You've Seen The Rosy Projections From The Alphabet
Groups...
Here's Our Resident Cynic's Top Ten Predictions For
2006:
10. United Airlines Management will vow
sometime in January that this will be the year they turn the
company around. A blogger will create an animated .gif that shows
that it's exactly the same as the pledge they made on entering
2003, 2004 and 2005 in Chapter 11.
09. Cessna will announce that they outproduced
Cirrus on single-engine aircraft in 2005. Cessna dealers will have
some great deals on slightly dusty 182s by midyear. (Cessna counts
planes as "sold" when they go to a dealer. Cirrus, when they go to
an end user).
08. Paul Moller and his Skycar will do their
superannnuated Tom Swift thing on the talk shows and make the cover
of Popular Tinkering magazines. Moller will be looking for
investors in his automated, 300-kt, vtol, roadable chimera which
will fly "this year." (He's from a planet with a very large orbit,
perhaps?) Now we know who's United's inspiration.
07. At
least one airline union will play frog-and-scorpion with
management. As they sink beneath the waves, management will ask,
"but why did you sting me when we were so close to shore?"
"Because this is the airline business! It doesn't have to make
sense."
07b. America will discover how courteous
maintenance technicians and gate agents can be. "Welcome to
Wal-Mart!" or perhaps "Would you like me to super-size that, sir?"
will replace "management doesn't let me stock that part" and
"Sorry, if you wanted an aisle seat, you probably should have
arrived before boarding started."
07c. After encountering the forgotten
phenomenon of native English speakers in service jobs, Americans
will want more airlines to go belly-up.
06. People will finally wake up to the fact
that 100LL is going away soon -- and Lycoming and Continental
appear to have no plan for their big-bore motors. There will be
much wailing and gnashing of teeth.
05. After the hearings that SecTrans Norman
Mineta apparently dragooned some junior chekists from the Secret
Air-Police into attending, the Secret Police will be back to their
usual two phrases: "Papers!" and "Talk to the hand."
04. The Secret Police will no more allow the
ADIZ to go away than they would recommend to His Majesty that the
Stamp Act be repealed... uh, sorry, rift in the space/time
continuum.
03.
The FAA, which blew $100 million to regulate the SpaceShipOne
program (program cost, $25 million), will try to break that record
with the amount of money they are squandering on the NPRM that
addresses the 'serious' problem of spectator deaths at airshows.
(No spectator has died at an airshow in the US, UK or Canada since
September 6, 1952). We obviously need to deal with this outrage by
cracking down on those risky airshows, taking control away from the
people who've run them for the last fifty-three years and give it
to the people who cleared two planes onto the same Sarasota runway
in 2000.
02. In both Canada and the US, elections will
take place in 2006, or to put it another way, the silly season is
upon us. Politicians of all kinds will be grandstanding and looking
for a member of some voiceless minority group to kick around like a
political football. (Like, uh, aviators!) In the midst of all this
ballyhoo, you just know some rocket scientist is going to bust a
TFR. Or the ADIZ.
01. The Iranians will stop their attempts to
build a bomb -- when a bunch of planes with blue six-pointed stars
on them blow the living daylights out of every physics lab between
Turkey and Afghanistan.
Which brings us to our final prediction: it's gonna be an
interesting year. Stay tuned!
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