1 – Love & Wisdom vs Postmodern Power: A Brief History of the Conflict in America and How We Fix It

Lost on a Low Level Flight
Back in the last century, when I was in flight school in the Marine Corps, I was stationed for a time in the vacation destination of Kingsville, Texas. At one point, Mother Nature decided to send a massive hurricane our way.

With the hurricane inbound, a young instructor and I—he was 25 years old and I was 23—were told to take one of the jets and go away and get some training done. The instructor decided we were going to practice low-level flights to Houston and Meridian, Mississippi, on our way to Atlanta where his girlfriend lived.

And so, with the hurricane imminent, we took off from Naval Air Station Kingsville as my newlywed wife drove north, by herself, to Dallas to escape.

The low-level flight to Houston was good. We got gas and launched out of Houston.

Now remember, this was last century, way back in the days before GPS and digital cockpit displays.  Low-level navigation flights were designed to teach you how to navigate using a paper map, a compass, and a stopwatch. You flew high-altitude to the start point, dropped down to 500’, accelerated to 420 knots, hit the stopwatch and used the compass to fly the heading to the next checkpoint.

You navigated by flying the correct direction for a certain amount of time where you would, hopefully, find your checkpoint. When you got to the checkpoint you turned the airplane to a new heading and flew that direction for a certain amount of time.

How did you know where you were? By flying the right direction for the right amount of time and looking out the window for terrain features—maybe a road or powerline or river or bridge—that matched your paper map.

Louisiana is flat, so there’s not many hills or mountains to help you stay on route. There are a lot of towns and roads and they all look the same.

We were about 10 seconds late hitting our first checkpoint—a river.

Crossing our second checkpoint—a highway—we were about 25 seconds late. The terrain wasn’t matching what was on the map very well. At one point, I saw a long line of numbered, colored boards go under the airplane. They looked somewhat familiar, but they passed so fast that I couldn’t tell what they were.

Flying the rest of the route was much the same. We were pretty sure we were lost. We got to the end-time for the route and were getting low on gas, so we started our climb to 15,000 feet and called air traffic control to get vectors to Meridian. It took air traffic control some time to find us. We were not where they expected we would be. We had been way off course.

After we landed at Meridian, the tower called us while we taxied and told us to give the Army base, Fort Polk in Louisiana, a phone call.

Fort Polk was quite unhappy because we had flown our orange and white airplane, 500’ high, right through the middle of their tank gunnery range.

While they had tanks lined up and firing.

Those colored, numbered boards? That was the tank range. Fortunately, tank rounds have a flat trajectory and went under us.

We figured out that the compass in our airplane was about 8 degrees off. That caused us to fly a bit north of our intended route. The deviation was small at the beginning but got bigger and bigger the further and longer we flew—until we were way off course.

It almost got us killed. We didn’t know where we were until we climbed to altitude. Air traffic control found us and gave us the reference points we needed to get to Meridian.

There are about 100 good lessons from that flight. Let’s talk about a few.
Lessons From Being Lost
Small Deviations Can Kill You
First, a minor course deviation is insidious over time. It can kill you.

If you start off headed completely the wrong direction, you can realize it quickly. The deviations are big and noticeable. If our compass had been 90 degrees off, we would have figured it out quickly.

When you’re only a little off course though, things are only a little bit off.