by
Darryl Phillips
Sallisaw, OK....For a long time I've been intending to explain how THE OTHER WING schedule works. Several readers have mentioned recently that I had missed writing my regular column. Well, not really. GAN&F is published every two weeks, and since there are 52 weeks in a year you receive 26 issues. THE OTHER WING appears in the last issue of each month. Usually I'm in the second issue, but a couple of times a year there are three issues in a month. In that event I'm in the third one. This year it happens in March and September.
So usually you'll find me every other time, but twice a year an extra issue sneaks in. Just keep reading GAN&F, sooner or later THE OTHER WING will be back.
******
Publisher Dave Sclair has only issued one guideline: It has to be about airplanes. Within that broad criteria I've been given full permission to write it the way I see it. My thanks to Dave for this freedom, I know sometimes he agrees with what I say, and sometimes he doesn't. It's certainly a privilege to be able to present a different viewpoint. When the letters come in, I urge Editor Kirk Gormley to "print 'em all". A variety of perspectives is vital, if we all believed the same thing it would be a dull world indeed. I read many aviation publications on a regular basis, and I always begin by reading the letters to the editor. Whether you agree, or disagree, or have a third point of view, keep those letters coming in.
This month's column was going to be about Free Flight. Richard L. Collins has one view in the May issue of FLYING, and Phil Boyer has another in the same issue of AOPA PILOT. Both are important and worthwhile reading for any pilot interested in the future of general aviation. There are also interesting Free Flight threads on Compuserve's AVSIG. The Mode T/Taillight group has a somewhat different slant on what we need if we are to fly free.
But I'm not going to do that column this month. I'm going to violate Dave's rule and write something that is not about airplanes. Yet, in a way, perhaps it is.
Yesterday I visited the bomb site at Oklahoma City. It was Sunday, May 7, two and a half weeks after the blast. For the first time since the explosion there was nothing going on in the ruins of the building. No digging, no searching, no gathering of evidence. The barriers have been moved in somewhat, in places my wife and I were able to walk within a half block of the Federal building, other places we had to stay two blocks away. In about two hours we completed the full circle.
Television does not begin to convey the scene. I was prepared for the Murrah building to look as it did, I wasn't ready for the dozens of small businesses that were damaged, many can never be rebuilt. Several major buildings may be beyond repair. Much of the broken glass has been swept up but in places we were walking through it. There has been a lot of rain since the blast. Crossing one street we had to detour around the trash that had failed to wash down the storm sewer. Then I realized that this was not the usual collection of street trash, this was contents blown from the kitchen cupboards of highrise apartments more than a block away.
I wasn't shocked to see that there was no glass left in the highrise on the side facing the blast. Bent and distorted aluminum window frames revealed how powerfully the pressure had forced inward. But I was not prepared for the other face of that building, a half block further from the bomb. It had no glass either, the shock wave had traveled through the building and exited this side, the frames were bent outward.
We were able to look inside many of the destroyed businesses. After all, there was no barrier but a strip of yellow police tape, sometimes not even that. Suspended ceilings were tangled all over the offices, desks were overturned, blood was sometimes evident, rubber gloves lay where the rescue workers had discarded them. It was an experience not to be forgotten.
At one location, the chainlink fence had been turned into a shrine. There were wreaths of flowers, photographs of loved ones, notes of sympathy, letters scribbled in crayon from children to friends who were lost. Someone had left a stuffed toy, a pink and white Easter bunny.
Bureaucrats. The Alfred P. Murrah building housed the bureaus, those bureaus were staffed by bureaucrats. Federal bureaucrats. We all complain about the bureaucrats. But they did not deserve this. The children did not deserve this. The tire store, the dry cleaners, the small loan agency, the church, they did not deserve this.
We try to understand the motivation behind this act. We cannot.
A few miles to the southwest, beyond the blast damage, are more bureaucrats. FAA bureaucrats. Working from that office were the bureaucrats who conspired to take Bob Hoover's most precious possession, his pilot's license. Do they have any understanding of how much damage they did? There were no shattered buildings, no TV pictures, but those few bureaucrats did immense damage nonetheless. They took something from us all.
Of course there is no direct connection between the Oklahoma City bombing and the action of those despicable Oklahoma City FAA employees. But there is a direct connection between the way FAA Administrator Hinson refused to answer questions on the Bob Hoover subject and the way Americans feel about bureaucrats. There is a connection between the NPRM that threatens to take away the medical certificates of thousands of safe pilots and our opinion of bureaucrats.
We try to understand the motivation of a bureaucracy. And we cannot.
Is there a lesson in Oklahoma City? I hope so. We need to remember that those bureaucrats, deep down inside, are real living, breathing, feeling human beings. They have families, they have hopes and dreams of the future. They deserve the best that life has to offer.
Perhaps the bureaucrats need to remember the same about us.