this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2024
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That's what I mean, that's not rich people. Most of those are going to be training flights, statistically with both the instructor and the instructee being in various stages of "let's get into horrific debt so I can fly an airliner at some point" pipeline.
The minority of people who fly for fun are going to be doctors, engineers, and people like that who are working their asses off like everyone else, just lucky enough to afford doing this for a few hours every month, that costs a significant portion of their money.
Those people will also be less trained than airliner pilots, thus more in danger of fucking up and dying if you fuck with them.
Let people be.
I worked at a local TV station and we occasionally did coverage at the local airport that had a lot of small planes and no commercial flights. Like you said, we're not talking about one percenters here. We're talking plumbers that are way into flying. Not even necessarily someone who makes decent money like a plumber. It could be, just like a person in a menial job who spends all their money fixing up a muscle car, a similar situation.
People who fly small planes, as far as I can tell, do it because they're super into flying planes. It really has nothing to do with their economic status beyond "has enough money to buy a small plane." If you get an ultralight that you can just tow to the airport and don't need a hangar for it, you're talking maybe a $20,000 investment. I've seen ultralights for sale for a lot less.
They usually don't even have that kind of money here. It's either a group lease or mostly rentals. But yeah, GA pilots are a very dedicated bunch. And they are usually good people too.
That we have a society where people are allowed to commit this kind of violence without consequence is horrible.
The rich people flying their own aircraft are almost always flying very small prop-planes that make less noise than the average semi-truck. The oligarch-parasites are never flying their own planes, so taking down an aircraft that they are in is going to result in multiple casualties of innocent people just trying to make a living. The only pilots who don't go into debt to get their license are military veterans who just paid for their training with years of their lives and a decent chance of racking up some not-insignificant PTSD.
I can see where you are coming from on this, but you're just wrong on this one. Luigi had the right idea by causing zero ancillary casualties and preventing harm from coming to anyone who was not his intended target. Any act of violence that doesn't take that into account is just expanding on the already pervasive suffering in our society. As an EMT, I helped care for a toddler that had their distal femur obliterated by a stray shot in a drive-by shooting. I was in the ER, so I never found out what ended up happening to them after we stabilized them and sent them off to the trauma and orthopedic surgeons, but with my medical education since then, my best guess is an above-the-knee amputation because the growth plate was destroyed. So I've seen innocent bystander casualties before, in person, and there is no excuse for causing that kind of suffering. The impact that can come from inflicting damage on innocent bystanders is profound and no one with remotely decent virtues could inflict that kind of pain intentionally.