Breakfast at Epiphany's

I was taking a fire service course called EVOC – Emergency Vehicle Operation Course. Most of the content could be summarized in one sentence: “Slow down and wear your seatbelt.”

The grand finale was to go out on a driving course that was marked out with cones in the university parking lot, and take an engine through some simple maneuvers.

I’m a pretty good driver.

Been driving since I was 15 and that’s a lot of miles.

Took a driving course once called “evasion and escape.” Learned how to do boot-legger turns. Some other interesting tidbits.

Drove a garbage truck for a while.

And a dump truck a few times, in the waybackwhen.

So I wasn’t intimidated by a fire engine.

But I haven’t done much except “routine” driving in a long time.

And I crushed just as many orange cones as anyone else...

There’s a huge, huge difference between driving a car and driving a fire engine. The load, the momentum, the turn radius, the stopping distance (1000 gallons of water at 8 lbs a gallon…..)

And that’s when something really hit home.

In the official conspiracy theory of 9/11/01, some guys who’d been trained on Cessna’s (with mediocre performances in at least one case) flew those commercial airliners with appreciable precision.

That’s like saying a guy who just learned how to drive a VW bug drove a fire engine through midtown traffic.

I just don’t think so.

Apparently, a lot of experienced pilots don’t think so, either, because quite a few have come forward to the declare the notion – shall we say “extremely unlikely?”

It’s possible that ONE wild, anomalous aerial wunderkinder might have gotten incredibly lucky. But four out of four?

I may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night.

sj