Firepower in Dayton
So, my stepfather’s a pilot.
I don’t suppose I’ve indulged my readers into too much of my mother’s new marriage, but that’s what he does, he flies commercial airplanes.
So what I never knew before the whole relationship that is my stepfather, Scott, was that pilots are a certain kind of people. They enjoy certain types of things, and problem solve in a very similar fashion. I can see it in my brother, who’s always been fascinated by flight. So when my mother asked me if I’d like to join her, my brother, Scott and his father in attending the annual Dayton Air Show, I felt like I was just tagging along to a spectacle of what was the biggest passion for my brother and my stepfather. They have both tailored their education and career choices to flight, and while I’m pretty sure I know more than I should, they’re simply another mode of transportation for me.
But to say that sounds as if you have to have a pilot to enjoy an airshow, which simply isn’t true. But to attend one with the aforementioned company was like seeing your friend’s favorite band with him, you just know it’s not about you. So taking the journey to Dayton was an adventure in its own to find out that going to an airshow was actually on my brother’s “bucket list”.
And the airshow in its own was pretty much what I had expected it to be. A lot of sitting and watching monstrous steel birds rip through the sky, in what I consider to be a pretty remarkable spectacle of human achievement. After walking through the belly of a plane bigger than your house, you put to question the very laws of physics that up to this point, you thought you understood. So in that respect, I can really appreciate an airshow, even if I have no burning passion for aviation.
Seeing planes weave in-and-out just feet from each other is pretty cool, and seeing take-off after take-off, comparing what they must be feeling to your worst experience with turbulence. But when you compare that in the view of entertainment value for somebody like me, it’s just another event to go to, another tick on the stat sheet of things I’ve seen. Once you watch a plane buzz by your head cruising almost faster than sound once or twice, the shock wears off, and that’s the entertainment breaking point for people like me, and people like my brother. I’m pretty sure he could have spent the entire day watching those planes twirl around, but me, once you see one, you’ve seen most.
But there are some things I did really enjoy. I got to see two of my favorite aircrafts up close, the V-22 Osprey and Apache helicopter. I also witnessed a flight of the A10 Warthog, which zipped around at a much high speed that I ever imagined a plane so big could. I learned they had fake canopies painted on the bottom, and seeing all the large olive-drab war-machines draped in war-paint really ignited my inner ten-year-old boy, who’s perpetually stuck in an army phase.
But that alone kind of put me in a funk for the whole day. It’s hard to sit down and enjoy and display of pyrotechnics in a WWII style-air raid knowing that at one point in those plane’s history, people were under those balls of smoke and flame, and that the guns mounted on my favorite childhood helicopters were meant to take lives. No ten-year-old-boy can truly comprehend just what loss of life is like, so weapons of battle are still just man made noises. So while I really had a fun time at the air show, and I knew it meant a lot to certain people, the perpetual idea of cheering on and clapping for machines of war really didn’t sit right with me. Family-friendly airshow or not, those machine guns weren’t mounted on the sides of those planes to look cool: they were there to win wars.
It’s not so entertaining to me, when I think about it like that.
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