Whether you’re a pilot, a surgeon, or a president, experience matters:

Pilots with Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger III’s background are becoming the exception rather than the rule. Captain Sullenberger, readers will recall, carefully ditched his Airbus A320 close to a jetty in the Hudson River in January 2009 without loss of a single life, after the plane had been disabled by a flock of geese while climbing out of LaGuardia airport. It should be pointed out that Sully learned to fly at the age of 16, flew F-4 Phantoms in the air force, and had 40 years and 20,000 hours of mostly hands-on experience when he performed his heroics on the Hudson.

The problem today is that aircrew may log thousands of hours on the flight decks of modern airliners, but their actual hands-on flying experience may amount to mere minutes per flight. When things get frantic–whether through a mistaken input or a sudden runway change by air-traffic control during descent–aircrew can be so preoccupied punching fresh instructions into the flight-management computer that they may fail to notice their airspeed and altitude are falling precipitously.

The whole thing here.
h/t

Retired Army major general Robert H. Scales in the Washington Post:

After personal exchanges with dozens of active and retired soldiers in recent days, I feel confident that what follows represents the overwhelming opinion of serving professionals who have been intimate witnesses to the unfolding events that will lead the United States into its next war.

They are embarrassed to be associated with the amateurism of the Obama administration’s attempts to craft a plan that makes strategic sense. None of the White House staff has any experience in war or understands it. So far, at least, this path to war violates every principle of war, including the element of surprise, achieving mass and having a clearly defined and obtainable objective.

A little scratching and hair-pulling wouldn’t do much harm, though:

One officer told me: “To hell with them. If this guy wants this war, then let him have it. Looks like no one will get hurt anyway.”

But it isn’t even the arguments (scientific, political, economic, or logical) that gets me, as much as it is the pure inanity of the topic. It’s the fact I have to even debate this in the first place. That there are millions of mindless, conforming humans that actually believe this stuff necessitating my expenditure of calories of energy to address the idiotic and very-religious-like premises of global warming. In other words, the fact we’re arguing about something so inane proves there is a larger underlying problem than global warming itself.

William Putnam III, the sole trustee of Flagstaff, Arizona’s famed Lowell Observatory, wants to name an asteroid after Trayvon Martin:

“As I see it, the social fairness showed to Trayvon Martin was very sadly lacking,” said the retired broadcast executive, alpinist, author and Flagstaff resident. “Inasmuch as I am the sole trustee of an institution which has some naming privileges, I want to do my share to see that this lad is remembered in an appropriate manner.”