Creeping Tyranny…Again

It’s getting harder and harder to ignore an out-of-control Federal government. Robert Goyer at Flying magazine has apparently had enough:

As far as the pseudo detention program is concerned — nobody at TSA or Homeland Security will even confirm the existence of any such program — my best guess is that there’s some kind of flight profile that triggers a response, similar to what happened to me in my unregistered, leased airplane. The only common threads so far seem to be that most of the pilots stopped were traveling west to east and all of them so far were male — no surprise considering the overwhelmingly male pilot population. Some were on IFR flight plans, some were on VFR plans, and others were just legally flying VFR without a plan. They have all been questioned about what they were doing and why, where they were going, what they had in the airplane and why they were headed to the destination they landed at.

For the record, none of this is any of their business.

Damn skippy it ain’t. Combined with the stories of pilots being detained by local po-po for violating nonexistent no-fly zones, and one might come to believe that the thugs are feeling – shall we say – emboldened? And make no mistake: the thugs are always there. There will always be a latent tendency by some in positions of authority to throw their weight around in ways that don’t exactly comport with the rule of law. The difference lies in their sense of how likely they are to get away with it – or even if it’s expected of them.