Bubble Boy Takes to the Air

Last week Jon Stewart weighed in on the Republican/Fox News hissy fit over the White House inviting the rapper Common to a poetry reading.  Stewart’s segment — especially his  masterful takedown of the deeply stupid Sean Hannity — was brilliant.  If you missed it, here’s a link to the video.

Then, last night, MSNBC’s Ed Schultz showed clips from yesterday’s debate on the “Common controversy” between Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart on O’Reilly’s Fox News show.  In Ed Schultz’s edited version, Stewart mopped the floor with Papa Bear.  Later that night, my curiosity piqued, I watched the actual debate on Fox News (that’s how it rolls in my time zone, peeps), and of course it was edited to make it appear that O’Reilly won.

So … one point to the polarization of political debate in this country; zero points to objective truth.  We can all stay happy in our separate epistemic bubbles.  But what else is new?

What did interest me, a little, was the polarized approach to a separate issue addressed on both the Ed Schultz and Bill O’Reilly shows: Newt Gingrich’s branding of Barack Obama as a “food stamp president.”  Schultz’s segment presented Gingrich’s statement as a shout-out to racists in the Republican Party.  O’Reilly’s segment, of course, called the liberal media racist for even hinting Gingrich might have a racist bone in his body.

The funny part was O’Reilly’s “tame negro” guest panelist, who echoed O’Reilly’s “who could possibly think this was racist” line but who, the entire time, was visibly choking on it.  At the end of the segment, unable to hold it in any longer, the tame negro blurted out his belief that in certain aspects of American political and social life, small vestiges of racism may still exist.  O’Reilly grudgingly admitted there might be an element of truth in that.  A word of apology for inadequate linkage: dig as I might, I cannot find an unedited video of the O’Reilly segment in question … the tame negro has been excised, it seems.

That’s about as honest as it ever gets over at Fox News, and I was glad I watched last night.  But I have to tell you, it’ll be a long time before I watch Fox News again.  I like my epistemic bubble.  Bubble boy, that’s me!

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And that is about all of that I can stand.  Knowing that at most points in our history we Americans have been even more fractious and polarized than we are now doesn’t make what passes for debate today any easier to stomach.

So how about a flying story?  I’m getting ready to start leading walking tours at the Pima Air & Space Museum, and I need the practice!

In 1977, while I was an Air Force instructor pilot at Vance AFB in Enid, Oklahoma, I started a civilian flying training program at the local airport on weekends, thinking I might want to fly for the airlines some day.  The fixed base operator at Woodring Field, Bill Sellers, ran a well-regarded flight school, and I earned my certified flight instructor rating in one of his airplanes.  A month or so after I became a CFI, Bill bought a brand new Great Lakes Trainer and decided to offer a course in aerobatics.

I was Bill’s first aerobatic student, and after finishing the course became one of Bill’s aerobatic instructors, actually earning an occasional paycheck in the back seat of the Great Lakes.  Snap rolls, outside loops, Cuban 8s, hammerheads, you name it … it was great fun.  We flew many of these maneuvers in the T-37 at Vance AFB, but not all of them, and doing aerobatics in an open biplane, with your head out in the breeze, was another order of aerobatics altogether.

The Lakes, like any taildragger, demanded a lot of attention on landing.  The center of gravity shifted aft once the tailwheel was down, and unless you kept it in its place with your feet on the rudder pedals, the tail would try to swap ends with the front.  This was a real danger during crosswind landings.  One day during my checkout program, Bill Sellers’ son Rusty, who was my instructor that day, decided he’d better land the Lakes himself, since we had a 13- or 14-knot direct crosswind across the runway, right at the Great Lake’s placard limit.  And sure enough, he ground-looped it.  Thank god it wasn’t me!  Bill Sellers had death in his eyes when we taxied up to the FBO a few minutes later, fabric hanging from the bottom of a bent wingtip.

But that’s not my war story.  I was just a passenger for that one, so it doesn’t count.  My war story unfolded one day while I was at the controls, practicing snap rolls with Bill in the back seat.  Or rather, it didn’t … but I didn’t know about it until after I landed.

I always did a post-flight inspection after landing.  Aerobatic maneuvers are hard on an airplane, even one designed for aerobatics, so you always give the plane a good look-over afterward.  That day, walking around the front of the Lakes, I noticed a half-circle gouge on the front of the engine cowling, right behind the propeller hub.  It looked like the engine had twisted to one side during flight, allowing the back of the propeller hub to dig into the cowling.  “Bill,” I said, “what’s this?”  We unbuttoned the engine panels and took them off, and discovered to our horror that the motor mounts had broken during our flight … probably from side-to-side forces generated while I was doing snap roll after snap roll.

Does that sound like a big deal?  Trust me, it was.  Once the mounts had broken, another snap roll or two might have caused the entire engine and propeller to rip away from the front of the airplane.  If the spinning prop didn’t chop up a wing … or me and Bill, sitting right behind it … the sudden absence of several hundred pounds from the nose would have turned the Great Lakes into a tumbling basket of wood and fabric, and we’d have certainly had to bail out.

We were very quiet after that post-flight inspection, and after Bill replaced the motor mounts, neither of us ever practiced snap rolls again.

After retelling that war story, I really do want to climb back inside my bubble!