Guns and jets

by philg

My friend Brad, a jet pilot with heroic flying skills, graciously agreed to help me with the Commercial maneuvers and precision landings today.  We hauled N505WT out of its hangar and headed out to Worcester with the GPS turned off and the gyro-stabilized compass covered up.  Flying along at 2500′ it was actually a bit tough to pick out landmarks from the VFR chart.  After 10 landings we decided it was time for some of the free cookies that they bake at the Worcester FBO (airplane gas station) so we taxied into the ramp.  The scene was one of utter desolation.  The main terminal building looked empty.  The last scheduled airline flights from Worcester ceased about one year ago.  The general aviation area contained a small collection of cheap piston-powered airplanes (like mine!).  At Bedford, N505WT’s home airport, there is always at least $300 million of private jets on the ramp, waiting to take hard-working public corporation executives from golf game to weekend house.  The woman behind the desk confirmed that not a single jet had landed at Worcester all day.


As we were starting up N505WT a good-sized business jet was taxiing in.  A van drove up to meet the passengers at the side of the $10 million twin-turbojet-powered plane.  “What luxury!” we thought.  “This is the only way to travel.  They’re probably just back from a resort in Mexico.”  A couple of guys got out of the van and walked around the plane wearing guns.  Security for someone important!  The one passenger got out, a teenager wearing a rather plain jumpsuit.  Then we noticed that his legs were chained together…


Yet another thing that America’s richest and poorest citizens share:  traveling by private jet.


Oh yes, speaking of guns.  A friend from the MIT Media Lab sent around a home video yesterday.  It seems that he has put the filmmaking skills that he learned there to good use and has made effective use of the Internet in distributing his creation.  Click right on the following link and then “Save Target As” before playing from your own hard disk in a separate player window (100 or 200% size is best): boyhood dream.


Twenty years ago people talked about Arpanet/Internet leading to an explosion in video creativity and distribution but it just wasn’t practical with the available bandwidth and percentage of consumers hooked up.  Today all the pieces are in place.

11 thoughts on “Guns and jets”

  1. I thought you were going to mention John Kerry’s new Secret Service detail flying onto the ramp. Apparently they swarmed his Beacon hill hood with SUVs and some of the rich neighbors are pissed about their presence. After all, his wife paid out of pocket to have a fire hydrant moved so they’d have more parking. Here’s the article: http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2004/02/21/kerry_candidacy_hits_home/ Now some rich people know what it’s like to have an excessive, unwanted police presence!

  2. I thought it was a basic rule of aviation that you can have brave pilots, old pilots but almost never a combination of both.

    Back to the jets: That’s one of my lotto fantasies: Drive up to a small airport in a limo with a bunch of suburbans riding security, then hop on a jet to take me to a golf course for a few hours 🙂

  3. Ummmm, I don’t know about you, but does “explosion in video creativity” really have to mean the filming of how a machine-gun is fired? And that is not to point out what this type of machine gun has meant to countless creative minds in the past 62 years…

    Maybe I just don’t get the irony?!?

  4. Alex,

    There is nothing wrong with machine guns. I have never seen a machine gun jump up and shoot somebody. What it really needs is a person behind it that wishes to kill his/her fellow human beings.

    “More than 840 million people in the world are malnourished—799 million of them are from the developing world. More than 153 million of them are under the age of 5.” <- http://www.bread.org/hungerbasics/international.html

    So, is that video more evil than our nice hot dinner?

  5. Yoni,

    There is nothing wrong with drugs like cocaine either. I have never seen cocaine jump up and smack up someone’s nose.

  6. There *is* nothing wrong with drugs like Cocaine as it might be useful to someone in a way that you or I don’t understand — so it should be legal (although hopefully undesirable). It is funny how older deadly weapons, like spears and bows, are no longer considered a threat when they murdered countless people. Some day when we have energy rays, machineguns will be more freely available because no one will consider them a significant danger in much the same way that you can still mail-order the very deadly muzzleloaders of the Civil War (and they would have been able to do the same job as the Bushmaster used by the DC Sniper since he only single-fired each shot).

  7. I don’t get it! This video is stupid — it’s just a guy loading and firing a machine gun. Is Phil being sarcastic?

  8. To “A Random One” and Alexander Steckel – I think there is a fair chance Philip was being ironic. He is not known for his love of the MIT Media Lab. Have a look at the humour section of his personal web site, which will also give you a better understanding of his sense of humour.

  9. OK, got it. HOWEVER: A lot of stupid videos have been on the internet and non-ironically described as neat/creative/inventive or sometimes “genius.” I guess looking at a video on a computer screen makes something more visionary for some reason.

  10. Very good observation about the similarities between the rich and the poor. In America, you can’t do or say much unless you’re too poor to give a flying f*ck or too rich to give a damn. Think about it, a divorce will wipe you out if you’re middle class, say with a net worth between $100K – $1 Million, but you’re a $5000-naire, then what difference does it make? Yeah, she can keep the 1989 Dodge Omni and the double-wide. If you’re loaded, what difference does it make if you lose the vacation home in the Hamptons? You’d still have your penthouse in the Dakota and the house on Martha’s Vineyard. If you’re poor, you can pretty much say whatever you want. For one, nobody’s paying attention to what you’re saying. Even if they were paying attention and happen to disagree, they aren’t going to dispute you because they have much more to lose in a confrontation than you. If you’re loaded, then, by God, whatever you say must be really important and visionary. Remember Larry Ellison’s Network Computer back in 1995? Any computer engineer with 2 brain cells could see that bandwidth limitation, security, and cost were limitations that technology couldn’t solve for at least 10 more years. Even if the technology were feasible, nobody would want a dumb terminal that becomes useless the moment the network connection went down.

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