The sticker on my car suggesting that fellow road users “Hang Up, Look Up, Wake Up & DRIVE” is evidence enough that my cur
Nigel Moll says:
The sticker on my car suggesting that fellow road users “Hang Up, Look Up, Wake Up & DRIVE” is evidence enough that my curmudgeon gene is thriving, but the JFK kiddie controllers provoked a reaction that clinches it. I see no factors to redeem the errors in judgment by 48-year-old controller Glenn Duffy and his supervisor that allowed Duffy’s twin nine-year-old kids to play Mr. Microphone at New York JFK International Airport on consecutive days in February, or by the airline pilot who appeared to place “playing nice” above the professionalism demanded of his line of work. With a cabin-load of passengers in the back, he accepted a takeoff clearance from a kid, playing along with this ill advised stunt (“Awesome job!” he replied) instead of staying on the brakes and demanding a proper clearance from a real tower controller. The fact that the kids were parroting dad is immaterial; a kid’s voice was issuing a takeoff clearance, and while this might have been unremarkable at Humptystump Regional it was behavior hardly befitting JFK International Airport in the late afternoon.
Real aviation isn’t kids’ stuff. Remember Jessica Dubroff, the seven-year-old girl who died, along with her “instructor,” in the crash of the Cessna Cardinal we were led to believe she was commanding as it set out to cross the U.S. in 1996?
Remember the Russian airline pilot who (the CVR transcript suggests) put his teenage son and 12-year-old daughter at the controls of an Airbus A310 before it plummeted to earth in Siberia in 1994, killing all 75 aboard?
