this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2024
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Pilots are in general not "rich people". Many go into debt to get into the profession. Taylor Swift isn't flying her own jet.
On the other hand, if the eyesight of a pilot gets damaged, it can fuck up their career that they put insane money into - again, likely from debt. Not speaking about having to switch professions and losing a life's dream.
Drag isn't talking about passenger and freight aircraft. Drag is talking about hobby aircraft. Rich people don't fly planes for fun where you live?
That's what I mean, that's not rich people. Most of those are going to be training flights, statistically with both the instructor and the instructee being in various stages of "let's get into horrific debt so I can fly an airliner at some point" pipeline.
The minority of people who fly for fun are going to be doctors, engineers, and people like that who are working their asses off like everyone else, just lucky enough to afford doing this for a few hours every month, that costs a significant portion of their money.
Those people will also be less trained than airliner pilots, thus more in danger of fucking up and dying if you fuck with them.
Let people be.
I worked at a local TV station and we occasionally did coverage at the local airport that had a lot of small planes and no commercial flights. Like you said, we're not talking about one percenters here. We're talking plumbers that are way into flying. Not even necessarily someone who makes decent money like a plumber. It could be, just like a person in a menial job who spends all their money fixing up a muscle car, a similar situation.
People who fly small planes, as far as I can tell, do it because they're super into flying planes. It really has nothing to do with their economic status beyond "has enough money to buy a small plane." If you get an ultralight that you can just tow to the airport and don't need a hangar for it, you're talking maybe a $20,000 investment. I've seen ultralights for sale for a lot less.
They usually don't even have that kind of money here. It's either a group lease or mostly rentals. But yeah, GA pilots are a very dedicated bunch. And they are usually good people too.
That we have a society where people are allowed to commit this kind of violence without consequence is horrible.
The rich people flying their own aircraft are almost always flying very small prop-planes that make less noise than the average semi-truck. The oligarch-parasites are never flying their own planes, so taking down an aircraft that they are in is going to result in multiple casualties of innocent people just trying to make a living. The only pilots who don't go into debt to get their license are military veterans who just paid for their training with years of their lives and a decent chance of racking up some not-insignificant PTSD.
I can see where you are coming from on this, but you're just wrong on this one. Luigi had the right idea by causing zero ancillary casualties and preventing harm from coming to anyone who was not his intended target. Any act of violence that doesn't take that into account is just expanding on the already pervasive suffering in our society. As an EMT, I helped care for a toddler that had their distal femur obliterated by a stray shot in a drive-by shooting. I was in the ER, so I never found out what ended up happening to them after we stabilized them and sent them off to the trauma and orthopedic surgeons, but with my medical education since then, my best guess is an above-the-knee amputation because the growth plate was destroyed. So I've seen innocent bystander casualties before, in person, and there is no excuse for causing that kind of suffering. The impact that can come from inflicting damage on innocent bystanders is profound and no one with remotely decent virtues could inflict that kind of pain intentionally.
not really. Can't remember the last time I saw a plane that wasn't a 747 or similar
So you don't have little Cessnas that fly in circles over people's houses for shits and giggles?
No, that's usually a rural thing. And those are usually cropdusters manned by farmers who, while I may not agree with politically speaking (based on the 8500 flags per section of irrigation), are doing a very expensive component of their job. And even then it's usually farmers with massive acrages that necessitated a plane over a Sprayer Tractor. They might do tricks and stuff when turning around but excessive trick flying about is how you wreck your plane.
Sure some wealthy people do have these private little planes/helicopters for recreational use. But they're far from cheap and still must answer to the FAA during flight. They pay insurance by the hour when in flight, and lying/fudging numbers can cost your pilot licence. (Google says it can take about 6 months for your 20 hours of practice flight time you pay for, totalling approximately $10-20k)
If you have an issue with a pilot flying too low, call the local airport, Tower Control might just find out a new plane owner has not reported their flights.
If the pilots don't want to be blinded, they can negotiate with the people on the ground. Lasers are the only weapon most people have to fight back against aircraft violence and seek an equitable resolution. Pilots shouldn't be above the rest of the world, detached from all the consequences of their actions.
Noise is not violence in the same way that murder is violence. And if your issue is them flying near residential areas, that increases the likelihood of another, uninvolved, innocent person being injured or killed in the crash. As I said in my other comment, violence inflicted on bystanders is abhorrent and not acceptable. Noise is a nuisance, murder is a permanent bad "solution" to a temporary minor problem in this case.
Noise is absolutely physical violence and inflicting it on thousands of people at once is unforgivable.
If you're talking about the constant noise from bit mining operations and the like, I'd agree with you. But having grown up very close to a US military testing airfield, I disagree with the assertion that aircraft noise is anything more than a nuisance. Throughout the first 26 years of my life, I lived in a place where squadrons of C-130's would do take-off and landing drills over my neighborhood. While it was irksome, like all aircraft, they were limited to flying during certain times of day, excluding emergencies, just like personal or private aircraft are. I suffered no permanent harm from it, and to be honest, our neighbors blasting loud music all the time and late into the night was more of a problem than the aircraft.
I think you are focusing far too much and placing entirely unwarranted importance on this issue, and your efforts would be better spent elsewhere. It will win you no favors to burn any good will you have on this issue when there are others that are much more important problems.
When I lived in L.A., our apartment was on the flightpath of Burbank airport in one direction and my office/studio was in the flightpath on the other direction. It didn't kill me. It didn't even hurt me. After a few days, it just became part of life. All it did was make us have to re-take anything that was recorded if a plane flew over.
And this "it hurts autistic people" thing is silly. As if there aren't a huge number of places you can live in cities that aren't on the airport flightpath.
Later, I lived in South Gate, CA, which is another part of L.A. we were on the flight path of the Zeppelin NT, which was just about as loud as the jets, except it flew over really slowly and pretty low (you have never seen anything that big in the sky if you haven't seen it). I'm guessing Drag here would rant and rave about that too.
And then there were the police helicopters and the traffic helicopters that flew overhead wherever you were in the city. Fuck the police helicopters, but the traffic helicopters are pretty damn necessary until we eliminate the car problem.
Anyway, if you live somewhere with an airport where rich people keep flying in and out, you live in a place that's already pretty damn noisy without any aircraft being involved. We call them cities. If you can't take excessive noise, you shouldn't live in one.
My apartment at school is a couple blocks from the hospital. I can hear the air ambulance helicopter take off and land. It's profoundly less annoying than the active railway near the apartment in the other direction.
It seems like you don't have autistic noise sensitivity or migraines. When a plane makes noise that bothers thousands of people, autistic people will be harmed. People with migraines will want to kill themselves. Everyone is different, and the law needs to be able to protect the most vulnerable in society.
Being overly sensitive to noise isn't exclusive to people with autism, nor is everyone on the spectrum sensitive to noise.
It's as stupid an argument as saying we should destroy all the street lighting because of people who have migraines at night. Yeah, it really sucks having to deal with that. What sucks a lot more is unsafe streets because of the total lack of lighting.
There is no reasonable way to eliminate all noise and I can guarantee that there are sources of noise that are louder and more pervasive/frequent than aircraft that you could focus this ire on. If someone is really so sensitive as to suffer immense harm from the noise of aircraft in their area, they should not live in that area.
Before you start on some tangent about how small, rural communities have aircraft noise as well as large cities, I would like to inform you that those small airports can be a vital lifeline for the most vulnerable in our communities. I have helped care for a patient that had to be flown to our hospital in a small airplane from a rural community about 500 miles away because an air ambulance helicopter couldn't make the distance and a ground ambulance would have been too slow. Putting too many restrictions on small airfields, especially in remote communities could very easily cause actual fatalities, not just disruption or distress.