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Article Type: Comment
Article Date: September 19, 2001
This has been a rough week for sane people everywhere. Last Tuesday, civilian airliners, virtual flying symbols of freedom, were twisted into instruments of mass murder. We’ve all seen the sickening images, beamed via the miracle (and curse) of geo-synchronous satellite to a shocked planet. Wordsmiths much more talented than I have consumed all of the fitting adjectives, adverbs, and modifiers describing the awful devastation wrought by these soulless animals. America has been sucker-punched well below the belt, and the whole civilized world felt the blow.
A system-wide shock such as the terrorist attacks have a tendency to bring human nature into sharp relief, like a photographic negative. The courage and heroism of the fallen rescue workers, the compassion of the various aid agencies, the selfless charity to help in some small way to ease the suffering of the victims’ families—these are just a few of the human traits that are admirable. There’s also the ugly side of the coin, not the least of which is the tendency to blindly strike out at any perceived threat. While incidences are thankfully fairly rare, there have been reprehensible vigilante attacks on law-abiding Americans of the Islamic faith simply because of their religion. Private and sport pilots that have earned their right to fly have seen that liberty revoked “until further notice” by a knee-jerk bureaucracy, but that’s a rant for another time. And the hobby of civilian flight simulation has been implicated as a tool of terrorism by certain media outlets. Some sponge-spined stores are even yanking existing copies off the shelf, fearful that such pacifist flying fare as FS2K can be used as a training tool for wannabee terrorists.
That’s right. If you’ve ever tried to fly a Learjet under the Golden Gate Bridge in Flight Sim 2000 or land a Cessna on the roof of a building in Fly!, you’ve been lumped into the group of baby-killing lunatics who may (or may not) have used desktop sims to hone whatever “skills” it takes to be a kamikaze. The use of the “kamikaze” term to describe these animals is indeed an insult to the Japanese suicide pilots; at least actual kamikazes were skillful enough to fly their own airplane off of the ground and man enough to try to hit heavily armed, moving targets. real kamikaze were also human enough not to take innocent men, women, and children with them.
Understandably, corporations are very sensitive to the perceived connection to terrorism, as disconnected from reality as it may be. Microsoft, for example, has chosen to delay the release of FS2002, because releasing it at this time would be "inappropriate". One obvious, and very good, reason would be the fact that the New York skyline has been suddenly and brutally altered. OK, that will have to be fixed, if for no other reason than for realism. The grotesque fact is, the towers are gone. A patch will be available to remove the WTC from existing versions of FS. While they are modifying terrain, perhaps they should be proactive by making much of Afghanistan glow in the dark and rendering Baghdad as a moonscape of smoking craters.
Let’s keep a couple of things in mind when you read or hear that the suspects had a sim on their PC. First of all, it seems that many of these ambulatory chunks of fecal waste were no-kidding commercial pilots, trained in actual flight schools. They had many hours of schooling in real aircraft. Whether they had a copy of 767:Pilot in Command on their hard drive would seem to matter very little, if at all. Could sims be used as a familiarization tool for those bent on wanton destruction? Sure. Absolutely. But if we are going to restrict the sales of flight simulators, lets also burn books with pictures of aircraft flight decks, require a license to buy a map or GPS receiver, institute a 2-day waiting period to buy a Stanley box-cutter knife, and ban video rentals of the 70's remake of King Kong because it portrays the WTC towers under siege by a giant gorilla.
It seems that whenever a tragedy occurs the media tries to manufacture blame—the more simplistic the better. After the school shootings in Colorado occurred a couple of years ago, it was proposed to be the fault of Quake and Marilyn Manson, not the sociopathic loonies with the guns. Now, it’s the easy access to a simulation of an airliner flight deck that is considered an accessory to murder. Both examples are, of course, gross oversimplifications of much deeper problems. Due to the plague of Political Correctness, however, many are afraid to point out the obvious for fear of offending someone. A paralysis by guilt sets in, with everyone afraid to make a move, any move at all.
This baseless guilt trip, however, is playing exactly into what the terrorists want—disruption of our daily lives to the point that even engaging in a relaxing, pacifist virtual flight reminds one of the horrific attack. As of today, the FAA still is not allowing VFR flights in US airspace, with the exception of aviation-dependent Alaska. This serious infringement of basic civil liberties by an over-reacting bureaucracy on a completely innocent segment of society is scary enough. Now, certain people want you to feel guilty for even taking a simulated flight around the old patch. It's not enough that our very real civil liberties are in danger of being eroded as a tradeoff for some intangible sense of security, now even virtual liberties are threatened.
So be a true citizen of democracy. President Bush himself has asked us to go on with our lives, so be patriotic and Immelmann an Airbus or loop a Learjet. Enjoy yourself.
It’s your duty.
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IMHO: Illegitimus Non Corborundum
By Bob "Groucho" MarksArticle Type: Comment
Article Date: September 19, 2001
This has been a rough week for sane people everywhere. Last Tuesday, civilian airliners, virtual flying symbols of freedom, were twisted into instruments of mass murder. We’ve all seen the sickening images, beamed via the miracle (and curse) of geo-synchronous satellite to a shocked planet. Wordsmiths much more talented than I have consumed all of the fitting adjectives, adverbs, and modifiers describing the awful devastation wrought by these soulless animals. America has been sucker-punched well below the belt, and the whole civilized world felt the blow.
A system-wide shock such as the terrorist attacks have a tendency to bring human nature into sharp relief, like a photographic negative. The courage and heroism of the fallen rescue workers, the compassion of the various aid agencies, the selfless charity to help in some small way to ease the suffering of the victims’ families—these are just a few of the human traits that are admirable. There’s also the ugly side of the coin, not the least of which is the tendency to blindly strike out at any perceived threat. While incidences are thankfully fairly rare, there have been reprehensible vigilante attacks on law-abiding Americans of the Islamic faith simply because of their religion. Private and sport pilots that have earned their right to fly have seen that liberty revoked “until further notice” by a knee-jerk bureaucracy, but that’s a rant for another time. And the hobby of civilian flight simulation has been implicated as a tool of terrorism by certain media outlets. Some sponge-spined stores are even yanking existing copies off the shelf, fearful that such pacifist flying fare as FS2K can be used as a training tool for wannabee terrorists.
That’s right. If you’ve ever tried to fly a Learjet under the Golden Gate Bridge in Flight Sim 2000 or land a Cessna on the roof of a building in Fly!, you’ve been lumped into the group of baby-killing lunatics who may (or may not) have used desktop sims to hone whatever “skills” it takes to be a kamikaze. The use of the “kamikaze” term to describe these animals is indeed an insult to the Japanese suicide pilots; at least actual kamikazes were skillful enough to fly their own airplane off of the ground and man enough to try to hit heavily armed, moving targets. real kamikaze were also human enough not to take innocent men, women, and children with them.
Understandably, corporations are very sensitive to the perceived connection to terrorism, as disconnected from reality as it may be. Microsoft, for example, has chosen to delay the release of FS2002, because releasing it at this time would be "inappropriate". One obvious, and very good, reason would be the fact that the New York skyline has been suddenly and brutally altered. OK, that will have to be fixed, if for no other reason than for realism. The grotesque fact is, the towers are gone. A patch will be available to remove the WTC from existing versions of FS. While they are modifying terrain, perhaps they should be proactive by making much of Afghanistan glow in the dark and rendering Baghdad as a moonscape of smoking craters.
Let’s keep a couple of things in mind when you read or hear that the suspects had a sim on their PC. First of all, it seems that many of these ambulatory chunks of fecal waste were no-kidding commercial pilots, trained in actual flight schools. They had many hours of schooling in real aircraft. Whether they had a copy of 767:Pilot in Command on their hard drive would seem to matter very little, if at all. Could sims be used as a familiarization tool for those bent on wanton destruction? Sure. Absolutely. But if we are going to restrict the sales of flight simulators, lets also burn books with pictures of aircraft flight decks, require a license to buy a map or GPS receiver, institute a 2-day waiting period to buy a Stanley box-cutter knife, and ban video rentals of the 70's remake of King Kong because it portrays the WTC towers under siege by a giant gorilla.
It seems that whenever a tragedy occurs the media tries to manufacture blame—the more simplistic the better. After the school shootings in Colorado occurred a couple of years ago, it was proposed to be the fault of Quake and Marilyn Manson, not the sociopathic loonies with the guns. Now, it’s the easy access to a simulation of an airliner flight deck that is considered an accessory to murder. Both examples are, of course, gross oversimplifications of much deeper problems. Due to the plague of Political Correctness, however, many are afraid to point out the obvious for fear of offending someone. A paralysis by guilt sets in, with everyone afraid to make a move, any move at all.
This baseless guilt trip, however, is playing exactly into what the terrorists want—disruption of our daily lives to the point that even engaging in a relaxing, pacifist virtual flight reminds one of the horrific attack. As of today, the FAA still is not allowing VFR flights in US airspace, with the exception of aviation-dependent Alaska. This serious infringement of basic civil liberties by an over-reacting bureaucracy on a completely innocent segment of society is scary enough. Now, certain people want you to feel guilty for even taking a simulated flight around the old patch. It's not enough that our very real civil liberties are in danger of being eroded as a tradeoff for some intangible sense of security, now even virtual liberties are threatened.
So be a true citizen of democracy. President Bush himself has asked us to go on with our lives, so be patriotic and Immelmann an Airbus or loop a Learjet. Enjoy yourself.
It’s your duty.
Printer Friendly