Tag Archives: stupidity

The Rise of Idiot America

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Why the Internet might save us all.

Two days ago, I took a considerable amount of time out of my day to read an article in Esquire by Charles P. Pierce, “Greetings from Idiot America.” The article, which was published in October 2005, was long, well researched, and well written. It used lots of multi-syllable words, which I’ve grown unaccustomed to reading. It shamed me, in fact, that I had to slow down and read certain passages more than once to get the full meaning.

When I finished reading, I felt a mixture of emotions: sadness, outrage, relief. I was sad because, for the past three or four years, I’ve been thinking hard about the topics Mr. Pierce covers in his article and I agree with most of what he says. It isn’t good news. I felt outraged because what he outlines and exposes is a planned attack against knowledge and science by those seeking money or power (or both).

This paragraph sums it all up for me:

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents — for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power — the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

But I also felt relief — relief that there were people out there who were thinking and could see what was happening, and could put those thoughts and observations into words in a place where others could find and read them. People like Mr. Pierce. Words like this article. Places like highly respected magazines and the Internet.

What It’s All About

“Greetings from Idiot America” starts with a discussion of the Creation Museum and the scene on the day when its “charter members” each paid $149 to see exhibits that included dinosaurs wearing saddles. These people came from as far away as Canada. They came with their home-schooled children as a “field trip.” They came to view exhibits that would legitimize their belief that the Bible’s book of Genesis is an absolute fact.

I’ve never been the the Creation Museum and never plan to go. I don’t want to support it with my money — money I’ve earned through logical thinking and sharing my knowledge by writing books and articles. But John Scalzi visited it not long ago. And his written discussion and photo tour are highly recommended reading and viewing. While Mr. Pierce writes about the museum before it was completed two years ago, Mr. Scalzi brings us up to date with a complete picture of the finished product. Dinosaurs with Adam and Eve are only part of the situation.

Mr. Pierce goes on to discuss various events in recent political history that support his theory. He ticks off point after point. A thinking person can’t help but be amazed that things like this have happened in our country, in our government, in the 21st century. It becomes clear why school systems can be conned into believing that Intelligent Design might just be another valid theory — even though evolution has mountains of real evidence to back it up. Or why America has slipped from being a leader in science — when we’re more interested in Britney’s custody battles or the latest American Idol.

In his article, Mr. Pierce reminds us:

Americans of a certain age grew up with science the way an earlier generation grew up with baseball and even earlier ones grew up with politics and religion. America cured diseases. It put men on the moon. It thought its way ahead in the cold war and stayed there.

I’m in that age group. I watched Neil Armstrong step out onto the surface of the moon. I was eight years old and I didn’t fully understand the significance of what was going on. I recall watching a scene that included the leg and ladder of the lunar module sitting on the surface of the moon. The picture was black and white and not very good. We waited a long time for something to happen. There was static with the voices, along with a lot of weird, high-pitched beeping. It was boring. It was late. I wanted to go to sleep. But my mother made me and my sister sit up and watch it. It was history in the making. It was proof that America was a country of great thinkers and doers. In less than ten years, we’d accomplished the goal the late President Kennedy had set for us.

Sadly, our current president won’t set any goals for us at all.

Mr. Pierce interviewed Professor Kip Hodges at MIT:

“My earliest memory,” Hodges recalls, “is watching John Glenn go up. It was a time that, if you were involved in science or engineering — particularly science, at that time — people greatly respected you if you said you were going into those fields. And nowadays, it’s like there’s no value placed by society on a lot of the observations that are made by people in science.

“It’s more than a general dumbing down of America — the lack of self-motivated thinking: clear, creative thinking. It’s like you’re happy for other people to think for you. If you should be worried about, say, global warming, well, somebody in Washington will tell me whether or not I should be worried about global warming. So it’s like this abdication of intellectual responsibility — that America now is getting to the point that more and more people would just love to let somebody else think for them.”

Pierce goes on to say:

The rest of the world looks on in cockeyed wonder. The America of Franklin and Edison, of Fulton and Ford, of the Manhattan project and the Apollo program, the America of which Einstein wanted to be a part, seems to be enveloping itself in a curious fog behind which it’s tying itself in knots over evolution, for pity’s sake, and over the relative humanity of blastocysts versus the victims of Parkinson’s disease.

I see the truth and tragedy in this. Do you?

On Flying Spaghetti Monsters

I should probably mention here that I’ve also begun following the blog, Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (CotFSM). According to Wikipedia:

The Flying Spaghetti Monster (also known as the Spaghedeity) is the deity of a parody religion called The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its system of beliefs, “Pastafarianism”. The religion was founded in 2005 by Oregon State University physics graduate Bobby Henderson to protest the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to require the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to biological evolution.

In an open letter sent to the education board, Henderson professes belief in a supernatural creator called the Flying Spaghetti Monster which resembles spaghetti and meatballs. He furthermore calls for the “Pastafarian” theory of creation to be taught in science classrooms.

One of the features of the CotFSM blog is the reprinting of “love mail” and “hate mail” received by Mr. Henderson. I read a bunch of posts the other day.

The love mail is an interesting mix from atheists (which you’d expect) and religious people who “get it.” All agree that neither Intelligent Design nor Creationism should be taught in schools. In fact, they all agree that religion should not be part of a public school education at all.

The hate mail is amazing. I really can’t describe it any other way. The majority of it consists of angry tirades penned by religious fundamentalists. Some of them seem to realize that the CotFSM is a joke or parody while others apparently believe that the CotFSM has real believers — in other words, they just don’t “get it.” Either way, they’re united in their belief that supporters of the CotFSM will go to hell. (Not surprising, I guess. What else is there for “sinners”?)

But what bothers me about some of the hate mail is the complete lack of literacy. Here’s a recent example:

wow you people are crazy i pray to my LORD jesus christ that you people wake up God created man in his own image and im sorry but if you look like noodles with meatballs growin out your BUTT you need to go back to SPACE or get back in the pan where you’ll be somebodys dinner!

people will believe anything!!

i am verryyy happy i was well homeschooled becuase i would be in jail for punching a teacher in the face when she tried to tell me about this so called spagetti monsterr!

i hate to be the breaker of bad news but when you look around when u die u wont be with your master meatball you’ll be burning in the pits of HELL and i am a REAL christian and that hurts to know that so many people are gonna be in hell! over a random guy that started a joke and has nothing better to do besides make up some god for fun then see how many people are loving this idea.
God bless you wacked out meatball loving freaks!
-christy

Wow, this person is illiterate. I guess grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling are optional in the home where she was schooled.

And this is what worries me about the future of our country. As more and more people pull their kids from school in favor of home schooling or pressure their school systems to teach non-science “theories,” the average intelligence of our population drops. Christy (assuming she spelled her own name right; I’m making an educated guess on the capitalization) might be an extreme example of the problem, but she’s out there. How many others like her are building and populating Idiot America?

Read it and Weep

If you’re concerned about America and what’s been happening to it for the past decade or so, you owe it to yourself to read “Greetings from Idiot America.”

But don’t stop there. Get your thinking friends to read it. Discuss it. Blog about it. Get these issues out into the open.

It took me more than two years to stumble upon this article. Why? Could it be that I’ve been sucked into Idiot America, too?

But thanks to the Internet, it was still out there, waiting for me — and you — to find it.

People Who Can’t Read

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It’s one of the little things that drive me nuts.

It’s not really people who can’t read. It’s the people who don’t read.

I run a Web site called wickenburg-az.com that’s surprisingly popular as a source of information about the town. You could check it out and find out what the Town Council will be debating at the next council meeting and learn about some neat things to do in the area and read some humor by the Arizona’s Official Liar. You can also find some information about the few Wickenburg businesses worth writing about — let’s not go there right now, okay? — and see some photos of the town and read letters to the editor of the local paper that they either won’t print or won’t print before their authors get sick of waiting to see them.

And if the information you find there isn’t enough, you can go to the contact page — like so many people do — and find the following statements:

All of the information we have about Wickenburg, its businesses, and its events are included on this Web site. We do not have any additional information that we can send out to site visitors….Please do not use the form to ask the Webmaster questions about Wickenburg. Your questions will not be answered.

The bold text appears on the page in bold. I did it that way on purpose, so people would see it easier. Evidently, it doesn’t help them read or comprehend it. Because I continue to get e-mail messages submitted via the form with all kinds of questions about the town.

Like today’s messge, written by a man with a stuck CAPS LOCK key. He wants to know if our library “rents” DVDs and if he can get a temporary library card. How the hell should I know? Does he expect me to drop everything and call the library for him? Why doesn’t he pick up the damn phone and call the library himself? Did running a Web site make me his personal assistant?

Or the woman who wrote asking for information about the gated communities in town. What the hell does she think Wickenburg is? A suburb of Scottdale? There are no gated communities here.

Or the retired couple who were looking for the 55+ trailer park with the cactus sculpture out front. Do they think I drive around town looking at trailer parks? I actually made the mistake of answering this e-mail message, telling them I had no idea what park they were talking about. They had the nerve to write back and ask me to look for it.

Like I don’t have anything else to do with my time.

And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten requests for information about events that might or might not be held in town. wickenburg-az.com has a calendar of events online. If an organization doesn’t submit event information to me, how am I supposed to know about it? So not only is it not listed, but as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t exist.

So now, when I get these messages, I delete them. I just press the old delete key without sending a response, leaving the sender wondering if their message ever got to anyone. It’s the best way to deal with it. They don’t write again. At least not to me.

Call me a bitch. You won’t be the first — or the last.

But if people can’t take the time to read simple information in bold type above a form, why should I take the time to answer their unwelcome questions?

Fighting Spam — All Kinds

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How I deal with comment and pingback spam.

I start each morning pretty much the same way. I make myself a cup of coffee, make a scrambled egg for my parrot, and then sit down at the kitchen table and check the comments that came into my blog overnight.

About Spam

The main thing I’m checking for each morning is comment and pingback spam. These are similar but different.

  • Comment spam is a comment that exists solely to provide one or more links to another Web site, usually to promote that site or its services, but possibly to just get links to that site to improve Google rankings. Comment spam ads nothing to the site’s value. Sometimes disguised as a guest book entry or general positive comment — for example, “Great blog! I’ll be back!” accompanied by a link or two — it simply isn’t something the average blogger should want on his or her site.
  • Pingback spam is a comment that appears as a result of a link on another blog pinging your blog. Although many pingbacks are legitimate (as many comments are legitimate), there appears to be a rise in pingbacks as a result of feed scraping, which I’ve discussed here and here. Pingback spam is usually pretty easy to spot; the software that scapes the feeds isn’t very creative, so the excerpt is usually an exact quote from what’s been scraped. Sometimes, oddly enough, the quote is from the copyright notice that appears at the bottom of every feed item originating from this site. Pingbacks automate the linking of your site to someone elses — in the case of pingback spam, it’s likely to be a splogger.

Lucky me: I get both.

Tools to Fight Comment Spam

Fortunately, I use both Bad Behavior and Spam Karma 2 (many thanks again to Miraz for suggesting both of these), so the spam comments that get through their filters and are actually posted to the site are minimized. On a typical day, I might just have 3 to 5 of them. Compare that to 3,400 potential spam messages stopped by Bad Behavior in the past week and the 51,000 spam messages deleted after posting by Spam Karma in the past year since its installation. Without these two forms of protection, I’d be spending all day cleaning up spam.

Anyone who doesn’t use some kind of spam protection on a blog with open comments is, well, an idiot.

Neither program is very effective against pingback spam, although Spam Karma seems to be catching a few of them these days. Although I’m pretty sure I can set up WordPress to reject pingbacks, I like the idea of getting legitimate links from other blogs. It helps form a community. And it provides a service to my readers. For example, if I wrote an article about something and another blogger quoted my work and added his insight to it, his article might interest my readers. Having a link in my comments right to his related post is a good thing.

My Routine

So my morning routine consists of checking Spam Karma’s “Approved Comments” and marking the comments that are spam as spam. Then I go into WordPress’s Comments screen (Dashboard > Manage > Comments) and marking pingback spam as spam and deleting it.

Why do it both ways? Well, I’m concerned that if I keep telling Spam Karma that pingback spam is spam, it’ll think all pingbacks are spam. I don’t want it to do that. So I manually delete them. It only takes a minute or two, so it isn’t a big deal. If I had hundreds of these a day, I might do things differently.

The other reason I delete the pingbacks manually is because I want to check each site that’s pinging mine. I collect URLs of splogging sites and submit them periodically to Google. These sites violate Google’s Terms of Service and I’m hoping Google will either cancel their AdSense accounts or remove them from Google’s search indexing (or, preferably, both). So I send the links to Google and Google supposedly looks at them.

I’m working on a project to make creating a DMCA notice easier — almost automated — and would love to hear from anyone working on a project like that.

This morning was quiet. Only three spams to kill: one comment spam and two pingback spams. I’ll get a few more spams during the day and kill them as they arrive; WordPress notifies me via e-mail of all comments and pingbacks as they are received. (I don’t check my e-mail at the breakfast table anymore.)

Do you have a special way to deal with comment or pingback spam? Don’t keep it a secret. Leave a Comment below.

On Geniuses

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Why I don’t Genius Bar hop and other comments regarding my recent hard disk problem.

One of my jobs as a blogger is to produce at least one blog entry a week. As you may have noticed if you follow this blog, it looks like I’ve been slacking off lately. Well, I just want to take a few moments to assert that looks may be deceiving.

Last week was a busy one for me. I finally got my computer back up and running after its second hard disk crash in a year. This crash was far more serious than the last and required the geniuses at the Apple Store to fix.

Now I know that lots of Mac pros laugh at the word “genius” when applied to the Apple Store’s tech support folks. And I do agree that it would be difficult to call any of them geniuses in the true sense of the word. (Think Einstein.) But if you were to compare their computer skills to the average Mac user’s, they could indeed be considered geniuses. They know a lot more about the current computer models than 95% of Mac users. Sadly, I fit into that 95% these days. I could tell you all kinds of things about fixing a Mac II cx or a PowerMac 7100/66 — and that’s because I used to teach a course about troubleshooting those computers running System 7. Nowadays, my troubleshooting capabilities are limited to what I need to know — like much of my other knowledge — and I don’t really need to know all the things the geniuses need to know to do their daily fix-it jobs.

So I’m not uncomfortable applying the word genius to many (but not all) of them. To me, some of them really are geniuses when it comes to diagnosing and fixing Mac problems.

I’ll also be the first to say that the capabilities of an Apple Store genius staff on any given day for any given store is hit or miss. It all depends on each staffer’s experience, knowledge, and interest in the topics he or she needs to know. I was at the Genius Bar in the Chandler, AZ store on Monday and the geniuses that day were pretty good. One of them was a super genius, the one who helped me was definitely above average, and the guy working the iPod slot was about average. (Let’s face it: it doesn’t take much skill to fix an iPod problem. Every iPod should come with a cheat sheet printed on back that explains how to reset it; that will resolve 95% of an iPod’s problems. The iPod guy probably resets a lot of iPods in a day. I’ve gotten so good at it that I can reset mine with one hand while flying my helicopter. Darn vibrations lock it up more often than I’d like to admit.)

I’ve had repeatedly bad luck at the Biltmore Apple Store in Phoenix, which is at least 30 miles closer to my house. The two times I tried to get assistance there, the lead Genius didn’t seem interested in looking deeply into my problem and didn’t seem to care whether it was resolved or not. On my fried motherboard problem, it seemed that she spent more time telling me how much it would cost to fix the problem than diagnosing what the problem was. This, coupled with her obvious lack of sympathy, made me doubt her diagnosis, so I had to go to another store (Chandler) to get a second opinion. I got a bad taste in my mouth (so to speak) from the experience. And that’s why I don’t go to the Biltmore store anymore.

Oddly enough, sympathy for my problem seems to be important to me. My main work computer or “production” machine (currently a Dual G5) is like a partner to me. It holds onto the projects I’m working on, it has the tools I need to get the job done as smoothly as possible. When it works right, we’re a team getting the job done. When it starts acting up, I get concerned. It’s not just a machine on the fritz. It’s a work partner feeling ill. What’s the problem? Can I fix it before it becomes critical? Is its motherboard about to go (again)? Or its hard disk? Will I lose data? Will I need to take it to the hospital (fix-it place) to get it working right again? How long will we be apart? And, of course, the selfish questions, like how long will I be unable to work?

The geniuses at the Chandler store are always sympathetic to my problem. They understand that my computer isn’t just a machine I use for e-mail and to surf the Web. They understand that its hard disk contains lots of important information — including books in progress — and the tools I need to get my work done. They understand that without my production computer, there’s very little real work I can do. And even though they don’t necessarily push any harder to complete a job for me than they do for anyone else, they make it seem as if my problem is one of the most important ones they’ll tackle that day. And they soothe me with reasonable reassurances that make it easier to face the 90-mile drive home and wait for their call.

This time around, the problem was a toasted hard disk. Personally, I believe it has something to do with my Firewire ports — it occurred while my iSight was plugged in and I was attempting to suck something off a portable Firewire hard drive. (My motherboard problem also manifested itself when working with multiple Firewire devices, including an iSight, so I’m very wary of using it these days.) They replaced the hard disk — which IS something I could have done myself if I really wanted to — and managed to get about 50% of the data off my old hard disk before it ceased to function at all. This cost me dearly, but the way I see it, I was paying for my own stupidity. If I’d had my entire Home folder backed up, recovery wouldn’t have been necessary at all and I could have saved the $150.

What hurts even more is that I’d written an article for Informit.com about backing up with Fetch before I had the problem and neglected to utilize my own instructions to protect myself.

The computer was done the next day and my husband, Mike, picked it up on his way home. It isn’t exactly on his way — he works about 15 miles north of there — but it was a lot more convenient for him than for me to make the 180-mile round trip drive. On Wednesday morning, I set about restoring the whole computer to it’s normal setup. I didn’t like the way the Apple folks had set up the machine — for some reason I was really bugged about my home folder being called maria (note the lowercase) rather than its usual mlanger (which I’ve used on all my computers for years). (Is that anal or what?) So I pulled off the recovered data, reformatted the hard disk, and spent the next two days installing software and updates. The updates were particularly painful now that I’m on the super-slow wireless Internet connection I whined about elsewhere in this blog. The 139 MB Mac OS X 10.4.8 combined updater took quite a while to suck off the Internet before I could install it.

Fortunately, I managed to pull e-mail messages, endo settings and contents, ecto contents, and some other stuff off my PowerBook. My iCal and Address book data was already set up to synchronize with .Mac, so getting all that data moved over was very easy. The only thing of real value that I lost was Chapter 6 of my Excel 2007 for Windows book, which I’d been working on for the second time. (The first revision went bad and I started from scratch. So today I look forward to starting my Chapter 6 revision for the third time. I knew it would be the book’s Chapter from Hell, but I couldn’t imagine how hellish it would be.)

By Friday, the computer was 90% back to its old self and I was working on it regularly instead of my laptop. So I was out of commission for two full weeks. I blame myself for that, too, letting the disk recovery software run as long as I did before finally bringing it to the geniuses.

The Hermosa Ranch Insanity

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Greed and stupidity collide.

In early October, the Wickenburg Town Council approved a 34-unit subdivision on 35 acres of land on “Vulture Mine Road near the Country Club.” That’s how the land’s location was described in the newspaper and likely in the P & Z and Town Council Meetings. It was not given its other descriptor: approximately 3400 feet from the departure end of Wickenburg Municipal Airport’s runway 5 (see photo).

Hermosa RanchI heard about this newly approved subdivision and did some research. I learned that it had been proposed in mid August and had miraculously gone through the approval process in about six weeks. A miracle of Town efficiency — the same town that took four months to choose between two bids for an Airport Fuel Manager last year. The same town that routinely keeps old business “old business” at many commission meetings, including the Airport Advisory Commission’s monthly meetings.

Perhaps that’s why it didn’t take so long to approve. It was never presented to the Airport Commission, despite the fact that it lies well within the airport’s area of influence.

As most regular readers know, one of my jobs is as a pilot. I operate an FAA-certificated Part 135 charter operation at Wickenburg Airport. That means a few things. It means that I’m a commercial pilot who has undergone extensive flight training and testing to meet certain standards. It means that I have gone the extra step to get special certification from the FAA to perform operations above and beyond those allowed by basic, “Part 91” commercial operators. It means I meet with the FAA regularly for flight checks and am subjected to unannounced inspections of my aircraft, hangar facility, and documents. I also operated the Airport Fuel Manager concession at the airport for a year and a half not long ago — a fact that a few people seem anxious to forget.

In other words, I know a little bit about aviation, airport operations, and FAA regulations.

And I know that putting homes within 100 feet of an airport’s runway centerline is not only stupid, but potentially dangerous for home and property owners.

Sure, someone will buy these homes. There are deaf people who won’t be bothered by the sound of flight school airplanes from Deer Valley and Goodyear doing touch-and-gos past or over their homes throughout the day every day. I’m not sure how they’ll like the rattling of their china when a jet departs. And there are lots of people who make home purchase decisions on the very day they see a piece of property — perhaps a windy or overcast day or a summer day when the airport isn’t very busy and the Realtor says something like, “There’s an airport to the west, but you can see how busy it is.” (A local Realtor once told me that he spent all day at his west-side subdivision and only saw two planes operating. His subdivision’s homes are right under the airport’s traffic pattern where at least 75% of the pilots fly. I can only imagine what he tells potential buyers.) There might even be a few people who think they like planes and might find living under the approach and departure path to an airport kind of interesting. I assure you, the novelty will wear off quickly. It sure wore off quickly when a train lover like me moved into a home next to a railroad track. It wasn’t easy to find another sucker to buy the house, either.

But what happens when Wickenburg gets commuter airline service? This isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem. Such service is already available in Prescott, Kingman, Lake Havasu, and Bullhead City. As Wickenburg’s precious roof count soars, it’s only a matter of time before such service is demanded by its citizens. Wickenburg won’t have 737s landing on its newly extended 6,000 foot runway, but it’s likely to have large turboprop planes or small commuter jets. The runway already accommodates 10 to 20 jet operations per week in the peak season — why do you think the town wanted the runway extended in the first place? What if there were an additional 14 operations per week with daily flights by Mesa Air or some other regional carrier? Do you know how much noise these kinds of planes make during takeoff?

And don’t hand me that tired old line about Forepaugh. Forepaugh is a dirt strip 15 miles west that isn’t even marked by name on a chart. Wickenburg has no jurisdiction over it and it straddles State and BLM land. Even if the Town of Wickenburg did manage to cough up the money to buy or lease the land (don’t forget airport insurance), it would take years and millions of dollars to get it up to the standards needed to allow commercial jet operations. And don’t forget — the Town would probably have to use eminent domain to get possession of the ranch that already exists on the south end of that runway, right on Route 60. How long do you think that will take? Forepaugh as a regional airport is at least 20 years away. Wickenburg will have likely annexed all the land up to Aguila by then.

But noise is only one problem with locating homes at the end of a runway. The other, more important problem is safety.

Think for a moment about how a plane takes off. Even if you’re not a pilot, you should be able to visualize a takeoff. The plane starts at one end of the runway, where the pilot opens the throttle wide for power. The engine roars as the props (or jet engine) produce thrust. The plane rolls down the runway, gathering speed. When the plane reaches a certain velocity, the pilot pulls back on the yoke (or stick) and the plane’s nose tilts up. The plane lifts off the ground. It then begins its climb into the air.

The steepness of an airplane’s climb (and the amount of runway it needs to reach takeoff speed) depends on a few things:

  • How powerful is the airplane’s engine? A powerful plane can climb out at a steeper angle than one with a less powerful engine.
  • How heavy is the airplane? A lighter plane — one with just a pilot and a light load of fuel — can climb out at a steeper angle than one full of people and fuel.
  • How hot is it outside? Hot temperatures reduce aircraft performance, making it more difficult to climb out on takeoff.

All kinds of planes come to Wickenburg Airport and every takeoff is different. An ultralight with one person on board can climb out at an amazing angle, using only a little bit of runway. But a fully loaded single engine air tanker (SEAT), like those that operate at Wickenburg airport during the hot summer fire season, uses every inch of runway and climbs out at a very shallow angle. Other planes have takeoff profiles somewhere in between.

The FAA recommends a 20:1 ratio for a runway’s approach/departure corridor. That means that for every 20 feet away from the runway end, a plane is expected to climb at least 1 foot. With 3400 feet from the end of Runway 5 to the property line of Hermosa Ranch, that means planes could be flying over Hermosa Ranch as low as 170 feet off the ground. Would you like an airplane flying that low over your house on takeoff?

It’s this shallow angle that should concern the developers of Hermosa Ranch. Imagine a freshly refueled SEAT, heavy with a load of fire retardant. The pilot rolls down the runway, gathers speed, and lifts off less than 3500 feet from a Hermosa Ranch house to fight a fire at Lake Pleasant. He’s only 200 feet off the ground as he nears Hermosa Ranch. Suddenly and without warning, his engine quits. Where do you think that plane is going to hit the ground? And with a load of Jet fuel on board, how much damage do you think the post-crash fire will cause? Are you still imagining? Then imagine that plane crashing near a birthday party around the pool in someone’s backyard.

Right now, there’s a big empty patch of land that stretches from the departure end of Runway 5 to Vulture Mine Road (see photo). If Hermosa Ranch didn’t exist, that plane would crash and burn in that empty land. The world would lose a pilot and a plane, not one or more homes or possibly dozens of people.

Think engine failures on takeoff don’t happen? Go to the NTSB Accident database and search for “engine failure takeoff” and get the truth. Just because you didn’t hear about it on the evening news doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. The NTSB’s Web site lists scores of accidents all over the country that occurred on takeoff or landing. Engine failure is just one scenario.

So it appears to me that either the Hermosa Ranch developers don’t care about the safety of their subdivision’s home buyers (not likely) or they didn’t fully think out the safety implications of building so close to the end of a runway.

What’s troubling to me, however, is that the Town of Wickenburg failed to fully investigate the potential conflicts of such a development with airport operations. Although the proposal was presented to the P & Z Commission, the warnings presented there by then-Council Candidate George Wilkinson went completely unheeded. There was no effort on the part of the P & Z staff or Town Planner, Miles Johnson, to investigate the FAA guidelines regarding building near airports. These guidelines are available on the FAA’s Web site 24/7. If Dr. Johnson or his assistant didn’t have the time to look them up, a few phone calls would have gotten them an answer. The phone numbers are on the Web, too.

I got the documents and made the phones calls to the FAA to confirm my belief that the FAA would not be happy with the Hermosa Ranch subdivision proposal. It took me about 20 minutes. The FAA compliance person I spoke to was amazed that such a subdivision would even be considered at that location. If Dr. Johnson — who is also Airport Manager — had done his job, he would have been better informed about the potential problems with this proposed subdivision.

It has been claimed that the “airport consultants” approved the development. Who are they and what kind of authority do they have? And is their approval in writing? I seriously doubt it, since making such an approval could get them into hot water if liability issues arose. (I can only imagine the lawsuits generated by a plane crash/birthday party accident like the one we imagined earlier.)

Why wasn’t the Airport Advisory Commission consulted about the Hermosa Ranch proposal? The commission, which has 5 (of 7) members who are active pilots in Wickenburg, would certainly have pointed out the conflicts between the airport and proposed development. Yet Dave Lane, who sits on the Town Council and Airport Commission (as its Chairman for the past four or more years) failed to bring it up to the Commission for discussion. The Airport Commission members I spoke to didn’t even know about the development until after it had been passed by the Town Council. Councilman Lane’s failure to bring up this project for discussion and his rubber-stamping of the approval were irresponsible and a complete neglect of his duties as Councilman and Chairman of the Airport Advisory Commission.

So what are we left with? A 34-home subdivision in the path of arriving and departing airplane traffic at Wickenburg Municipal Airport, with homes less than 100 feet from the extended runway centerline — that’s the path planes attempt to follow when taking off or landing. A subdivision approved in what’s probably record time by P & Z and the Town Council after ignoring safety and noise issues presented by at least two Wickenburg residents. A proposal never presented to the Airport Advisory Commission for discussion, never researched with the FAA for compliance with “airport-compatible zoning” requirements. A development that appears to have the only goal of adding to Wickenburg’s roof count, placing high-priced homes in an undesirable and potentially unsafe location.

Why did I start a petition to stop this insanity? Do you really have to ask?

When the elected officials fail to make decisions that are in the best interest of all citizens (rather than a handful of supporters), it’s the duty of the public to step forward and, using the democratic process guaranteed by the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights, provide input and guidance. My petition was a wake-up call, the only way I knew of to get the attention of the Town’s elected officials and staff and the public. It was a way to get the FAA involved to offer guidelines to the Town for making airport-vicinity zoning decisions. It was a way to propose a safety zone around the airport, one that can prevent the horror of a plane crash on take-off from taking more lives than just the ones on the ill-fated plane.

I’m not the only person who thinks that Hermosa Ranch and any building at the end of the runway is a bad idea. Of the 79 people I approached for signatures, 76 of them signed. Two of the signers are Airport Advisory Commission members. If they’d been consulted before this got to the Town Council — as they should have — the proposal is likely to have been denied on the very grounds I cited in my petition and in this article.

Safety should come first. Lifestyle should come next. Profit should come near the end of the list. Shouldn’t it?

Now, I understand that members of Wickenburg’s Good Old Boy Network are whining that this petition will cost the Town of Wickenburg $10,000 to run an election and put it to vote. I want to remind those people — and the rest of Wickenburg’s citizens — that if the Town Council and P & Zoning Commission had done their jobs and made a responsible decision, this petition and the costly election would not be necessary at all.

What do you think about this? Don’t tell me — I’ve already done my part. Call the Mayor, Council Members, and the Town Planner. Town Hall can be reached at 928/684-5451. Call the members of the P & Z Commission — you can get their names from the Town Clerk. Ask them why they approved such a plan. Ask them if they care about Wickenburg and the safety and well-being of all of its residents.

And let them know that you care — at least as much as I do.