Burning Holes in the Sky

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 LinkedIn - It's like Facebook for adults.  People posting accomplishments, provocative business articles, celebrations, thoughtful leadership quotes, job postings, etc.  Don't quite understand the purpose.  There are some people that are excellent at using the platform for self promotion and coming across as "with it" in their industry.  Contemporary thinkers.  Showing they're business savviness and that they're movers and shakers.  That I am not.  Nor do I want to be shamelessly promoting myself.  

Someone had made a post about pilot training in the seat of an airplane vs pilot training in a simulator and was making the case for having more traditional flying hours in an actual airplane and less time in a sim.  David Neeleman (who I greatly admire) had a snarky comment about seat time in a plane burning millions of holes in the atmosphere through emissions and wasting fuel.  OK - this coming from a guy who has started 5 airlines - Morris Air, WestJet, JetBlue, Azul and Breeze.  How many holes have his entrepreneurial ventures burned in the sky and will continue to burn in the sky in the name of commercial aviation.  

I think the angle Neeleman is really going for is to have more simulator hours count towards training and less actual plane hours count towards training.  It will put more pilots on the line in a shorter amount of time.  Using the environment as the excuse or justification to campaign for less flying time and more sim time to me is disingenuous.  An environmentalist doesn't start and and grow multiple airlines.  Granted Neeleman has always purchased the most fuel efficient planes on the market, it doesn't discount the impact aviation has on the environment.  The industry needs more pilots and the faster they're trained up, the better it is for the industry.

Alas, I think the climate change alarmists are really using the weather as a way to increase tax revenues, regulate a necessary industry out of existence (energy production) and take away personal freedom. The science and conclusions about green house gases and climate change are fuzzy at best.   The world economy doesn't work on windmills, batteries and solar power.  Fossil fuels don't come from dinosaur remains.  The Earth makes oil.  They know that. 

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