Balloon Boy verdict

As I write this some judge is reading the verdict in the trial of the two doinks who faked the Balloon Boy event a few months ago. You know... the one where they pretended that their kid was accidentally launched in a balloon that most of us looked at and said it could only loft about 20 pounds. Yet the 24/7 cable TV media picked it us as a real event and were totally suckered in. That Balloon Boy spoof is what I'm talking about here.

Turns out the parents are a pair of con-artists looking to audition in order to land a reality TV show.

If I were the judge, I'd give them a dose of their own medicine and my verdict reading would go like this...

Judge: Okay... I find you both guilty, and I sentence you to death by hanging, the sentence to be carried out immediately- bailiff... get a rope.

Defense attorney: Your honor, this is highly irregular!

Judge: So is the crime- the punishment there by fits the crime... bailiff, where's that rope?

Bailiff: Ummm *hurumph*

Judge: Don't hurumph me, I'm the Fu$%ing judge here, get a rope! Come on now, chop, chop... we have a lot of cases on the docket and a lot more idiots to hang, let's move along- take 'em out and swing 'em both, it's almost time to break for lunch.

Defense: Your honor- who will raise the children?

Judge: Turn the little nippers loose in the desert and let 'em raise themselves- they'll have a better chance than with these two.

Now you know why I'm not a judge.

Apollo 11... launch day, 40 years ago

It was a fine summer morning in Saginaw, Michigan on the 16th day of July, 1969 and by nine o'clock that morning, most of us kids had already been outside playing for a while. I had no idea that the events that were up-coming would have a profound effect on my life- sure I'd been told a zillion times that history would be made that day, but in the mind of a 12 year old, that meant little.

Although documentaries of the era would have you believe that every place you looked there were hippies on acid with flower face paint ambling around blowing bubbles and angry black people marching down every street and burning buildings as F-4s dropped napalm on hills nearby, but that is as far from the truth as those events were from our neighborhoods. For most of the nation this was a time when most of us were living a much more near Leave It To Beaver existence than the one depicted in the documentaries. Sure- moms didn't wear a dress to do housework and dad was only seen in a suit when going to a funeral, but other than that we were happy and safe. My friends and I played outside totally unsupervised from the time we got out of bed in the morning until the streetlights came on in the evening. We made good use of every second of summer weather. It was an era of plain white T-shirts, Red Ball Jets sneakers, skinned knees and grass stains.

There was no escaping the TV coverage of the Apollo 11 mission as all of the networks had been on the air live since since before dawn. Bergman did some of his best space savvy droning on ABC in contrast to the outward disdain for the space program presented by Chet Huntley and his otherwise indifferent partner David Brinkley on NBC. Over on CBS they had pulled out all of the plugs for this mission. Cronkite had been teamed up for the first time with astronaut Wally Schirra in pairing that would become nearly as legendary as the flights they would cover. All three networks ran the standard clips of the astronauts, eating, suiting and walking out... although a close look at the suit-up would have revealed that the event shown was actually taped during the Countdown Demonstration Test back during the first week of June, (The tell-tale clue to that is that in the "suit-up" footage, the astronaut's suits are missing the Apollo 11 mission patch.) Of course the fine producers at NBC could not resist the urge to temper what excite may be generated and go out and "ask" the "public" what they thought of the mission. So they went out and found that well known Apollo Cheerleader, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy who, of course went on camera to moan about all of those poor and hunnngry people in America, who you'd think were dropping dead in our streets by in bunches, and he then acted as if the cancellation of this mission, at this point would somehow instantly cure all of that. Less than a year later, the producers at NBC and Rev. Ralph would get their wish. The Apollo program would be cancelled and an estimated total of less than $300 million dollars out of the $24 billion invested in Apollo would be returned to the federal coffers and rapidly turned into bureaucratic cellulite. No ghettos would be cured, no extra programs to feed those herds of "The hungry" would appear and thousands of aerospace workers would lose their jobs.

My mom called me to the TV less than two minutes before Apollo 11 lifted off. At the time I was only marginally interested in the space program. I'd watched with a kid's interest, all of the previous flights and now stood by the TV and watched as Apollo 11 counted down to zero. The images of the Saturn V roaring to life were familiar as were the images of the ascent and staging. I recall that as Apollo 11 cleared the tower, my mom said "Oh God... they're taking such an awful chance." I remember looking at her and saying to myself "What chance?" NASA had this all planned out... I thought... so completely that every detail was covered. I recall feeling that my mom's concern just showed that she didn't understand how good NASA was at doing this. When the coverage switched to animation, I went back outside to play.

Things in my world were immediately different from that moment, however. It was like a space program infection had suddenly spread to everyone everywhere. No matter where you looked or who you spoke to the subject of Apollo and spaceflight seemed to pop up. The other kids in my neighborhood played space and space toys of ever sort seemed to come into their possession out of the blue. I went back to my room that evening and got out my model CSM and LM that I'd build with remedial modeling skills. I practiced some docking and undocking and did a lunar landing on my bedroom floor. For the first time in my 12 years of life, I recall having the strong desire to find out more about this and I wanted to do so before the astronauts, now headed toward the moon, arrived there.

Michael's will and Mark's spill

Today, while all... I repeat ALL of the 24 hour media channels leached upon the subjects of Michael Jackson's last will and South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford's fall from grace in nauseating detail other event went unnoticed. Lawyers, doctors, music hucksters of all levels were mixed with marriage counselors, jilted spouses and vote grubs in a continuous coverage that was interrupted only by commercials for lawyers, doctors, vote grubs and tax fix-its. Everyone wanted in on the act- Al Sharp-tongue was air-dropped into LA like a Navy seal- no camera would go without his noseprint on the lens. Indeed there were no other events in human history going on today. Even radio talk shows went on about how they shouldn't be focused on Mike and Mark... as they focused on... Mike and Mark.

One event, however went totally overlooked by the 24 hour servers of sound bites. Down at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), the STS-127 stack was tank-tested. Over a period of more tha three hours, tons of LOX and LH2 were pumped into the stack in an effort to test repairs to the Ground Umbilical Carrier Plate (GUCP) whose leaking condition scrubbed the STS-127 mission twice. Hundreds of highly skilled and highly educated engineers and technicians participated in the extremely hazardous test of the most complex machine on earth. It demanded that humanity put forward the best of the people we have- all working together as a huge team. Every move that they made was pre-planned and critical as at best the External Tank (ET) would fill and act normally, but at worst it could explode like a small atomic bomb. At length, when tanking was complete, the Ice Team went out and personally inspected the vehicle. Following their inspection the ET was drained of its fuel and oxidizer and the preparations were begun for another launch. It was a high-risk day at KSC and it was an important event in our technical history. It was where, once again, we proved that if humans are smart enough and careful enough, and innovative enough we can actually do anything. It is a lesson that has been demonstrated countless times at KSC and Cape Canaveral. Yet, until hours after the event it was completely ignored in the media, that is enamored with a dead self-mutilated "king of pop" and a cheating lying politician who cannot even find the courage to keep his pants zipped.

Although it is bright day for everyone at KSC, it is a dark time for anyone who happens to be exposed to the news media. The network's nose for news is on a par with the one on Michael Jackson's face.

CAL Captain Dies in flight- news media goes nuts

Aviation made the major news outlets today with a sad event in flight. On board a trans-Atlantic CAL 777 the captain passed away in flight. This sorrow full event, of course, ignited the swamp gas in the 24 hour news networks and let slip the leashes of their on-call "aviation experts." I, however, now had to watch the coverage in order to attempt to get a few insane tid-bits that may be used in a future cartoon.

Along the twisted path of the news coverage of this event, where the newscasters try to cover in detail things to which they have no access to ANY details, my TV's "Dumb" meter tends to peg. Although FOX News managed to get a real airline pilot on the phone, they get credit for the least dumb, yet dumb anyway, question:

"Do you think they informed the people in the back (passengers) that the captain had died?"

As a former airline captain myself, as well as a long-time FO (First Officer), I could not help but answer that one aloud to my TV...

"Are you f#%kin' nuts?!"

Although I cannot speak for other airline pilots, in a situation like that I personally would turn into Captain Over from the movie "Airplane" calmly pointing out sights of interest out the passenger's windows as other crew members drop like flies. What did the reporter want to hear anyhow? "Oh sure I'd tell the PAX, after all, you can never have enough panic on board." Although there are times when you want to keep your passengers fully informed, when the pilot sitting next to you drops dead probably isn't one of them.

Then there was the CNN reporter who babbled in front of a screen showing Newark and drooled out some nonsense about how the aircraft may have been diverted if there had been a crosswind of over 30 knots because the FO may not have been able to land in any sort of crosswind. He then went on to say that the 777 got to the airport and found "... just 3 miles of visibility." Wooooo... 3 miles viz in a 777... wooooo scary.... much drama.... Shoot, I can recall days when I looked at the destination weather and said "500 and a mile? COOL! It's about time we caught a break." The fact is, for those non-career pilots reading this, that to a professional airline pilot all of those numbers describing ceiling and visibility and winds are simply a part of your day's work. The weather is what it is when you get there and the odds are that if it's good enough to start the approach that's all that really matters. We do not sit in the cockpit and fret about it- we just go in and do our job. The weather reports just give you a heads up before you get there and the odds are that no matter how bad it is, you've probably made approaches in a lot worse. That reporter's never been in a professional pilot's seat, otherwise he'd have known that "3 miles of visibility" is duck soup. Of course he's also probably sweating it out in the hope that he doesn't sound too technical or correct, otherwise CNN management may can him for actually knowing what he's talking about... like they did Miles O'Brien.

Dumbest of the questions came from one of the networks whose acronym name starts with a "C" when the meat puppet looking into the camera asked their expert on-call if he'd ever had a captain die on him. Of course the poor slob on the other end of the phone answered "no" but I wished that question had been asked of me- because I would have gone a bit farther.

Q: "Have you ever had a captain die on you?"

My A: "No, but I've flown with a few that I wished would die sitting next to me."

Then I'd proceed to elaborate until they took me off the air.

You would be amazed at how many people out there actually think that airline FOs (or as it was put over and over again in news reports "co-pilots") cannot fly the freaking airplane. I've had neighbors come up and ask me "How on earth did the "co-pilot" land that thing?" From watching the news networks, it is easy to see why regular people are so ill-informed... okay... stupid. It's because their only source of information is the stupid news media. Thank goodness my neighbors have me to turn to. I simply tell them that the blow-up autopilot in the movie "Airplane" really exists. In fact, it is FAA certified and every 90 days a mechanic has to inflate it and check for leaks. In case of a water landing it can even be used as a flotation device for the captain... just ask Sully.

The bottom line is that the surviving crew of CAL Flight 61 did exactly what they've been trained to do. In every training cycle you fly the sim dozens of times and almost never do an uneventful flight. You are always dealing with multiple and often odd-ball failures- including the death of the other pilot. Sure, the crew did a great job, but professional aviation demands that you do a great job every time you do your job. I was once told that it is the only job in the world where you are expected to do it perfectly every single time, and no one notices- from my experience, that is true.

Klyde Morris 01/19/09