The Conservative Soldier

It was the perfect storm for a disgruntled liberal in search of a place to assign blame.

Here’s the scene. An American Airlines MD80 on a steamy, overcast afternoon yesterday, at a gate at Raleigh-Durham International Airport, bound for Chicago-O’Hare.

We’re about to be pushed back, almost on time, when The Captain, in his best I-am-a-Senior-Pilot-with-a-vault-full-of-worthless-stock-options voice, announces we’ll be delayed. (As an aside, I think I know why commercial aviation is screwed up. Every flight begins with the plane moving backwards from the gate. That’s got to be a bad omen, no?)

Why the delay? Conservatives, of course.

North Carolina’s iconic conservative, Sen. Jesse Helms, died on the 4th of July. Not a Yankee Doodle, but a dandy for sure. His funeral was yesterday in Raleigh. An hour or so before the departure of our Chicago flight, Vice President Dick Cheney jetted into RDU aboard Air Force Two (a winglet-enhanced Boeing 757) to pay his respects to Sen. Helms.

As Air Force Two descended into RDU, the airspace in the vicinity was sealed, leaving planes such as our American MD80 in a holding pattern. As soon as VP Cheney was off the tarmac and headed to the Helms service, the airspace was re-opened and a number of flights were vectored for landing.

As the pilot explained, all of these planes came in at once instead of at their normal staggered times. (A few minutes is staggered, apparently). We would be delayed 30 minutes because the luggage from the inbound flight was still in the belly of our MD80 even though the passengers had long ago assembled in baggage claim. While they paced, we sat, for even more than 30 minutes. All of the incoming luggage finally came off, followed by the loading of the outbound luggage.

Over the PA, Disgruntled Senior Pilot suggests there was not sufficient ground crew to handle the onslaught of incoming flights (all three or four of them). “If you want to complain,” he added, “I guess you can write a letter to the Vice President.”

As fellow passengers began chatting among themselves as to how they would now surely miss their connections in Chicago (because, after all, all of the other flights at O’Hare would be on time), an AA flight attendant walked down the aisle distributing the latest weapon in the War on Error — the Re-Booking Slip.

The Re-Booking Slip takes the flight attendants off the hook, you see. When the blue-haired granny wants to know if she’ll make her flight to Omaha, the soon-to-be-unemployed flight attendant merely points to the toll-free re-booking number on the slip and advises Blue Hair to dial it, using her cell phone. Blue Hair, of course, does not have a cell phone most of the time.

While everyone chit chatted, I could not stop thinking about what the Senior Pilot had said. Blame it all on Vice President Cheney, he’d inferred. Just one more thing to lay at the feet of the Bush Administration. Obviously, Bush and Cheney must be the first U.S. leaders to require restricted air space for their aircraft. And, as if the real problem was in no way tied to the fact that the entire commercial airline industry is in staff cutting, cost slashing mode.

Why were there not enough ground personnel to respond to a minor surge in arriving flights at a relatively sleepy airport on a Tuesday afternoon? Because AA has been firing or furloughing them for months now. Give me a break.

In any case, this pilot had no chance at winning the Sound Bite of the Week award.

That already belonged to the pilot of Sen. Barack Hussein Obama’s aircraft, an MD80 charter from the Midwest Airlines fleet. It made an unscheduled stop in St. Louis en route to Charlotte, N.C., on Monday because an emergency escape chute deployed in flight from the rear section of the aircraft.

The pilot explained the decision to put down in St. Louis by saying, “We detected a little bit of a controllability issue.”

Apparently the Obama talking points people got to the pilot before he gave the honest answer, which would have been, “We didn’t know if we could keep this massive, aging airliner, moving at 500 mph, from nose-diving into a Missouri cornfield, so we landed as quickly as possible.”

Got to love that they had an emergency over the battleground state of Missouri. If I’m Sen. John McCain my first move is to get this ad on the air ASAP: “He tried to fly right over the Show Me State. Only a mid-air emergency compelled Sen. Obama to set foot on Missouri soil. Will Obama always wait for crisis before he reaches out to you?”

Wow, is there a lot of good material here.

Sen. Hillary Clinton had chartered the same aircraft before bowing out of the Democratic race. I think I ‘d have flown commercial before loading my staff and the press corp onto that charter. Another judgment red flag against the Obamas, I say. Bill sits near the back of the plane, doesn’t he? Isn’t that where the youngest tenured female press sit? Who knows what buttons he was fiddling around with after a few vodka tonics.

And you had to love the fact that the emergency was set off by a rear escape chute deployment? Did someone in the Obama inner circle decide he’d had enough, right then and there (a la the infamous 1971 hijacker/thief D.B. Cooper, who “escaped” by parachuting from the rear stairs of a 727 over Washington state)? Was Obama trying to drop anti-McCain leaflets over the midwest? Were the sacks of multimillion-dollar campaign contributions they tossed in the back simply too heavy for the rear door mechanism to withstand?

We know that Midwest Airlines is famous for serving its commercial passengers freshly baked chocolate chip cookies in flight. So, presumably, the cookies on Obama’s Monday flight to Charlotte were only half baked.

Need we say more?