
This past Saturday I ventured out to Vero Beach where the Florida Aero Club (of which I am a member) invited me to present a safety seminar to their membership. After seven months in semi-isolation, I was ready to go.
It seems the membership of the Florida Aero Club was ready to go, too. The turnout was good — although the traditions of handshaking, back-slapping, and hugging have been replaced by greetings that involve temperature taking, mask wearing, and elbow touching.
Life has changed. That’s to be expected. It will not return to normal because there is no normal. There is only the way we live today, which is different than the way we lived when I was a boy and bears little resemblance to the way my grandfather and his family lived when he was young. With no electricity, or running water, or paved roads to lighten their load, they made the journey through life anyway. Inventing and adapting to changes as they went. As we do today. As we will in the future.
Obviously, some of us are at greater risk than others. With that in mind we should protect ourselves accordingly.
Yet, we must also recognize that some may wish to take a different path, one that we aren’t necessarily comfortable with. And that’s okay.
Metaphorically speaking, some of us may wish to aviate, while others fear flying and choose to remain firmly rooted to the ground. We each have mountains to climb, real or imagined. Whether we choose to climb them or remain in the foothills is an individual choice.
George Mallory knew that when he said, “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.”
Today, Mallory remains firmly established on Mount Everest, as does his climbing partner Sandy Irvine. In 1999 Mallory’s body was found, identified, and left where he fell, 75 years after he went missing. Irvine has yet to be located.
Maybe the pair reached the summit, years before Edmund Hillary. Maybe they didn’t. Whatever the case, they lived their lives, reached for their goals, and accepted the risks of their choices.
Like Mallory and Irvine, Orville and Wilbur, we have the opportunity to choose our own path. To blaze our own trail. To live fully, regardless of perceived limitations.
Our lives will never be the same again. Not really. But they do not have to be diminished by the changes we impose on ourselves, either.
Me? I choose to fly, both literally and figuratively. Now, and for as long as I have the strength and mental acuity to do so.
May you be as comfortable and satisfied with the direction you take in this life.
The COVID virus is a political weapon for the most part now. The science is well known. And those under age 65 with no risk factors have a 99.9% chance of beating the virus or becoming a-symptomatic, if infected, at worst. Still you are seeing lock-downs, business being shutdown, kids blocked from schools and the rest in some states.
Not to make this a political discussion, but most of us want to return to our “full” lives. And get back to a full aviation experience etc.
If Trump wins reelection we will see a vaccine sooner rather than later. Just as we have seen the therapies get rapid approval that have lowered the death rate now below flu levels. But if Biden wins…do you see the rapid vaccine approval happening? Do you see the lock-downs being lifted anytime soon? Anyone want to hazard a guess?
Not to be political bigs? 😉 . I don’t think the pharmaceutical companies working on the vaccine care who is President. They are working on it as quickly as they can. Sadly the introduction of the vaccine will also be undermined by the Q-anon/Plandemic crowd that have worked so hard to fill the internet with mask “facts” if you are going to bring up Trump, his trying to take credit for rushing the vaccine will backfire in that the anti vax crowd will be trying to scare people that corners were cut to get this out. At least Biden is simply stressing he needs assurance that the vaccine is safe and then supports its use.
Nothing wrong with that….character is still important.
“With no risk factors”? So the ~half the US population with risk factors (obesity alone would count for 31% and much higher if kids are excluded) don’t count? My young nephew with Type I diabetes doesn’t matter? Your mother doesn’t count?
From CDC numbers, those under 21 or so your 99.9% number is about right. For those 25-64 years old the fatality rate is 19.1%. That’s the science. Not your opinion of it. https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/06/23/coronavirus-covid-deaths-us-age-race-14863
The pictures in the article pretty much define what’s meant by a high risk group. “Rusty Pilots” meetings do not typically draw many attendees under 40. Duh.
Kind of sad the percentage of people gathering without taking the simple precaution of wearing a mask.
The politicization of mask wearing fueled by conspiracy misinformation has caused so many people not to take this simple act of respect for others seriously.
Proper risk management is always a balance. You don’t have to hide under your bed. Appropriate mask wearing, common sense social distancing (you can be social and 6 feet apart) and then get on with your life.
Masks make no difference. Particles of COVID are between .06 and .14 microns in size. N95 masks (the masks you cannot get) stop 95% of particles down to .10 microns in size. The cloth masks for the public are in the 5 to 10 micron and higher range. If someone is infected and the cough or sneeze near you, especially if indoors YOU WILL GET INFECTED even if wearing a cloth mask.
Covid can be carried by droplets that are much much larger than .14 microns. And the research shows that the spread of those droplets can be reduced by wearing a mask. To fight this pandemic we should follow the science, not the political ideology.
Before we were called Boomers, we were called the Me Generation. “Obviously, some of us are at greater risk than others. With that in mind we should protect ourselves accordingly.” – provides an excellent example of why. All those terrible draconian rules are to protect others, at least as much if not more, than ourselves. The Wrights took risks for a noble purpose, Sir Hillary’s motivations perhaps less noble, but neither risked the lives of innocent others for their gratification. The rapid increase of “harmless” events such as this without proper safeguards, along with super-spreader events such as the Sturgis motorcycle rally, are proving without any data-driven doubt to be the driver of the recent huge increases in infections.
Aviators and aviation confers no immunity. To the contrary, one can argue that without it, the outbreaks in March either would not have happened or not have been nearly as severe. But hey, keep it up and make whatever point you’re trying to make. Kiss OSH ’21 goodbye now though, because, if present trends continue, it ain’t happenin’.
These are comments, not attacks. The CDC and many more imminently qualified epidemiologists have concluded, based upon numerous studies, that the wearing of masks has very little, if any, demonstrated effect on the rate of transmission of the virus. Social distancing and hand washing are better precautions, mostly because sunlight and disinfectant kill corona.
I wear a mask, mostly to sooth the fears of others, and to encourage more normalcy in other respects. A ruined economy, and the damage done to our society, are not worth locking down the entire country. I said from almost the beginning, and this has been confirmed by most European methods of dealing with contagion, that lockdowns do not work to decrease the death numbers.
The best strategy has always been a very short lockdown, to allow the hospitals to ramp up for this kind of increased demand, followed by normal living, with those slight precautions. The effective use of therapeutics, and the limited immunity imparted by close relatives of the virus, insure that the actually death rates among adults with no co-morbidities remains extremely low.
In point of fact, the actually death rate of any person in the US exposed to the virus who is under the age of seventy is now only .5 percent. That means that 99.5 % of all the people who contract covid can expect to survive. Quarantining only the most vulnerable, and giving them access to the best possible care, is the best result that can be hoped for. Otherwise, other conditions go untreated.
The dangers of alcoholism, drug addiction, mental disorders, physical abuse and the regular procedures and checkups that are not addressed because of fear and absence from proper care take a far greater toll on our society, not to mention the economic effects. The best way to undermine a virus of this nature is to defeat it through herd immunity.
I suspect that, even without a vaccine, you should see a significant decrease in the daily increase in transmission, sometime this winter. But even if that estimate is off by some number of months, this is still the best method of finally ridding our country of the secondary effects, as well as the primary cause. Viruses should never be politicized. They should be defeated.
Remember that over three-million old people die in the United States, every year. Is it any surprise that flus of all kinds take down the weakest individuals? An expectation of no deaths is an impossible dream. No action on the part of the government, or the medical community, could have achieved that result, not once the virus was introduced into the population.
From the CDC website: Masks are recommended as a simple barrier to help prevent respiratory droplets from traveling into the air and onto other people when the person wearing the mask coughs, sneezes, talks, or raises their voice. This is called source control. This recommendation is based on what we know about the role respiratory droplets play in the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, paired with emerging evidence from clinical and laboratory studies that shows masks reduce the spray of droplets when worn over the nose and mouth. COVID-19 spreads mainly among people who are in close contact with one another (within about 6 feet), so the use of masks is particularly important in settings where people are close to each other or where social distancing is difficult to maintain.
Simple common sense, no one is saying Masks are 100% full proof, nothing is.
It is a crucial step in a multi layered approach that all combine to help reduce the spread and also the viral load. That’s all we can do.
Simple common sense risk management should be an easy sell on an aviation blog.
Pure internet fiction that masks don’t “do anything”
From CDC numbers, those under 27 or so your 99.5% number is about right. For those 25-64 years old the fatality rate is 19.1%. That’s the science. Not your opinion of it. http://www.acsh.org/news/2020/06/23/coronavirus-covid-deaths-us-age-race-14863
Making up stuff and claiming it’s “science” is lipstick on a pig. Same with cherry-picking studies (usually of questionable quality). 100% consensus seldom happens even within the legitimate scientific community, especially these days where outliers get the headlines. Earth is Round gets no attention, yet claim Earth is Flat and TV cameras appear on your doorstep.
If you wish to make the ‘lotta people going to die anyway’ argument, the yearly average death rates are well-known and quite steady. The number of deaths this year above this average implies that USA covid-caused deaths are at least 100,000 *more* than the 225,000 presently accounted for.
Again, keep up the chaos of pretending all is normal and this “flu” is harmless and OSH ’21 is DOA along with another half million Americans.