For a few minutes today, in a very small way, I knew what the families of the VT students felt when the news of the shooting there first broke and little was clear, because Marine Son lives in a military housing area just about a mile from where a Blue Angel crashed this afternoon during an air show. The initial reports only indicated that the plane went down in “a residential area.”
I was away from home and heard the story on the radio. I know my son well enough to know that if an air show was in town, he was there…and not in his home. But then he didn’t answer his cell phone when I called to check. Fortunately for me, I suppose, I’m not an overreactor.
He was indeed at the air show and he and his family are fine. We now know that apparently only the pilot died.
But for those few minutes, the horrible thing was possible. And for one family, the pilot’s family, that horror is real.
2 comments:
Altitude is sometimes equal to life. If you're clipping pine trees in an F18, you have very little of either one. After working on F18s, I found that I had very little appreciation for the plane and was instead awed by F14s. It's too bad this chap didn't have time to yank the eject handle.
Our southern pine trees are quite tall, but not that tall. He was indeed too low to eject.
A sad story however we consider it.
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