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March 25, 2004
If God had intended us to fly .... ?
Today we have a very large helicopter clattering away overhead. It is quite distracting as he/she/it is lifting personnel and equipment from one part of the site and then flying low around the site to an exercise area near my office. He then spends about 5 minutes at a time in a hover while winching the men and kit down to the exercise. While he is passing overhead, the building shakes and while he is hovering (about 200 metres from my desk) you have difficulty hearing anything on the telephone. Mind you, he is quieter than the old Sea Kings and Westlands we used to get!
That said, my son is a recently qualified helicopter pilot and is now working up his hours so he can convert to the new JAA Civil Pilot category with the help - thankfully! - of his employers. This is not a cheap occupation and it requires an enormous amount of dedication and concentration to fly one of these brutes. An after dinner speaker and ex-pilot I once heard stated that helicopters flew in defiance of the known laws of physics. To quote: "You pour on massive amounts of power, and against all known laws of physics, this thing lifts off. It should, in obedience to the natural laws of torque and power, screw itself straight into the ground."
My son learned to fly one of these things in a Robinson R 22. The R 22 is not a particularly sophisticated machine - which makes it ideal for learning to fly them in one sense - but its controls are very sensitive, which makes it quite unforgiving. As my son described it - you think about moving the controls and the heli responds to that. He enjoyed flying it, even revelling in being able to fly it well and earning praise from both instructors and examiners for his natural ability (PROUD PARENT plug!), so he was naturally a bit upset to receive the photo below of what remains of his favourite machine.
A fellow pupil had moved on to become an instructor - and crashed the little machine rather badly with a student on board. Both, we hear, survived with some injuries, a very fortunate state of affairs. As for the small school that owned it, and another like it, it may be an open question as to whether they can survive or not.
There is always the question of whether or not our technology is getting too complicated and therefore compromising our safety after an accident like this. It can be compared to the debate about speed limits for motorists in one sense, as it is always driven by those who insist that if everyone is forced to accept their limits as being for everyone's safety, we would still have a horseman with a red flag preceding every "horseless carriage".
This is the thinking that Flanders and Swann famously lampooned in their show "At the drop of a hat", with the remark that "If God had meant us to fly - He would never have given us the railways!"
The truth is that we all have to find our own limits. My son has done something that I would not be confident enough to attempt - he now flies helicopters. By the same token he has frankly told me that he thinks I am certifiable for fighting fires. He has set his goals, as I have mine. These are different and we each have a different way of approaching our targets, but, it is the challenge, the need to explore our limits that is what drives us. Deprive us of those challenges and the freedom to pursue them and you really would not want to have us around, because the energy we put into that pursuit would then be bottled up in frustration, a very dangerous and destructive force.
Those who seek to tie society up in cotton wool wrapped "safety" cocoons are likely to create a society of frustrated, thrill seeking, and destructive misfits with no way of releasing their energies. Oops, I think I have just described modern Britain!
Posted by The Gray Monk at March 25, 2004 03:02 PM