Flight Level 34 was OK for most of the flight back to Dulles (IAD), but I have to tell you that everything happening south of that FL sucked, both directionally and altitudinally.

Going up and down to cruising altitude, the Boeing 757 shuddered with the residual effects of the storm system. The front that passed over the Springs had it’s origins in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean where the la Nina cooling event is continuing to generate intense weather. I was lucky that seat 12F was going to be passing through the trough between the fronts.

This one featured flash-floods, tornadoes and thunderstorms interspersed with enormous hail. Twisters killed people in Oklahoma before moving east through Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia.

The system hit North Carolina Saturday night as I packed to go home, casting a glance at the Accuweather forecast for IAD. The storm generated a record 92 tornadoes in the state south of Virginia, killing a couple dozen innocents and wounding nearly a hundred.

Travel is not much fun these days, as you well know, since you have been jammed in with fellow citizens, mashed, processed and scanned within an inch of your life. Even when things go well, as they did when the 757 leapt into the air, on time and without undue delay, the residual eddies in the lower altitudes made the big jet shudder with the impact of the swirling air-mass.

The view from 12F was framed by the big blue engine nacelle. I could not tell if it was the Rolls-Royce or Pratt & Whitney engine. The 757 with either as an option. The P&W apparently has, or had, vibration issues that contributed to pylon fatigue. You know the consequences of that, though I have heard a skilled pilot can land the bird with just  on the wing.

I have a little cheat-sheet on what my chances might be. I do not fly Southwest airlines, which has the Boeing 737 as their work-horse, and which has had some minor issues with the roof coming off due to landing and pressurization cycle issues.

Back in 1988, an Aloha Airlines 737 went topless suddenly, sucking flight attendant C.B. Lansing out through the sudden gaping hole in the upper fuselage. I don’t know if I rode on that airplane on our trips around the islands or not. The pilot managed to get the jet back on the deck, but the event made everyone think about fate.

A lesser version of that failure just happened that week to a Southwest 737. It was not as dramatic a failure, thank goodness, but that Boeing model is not the only one with issues. The single-aisle 757 operated by American and United has had its problems, too. Last November, an American Airlines 757 depressurized after a two-foot hole opened over an exit door, forcing the crew and passengers to don those cheesy oxygen masks.

That would be a startling but not necessarily catastrophic event. Still, when the jet that is attached to seat 12F shudders with the pounding of the invisible fists, I tend to think about pressurization cycles and engine vibrations. Not that we can do anything back there, so I read the Economist and a novel about wind-power generation in the great American west.

The whole wind thing sucks, or blows, depending on where you are in the air mass. It is sort of like the fraud of ethanol production, one of those bizarre exercises in social science masquerading as real science. In the interest of progressive technology, we have created an industry that simultaneously removes food from global supply chain and consumes more petroleum in production than it generates when refined.

Ethanol production is almost the perfect government program, generating two completely negative unintended consequences with zero social benefit and one entrenched lobby.
Not quite perfect, though. I read in the pages of the Economist and elsewhere that everything is actually going to be OK through the unintended consequences of those idiots on The Hill. All we have to do is hang tight in the hammering buffet of the immediate future, for a decade, tops.

It won’t take a lot of debate, since it will happen all by itself, and actually accelerate if we do absolutely nothing, which is what Congress is best at anyway.

The Congressional Budget Office maintains a thing called the “Current Law Baseline.” That is what is already on the books. According to the CBO forecast, the Bush-era tax rates will expire in 2012, inflation brings the hated Alternative Minimum Tax to us all. The AMT was passed in 1982, and was billed as only hitting the richest of Americans; do stop me if you have heard this recently.

Since the AMT was not indexed against the Consumer Price Index, as all out boats have risen in a sea of devalued greenbacks, the tax is increasingly biting into middle-class paychecks. Add to this miracle of passive tax increases, under existing law, Medicare payments to doctors are going to be slashed by 20 percent.

With these policies, the deficit drops away in the next 10 years, and stays manageably low for the decades after that. It is sort of like the coming demographic slump in China or Russia that in a few decades will cause them many more problems than the good ‘ole USA will have in the same period.

So really, the question is how to hang on long enough that there will still be something worth saving.

The dueling budget deficit plans are what will possibly get us through the next decade. Well, that is charitable. The Ruthless Ryan plan actually is a plan. The President’s version is one of those campaign things that can’t quite be quantified.

Neither of them work in the long haul. Ryan bills the old and ladles more relief on the rich. The contrary approach by the President- squeezing the wealthy- buys some short-term deficit reduction, and will inevitably have the same effect as the AMT, over time. The campaign version proposed by Mr. Obama, or “Pain Light,” trims an alleged $4 trillion over the decade, almost what the Ryan plan does.

But that $4 trillion is just a fraction of America’s projected long-term debt. The whole point of the Ryan plan is that the real deficit reduction starts at year 10, when his Medicare reforms are phased in.

Under the President’s plan, we soak the rich in the short term, and then just keep going deeper into the red. But of course, he must be counting on getting us to where taxes and Medicare get whacked all by themselves.

The economy goes through cycles like everything else does. That includes jets and the weather. Really, everything is going to be OK. Of course, with jets and the weather you don’t have to go flying. With the economy, we are stuck in our assigned seats with the pilots and the airframe we have got.

At check-in, we forgot to ask about the cycle time, and were not lucky enough to get an exit row.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com