D.C. Gyrocopter: Next Time, Mail the %$^$* Letters
I’m trying to be amused, but the fallout from this silly stunt is likely to be anything but.
Just as I was warming up to gyrocopters, along comes Doug Hughes who, overnight, has become the most famous—or notorious—mailman since Three Days of the Condor. As I was watching the coverage of Hughes' bizarre stunt to deliver letters to Congress by plopping his gyrocopter on The Mall in front of the Capitol and listening to this guy prattle on about why he did it, I vacillated between thinking he's either one of the most courageous pilots I've seen recently, or the most selfish. I've settled on selfish. Definitely selfish.
If you watch this highly produced video, what's most obvious is thatHughes is the kind of true believer for whom collateral damage is merely a minor inconvenience if he even considered that it might have downstream consequences for anyone other than the occupant of his mental hangar. As stated in the video, Hughes' thing is to demand the separation of big money from politics, as though Jeffersonian democracy was somehow built on the notion that bank and state live in different universes. I'm sure it's a worthy ideal to which we might all aspire, but couldn't you just mail the %$#&*^ letters? "No sane person," Hughes said, "would do what I'm doing." And no person has a greater gift for understatement. Or maybe he's just laying the groundwork for an insanity defense.
Let's count the fails here. First, Hughes was perfectly willing to accept the risk, reasoning that the hair-trigger security apparatus wouldn't shoot a 61-year-old man out of the sky if he politely announced that he was coming and intended no harm. What will be revealed in the inevitable investigation will be a series of oversights and failures in security procedures that will indicate they damn sure would have shot his ass out of the sky, but they couldn't bore sight him because even though he told them he was coming, they just didn't take him seriously. Someone will be squirming before the Select House Committee on Stupid Acts trying to explain this. Someone will be asked, "What part of this Hollywood video didn't you believe?"
Then there will be all kinds of questions about intelligence, security and point defense, culminating in the realization that the Capitol is all but defenseless against a single self-focused person willing to fly a gyrocopter 70 miles at 100 feet. (Maybe in the future, that swarm of drones we're hyperventilating about will make such a flight impossible.)
But it's obviously possible now and I think we all fear that the government security edifice will soon try to find a way to make it less possible. The D.C.-area airports are already on a kind of lockdown and have been since 2001. Will that get worse, even to the point of closure? I'm guessing not, but I'm also guessing we'll see a new round of silly security restrictions that will do nothing other than to further chill general aviation, including gyrocopters, Mr. Hughes. Meanwhile, those 535 letters will become nice collectors items while having zero impact on campaign financing.
In a way, Hughes' stunt is a test of sorts. A test to see if the country, the body politic and the security agencies are mature enough to evaluate this incident and realize that it was, in the end, actually harmless. Think of it as democracy on the wing. But we all know it doesn't work that way. Having failed to dissuade Hughes when his plans were handed to them on a plate, these agencies will now work overtime to show how they'll never let that happen again.
And that, Mr. Hughes, is the downstream consequence you didn't think about.