Wednesday, August 12, 2009

The Wright Brothers Were Right: Rural Kitty Hawk, Not Metropolitan Manhattan
  Transportation piece by FreeCongressFoundation: Marion Edwyn Harrison

Orville and Wilbur Wright, inventing the forerunner of the aircraft as we now know it, tested their flight in a rural area.  21st Century usage of aircraft all but precludes limiting flight to rural areas. However, it is becoming tragically obvious that there is excessive volume, and excessively unregulated, air traffic over metropolitan areas.

The most recent - one optimistically if perhaps unrealistically hopes, the last - air crash over a metropolis was that of a sightseeing helicopter and a small aircraft over the Hudson River between Metropolitan New York and Metropolitan New Jersey, nine people killed.

A portion of Northern Virginia, especially Arlington County, abutting the Potomac River and the Nation’s Capital, if contemporary practice continues well could be the situs of the next such, or worse, tragedy. It is not uncommon at any hour of day or night to hear or see, or both hear and see, dangerously low-flying airplanes and even more nearly ground-level helicopters.  One need not be atop a skyscraper or very tall building to look straight ahead. A few stories high in a residence, and particularly in a residence on a street with a bit higher elevation, is all that is required.  The safety desideratum that a helicopter should fly a minimum of 1,000 feet above ground is honored in the breach. Further, huge numbers of commercial, military and private (private meaning other than airlines) airplanes veer off their flight patterns, departing their Potomac River route and crossing residential and commercial neighborhoods.   

The identity of these miscreants varies.  However, in Northern Virginia no small number of the helicopter passengers are bureaucrats, often flying from one Federal office building to another - for example, the Pentagon in Arlington, Central Intelligence Agency (“CIA”) in next-door McLean, White House.

Safety and noise pollution aside, the time of these bureaucrats is nowhere near so valuable that they cannot drive, or ride in, an automobile, bus or other roadway conveyance.  No record appears accessible, if one even exists, to total the cost of this helicopter transportation - a cost which undoubtedly annually runs into tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of taxpayer dollars annually.

For reasons of safety, cost to taxpayers and noise pollution, a major investigation and consequential diminution of not less than these helicopter flights is so highly advisable as to be essential.  The powers-that-be, while they are at it, also ought seriously to investigate excessive and, more particularly, off-flight pattern, airplane flights.  The Federal Aviation Agency does not have full jurisdiction but has a sufficiency to have been, and to be, useful.  The National Transportation Safety Board likewise could have been, and could be, meaningfully useful. CIA and the Department of Defense clearly could control their own flights.  The most facile part would be a massive reduction in helicopter flights.  Bureaucrats, take note!

Marion Edwyn Harrison

Marion Edwyn Harrison is President of, and Counsel to, the Free Congress Foundation. http://freecongress.org/

Posted by FreeCongressFoundation: Marion Edwyn Harrison on 8/12/09

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