Way back in Iraq, our squadron commander told us (as crews of a helicopter that would nightly fly America’s special operations forces to their nighttime raids), “If any of you were to crash, it’d headline international news.”

I took his meaning to be, “I know this seems routine, and that routine can seem insignificant, but it’s not. You’re doing good work for America.” In short, he was keeping the troops motivated.

Naturally, it was also a true claim. If 30+ special operations troops crashed and died, that would be international news. This is true to this day.

But today, even aviation events where no one has died are making the news cycle.

For you, the non-pilot, I want to offer two pieces of perspective. Firstly, how would you like it if every single mistake you made on the job went viral? That’s right. And that’s why you’re not a pilot. And you shouldn’t be one.

Secondly, this near-miss at Midway has the same feature as the mid-air in DC. The pilot said he would do the right thing but he did not. How should this be accounted for?

For me it is simple. I have to maintain a hyper-sensitive honesty.

In the case of the DC mid-air, after I (in role of BH pilot) had said, “Traffic in Sight” the first time, if I found myself queried a second time (which is what happened), I’d have to trust that my well-honed honesty would have pricked my snowflakely-sensitive conscience as usual and then I would have said to tower, “Ahh, actually I am not sure what traffic you’re referring to. Can you point him out?” (I mean to bring to bear that I would intentionally use those non-standard phrases to call to Tower’s attention that the situation is abnormal and needing renewed attention, even as the words also suggest as much.)

In this case, at Midway, given the extreme situation of the news hyping every single aviation procedural aberration they catch wind of, the minute my clearance had changed (to be sure, there was some totally normal, but not strictly necessary, back-and-forth clarification between the pilot and Ground Control), I would have made the decision to stop prior to every runway and double-check if I was cleared across. This would be totally unnecessary and actually annoying and that is the point. The Ground guy would, then, display his hatred of me as he cleared me individually like I was a child (but apparently capable of being a pilot), but it would have pricked his conscience that I thought something was needing extra attention—the something being either 1. a weak pilot, 2. a weak controller, or 3. some as of yet uncommunicated circumstance.

Generally, aviation communication requires extreme eloquence and purpose—which amounts to an exceedingly small and standard vocabulary. Because of this fact, simply using plain language is a tool the pilot and ATC can employ without blatantly calling each other names when the situation arises. I’m not kidding. Believe you, me, when life and death are at stake, the desire to jump to full throttle on some moron, who is sitting in an air conditioned room totally free from danger, at the slightest unnecessary increase of risk with, “Go eff yourself!”, or conversely, the desire to put a supposed demi-god who believes himself to be the spiritual offspring of Maverick in place with, “I used English and you speak English!” or similar, is very real. (And I would argue appropriate and inescapable given the stakes.) The point here is demi-gods who are, in fact, the spiritual offspring of Maverick know how to use subtle and nuanced methods to get the attention they most assuredly deserve. And as you groundlings highlight to the world every day, we deserve a lot of your attention.

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The last thing that you need to know is while parts of the media coverage emphasize the fact that the two planes were not on the same channel, this is fake news. Don’t be stupid people. Ground handles traffic on the ground, and Tower handles traffic in the air, and other channels handle other parts of the airspace system.

The problem of radio communication is it requires “one at a time”. To imply that everyone needs to be on one channel is completely without forethought.