Not Ready To Talk Yet… Or Later

What Joshua Foust speaks of in regards to the great deal of incredibly loud and pointless chatter about the Afghan elections is actually how I’ve grown to feel about blogging.

Much of the time I no longer feel comfortable spending a fair amount of time offering relatively uninformed opinions on current topics that I don’t have a formal training in or firsthand experience of.

So much of the blogosphere is a well-meaning bout of “I don’t really know but let me throw this out here for you all” type of conversation. Its good 10% of the time for fostering ideas, challenging a prevailing narrative, etc. but you still have that 90% that is pure cotton candy.

The Medical Helicopter Industry Grows Up….Maybe?

The medical helicopter industry is one that my father has spent much of his post-Army career in as a lead mechanic. The kinds of shenanigans discussed in this Washington Post story are all too well-known in our family, especially because we suffered financially on numerous occasions when my father would cease employment with a company he felt was risking the lives of crew and patients by demanding steep, untenable cuts to repair budgets or to toe the line on safety regs (or just outright violate them) in order to obtain more profit. My father has an old-school character of integrity and stubbornness that seemed to prevent him from taking such blatant defiance of common safety sense lightly or quietly.

People die as a result of such short-sighted decisions, and the FAA and others do very little about it in this industry. Maybe, maybe that will change, as this article seems to imply.

In my time in the Navy, my convictions about the need for stringent aviation regulation for carriers and providers serving the public was reinforced by the instances of “gundecking” (falsification of maintenance documents) that seemed to happen every month on the ship, sometimes leading to terrible near or actual mishaps. Always, the sailor responsible was held to account in a manner which was highly detrimental to their immediate finances, reputation among the crew and career. Yet, many of these instances were people who just “didn’t feel like doing it” or who “got in too deep and didn’t ask for help”.

Now, if sailors are willing to risk literally everything (from money to career) for mundane reasons, I am supposed to believe ardent de-regulators and reflexively anti-government forces that the FAA and assorted regulations are unnecessary or too powerful?  There may be a good rationale for de-regulation in other industries, but we need a much, much more powerful FAA or a private organization replacing it in the future with incentives to harshly police the aviation industry on such matters.

Justice In Virginia

Background:

Arguing that DNA and forensic evidence points to a prison inmate who has confessed as the sole perpetrator of the crimes, they called on Gov. Tim Kaine to pardon the sailors.

“After careful review of the evidence we have arrived at one unequivocal conclusion: The Norfolk Four are innocent,” said Jay Cochran, a former assistant director of the F.B.I. and former special agent who served at the bureau for 27 years. “We believe a tragic mistake has occurred in the case of these four Navy men, and we are calling on Governor Kaine to grant them immediate pardons.”

The former agents join a long list of unusual supporters, including four former Virginia attorneys general; 12 former state and federal judges and prosecutors; and a past president of the Virginia Bar Association, who have called for the men to be pardoned.

In January 2006, 13 jurors from two of the sailors’ trials signed letters and affidavits saying they now believed the men were innocent.

Governor Kaine concedes the evidence against three Norfolk sailors convicted of rape and murder was sorely lacking and has conditionally pardoned them today.
Thank God. The Norfolk Four are now free.