David E. Steiner

Retired USAF, Teacher, Dad, Grandfather, Curmudgeon

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Risks

 

Stephen Coonts is a Boulder author whose book, Flight of the Intruder, was based on his experience flying a Navy A-6 Intruder on bombing missions in North Vietnam. It became a movie and he made a pile of money. He spent some of it on a 1942 Stearman biplane and spent the summer of 1991 flying to the 48 states, mostly in hops of two hours or so, since a Stearman holds 46 gallons of gas and burns 12 gallons an hour.

Mr. Coonts wrote a book about his summer adventure and he dwelled at length on the sorry state of general aviation, brought on, he says, by the simple fact that a person who crashes a plane made in 1947 can nevertheless sue the manufacturer for design flaws and thereby become rich and incidentally bankrupt the manufacturer. He also goes into some detail about the many things he can’t do in his airplane because of the many restrictions put in place by the government: places he can’t fly, altitudes he can’t use. Flying, he says, is a risky business, and anyone who flies can’t expect to have all the risks removed. But we try, he says, just as we foolishly try to remove the risks from almost everything.

I have some sympathy with this point of view. How many things can you think of that you used to be able to do that are now illegal, ostensibly because they’re too risky?

In the mid-sixties I was finishing a Ph.D. at the University of Oregon. I was also flying as a navigator with a reserve troop carrier squadron of 16 C-119G aircraft out of Portland International. When the Vietnam war heated up, they called up the reserves several times to haul various things around the country. I made one flight to Goose Bay, and on another we hauled six thousand pounds of pillows to the troops in Puerto Rico.

 

 

The C-119 was called the Flying Boxcar, for obvious reasons. It was one of the largest twin-engine propeller-driven aircraft ever built: 110 feet wide, 87 feet long, and 20 feet high, powered by two 3,500 horsepower Wright R-3350-32W Turbo Cyclone engines. The four-blade propellers were the largest ever made by Hamilton Standard. It could carry 78 people or 28,000 pounds of cargo. Once a month we practiced dropping cargo or paratroops out of them, from an altitude of 1,000 feet, at Ft. Lewis, near Tacoma.

The plane was designed for the invasion of Japan, and it was used in Korea, but then was relegated to the reserves until Vietnam, when all of them were sent to serve briefly as gunships. They were slow and inefficient and were quickly replaced by C-130s. I’d be surprised to find a single C-119 flying today.

It was an odd and quirky plane. It was slow by modern standards: it cruised at about 200 mph. It had terrible single engine performance. One of our planes was taking a spare engine from Miami to Puerto Rico for another C-119; it lost an engine and was never heard from again. There was talk about the Bermuda Triangle, but the truth was a fully loaded C-119 on one engine had the flight characteristics of an anvil. Also, the high frequency radios hadn’t been maintained since the planes were built, so communication at long distance was impossible.

Fortunately, we rarely flew fully loaded or over water and on our trips around the country we took quite a few risks. We flew into the caldera of Crater Lake National Park in the dead of winter and skimmed the lake. We flew into the Grand Canyon. Once, on our way back to Portland, I took us into this, our valley, at low level, to show the crew my summer home. We probably scared the hell out of someone as we roared through Wind River Pass at 200  feet. You can’t do that any more; it’s against the rules. Too risky, for one thing.

Later, when I went to Southeast Asia, I flew in bigger, faster, safer airplanes and eventually accumulated 1,000 hours of combat flight time, which in itself was fairly risky, but I always had a soft spot for this big, ugly machine, which was always more or less a risk to fly.

Like the rest of government, the Air Force tries to make things less risky. The rules of flight used to be simple. When I started flying, the Air Force regulation about flight rules was about 15 pages. When I stopped flying, it was almost two inches thick. Nearly every new rule was the result of somebody doing something stupid which resulted, as we liked to say, in premature contact with the ground, or “buying the farm.”

All of life is a risk, of course, since nobody promised us tomorrow, and we certainly recognize that truth living here, as we have left many of the securities of city life behind. But how much is too much? Riding a motorcycle is risky, so I wear a helmet, but that doesn’t satisfy my mother, who regards this activity as much too risky, if not downright nuts, given my advanced age. The idiotic 55 mph speed limit, which nearly all of us ignore, is supposedly there to protect us. So are the rules against fireworks, open fires and undercooked hamburgers.

I never used to worry about cooking hamburgers. I drank the water out of the Roaring Fork. Now Crystal Spring is under constant threat of closure as the dark forces of Big Government tighten the rules and try to eliminate every possible risk. Keith Dever had to jump through expensive EPA hoops last summer even though there’s never been any evidence his gas storage tanks leak. And there are many more examples, right here in Allenspark.

How slippery a slope is this? Mr. Coonts complains that flying used to be fun, but now it’s mostly trying to avoid a violation, a big fine, and loss of license. He’s right, but the Risk Police have their fingers in many more pies than the one in the sky. How much risk will we avoid before life itself ceases to be fun?

 

Columns

© 1985 – 2003, David E. Steiner

Allenspark Wind Columns:

Introduction

Why Allenspark?

Going Riding [August, 1985]

Electricity

Used Cars

Peace and Quiet [1986]

Liberals & Conservatives

Going to the Movies

The Screened Porch

The Beginning of The Season

The Weather

The Hilltop Guild Bazaar

The End of The Season

The Gift of Time

The Beavers

Addresses [1987]

Hiking

Watching the Trees Grow

Postal Rates

Changes in Estes Park

Square Dancing at the Pow Wow

Back to the Hilltop Guild Bazaar

The Solstices

Bird Feeders

Elevators

The Estes Park Hardware Store [1988]

Visitors

Limousine Service

A Memorial Service

A Hummingbird

Garbage

A Hiking Trip

The Estes Park Public Library

Wild Life

Riparian Rights [1989]

Weather

Fences

Commuting

Mountain Friendliness

A Motorcycle Trip

Satellite Television

“Weaving Mountain Memories”

Hotel Rates in the Old Days

The Price of Propane [1990]

The Front Range Almanac

June

Modes of Transportation

Miller Moths

My 50th Column

Modern Conveniences

Rock Climbing

On the Death of Otto Walter, Postmaster

Otto’s Memorial Service

A Big Owl Pot-Luck Dinner

A Whine About Telephone Service [1991]

After the Persian Gulf War

Some Changes in the WIND

The Trip to the Mountains

The Mountains in the Summer

Visitors

Of Dogs, Music, and Children

Muhlenburg County

To My Grandson

The Sale of Longs Peak Inn

World War II  [1992]

Murphy’s Law and the Computer

The South St. Vrain Canyon

“Whiteout”

The Hazards of Volunteering

Crime in Our Valley

Infestations

On the Death of Charles Eagle Plume

Can We All Get Along?

A Partridge in a Pear Tree

Lost Horizon [1993]

Walking

Rumors About a Visit by the Pope

Progress?

More About Fences

Woodpeckers

The Visit of Pope John Paul II

Forest Fires

The New Sewage System

The Snow Pool

The Good Old Days [1994]

The WIND’s 20th Anniversary

The Bunce School

The Shooting Gallery

The Estes Park Museum

Our Government

U.S. West Takes a Hit

The Year of the Hummingbirds

A New “Yield” Sign

Growth in Allenspark

Private Telephones?

The Salvation Army

Creation Science [1995]

Devolutionizing Big Government

Risks

Airports

Fort D.A. Russell

Domestic Terrorism

Old and New

Barney Graves

Life in the Wilderness

What’s In a Name?

Arthur C. Clarke

 

The Estes Park Trail-Gazette Columns:

July 1983

Carpentry

Estes Cone

Johnny Grant

Observations in Estes Park

The Bath House

Waving

The Sutherland’s Ice House

How Old is Charles Eagle Plume?

Dogs

Christmas Trees

Tree Murder

Mountain Driving

Garbage

Mail Boxes

More About Mail Boxes

“Are you related to ....?”

Spring

An Accident

The Wild Cat

A July Reunion

A Visit to Baldpate Inn

Opening Cabins

Summer

The Times, They Have Changed

Death and Transfiguration

The Population Explosion

The March of Time

Faith-Based Social Services

Looking for Pitch

Recent Writings I

Recent Writings II

Recent Writings III

Recent Writings IV

Recent Writings V

Recent Writings VI

 

 

 

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