Over the weekend a Cirrus SR-22 airplane, the same kind that Deb and I have been flying around the country on our American Futures travels, made an unplanned descent into the Pacific. The extra fuel tanks for the long ferry flight from California to Hawaii developed some kind of valve problem; the pilot realized that without that extra gas he couldn't make it all the way; so in coordination with the Coast Guard, he picked out a site in the vicinity of a cruise ship. Then he used the Cirrus's unique whole-airplane parachute to lower the plane to the water and crawl into his rescue raft. I told the story here.
Now the pilot, 25-year old Lue Morton, has gone on Good Morning America to describe the experience — and share a GoPro video he shot from inside the plane as it was coming down. You can see the remarkable footage here or below (after pre-roll ad):
World News Videos | ABC World News
Good for Cirrus, the Coast Guard, Lue Morton and his colleagues at The Flight Academy, the Holland America cruise ship Veendam, and all others involved.
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On a less upbeat note, Andrew Jacobs of the NYT has an update on the darkening saga of Chinese authorities intensifying their effort to cut China's people off from the international Internet. I also had a note about this over the weekend.
One of Jacobs's ways of making the point:
“I need to stay tuned into the rest of the world,” said Henry Yang, 25, the international news editor of a state-owned media company who uses Facebook to follow broadcasters like Diane Sawyer, Ann Curry and Anderson Cooper. “I feel like we’re like frogs being slowly boiled in a pot.”
Sigh. Seriously, the Chinese internal squeeze-down is bad news. And among its less-serious consequences is that people in China are walled off from the knowledge that they need to add "apocryphal" before "boiled frog." Or else "decerebrated," since frogs only behave this way if their brains have been removed. (You can check it out.)
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In San Francisco today I gave a speech at a League of California Cities convention, telling city managers from across the state what we'd discovered about "successful" cities and regions in our travels through the past year-plus. I had a list of ten markers of places-on-the-rise— not counting, of course, the presence of start-up craft breweries. No. 7 on the real list was an active, creative, and effective community college system. This report from Mississippi will give an idea why, plus this one from Georgia on high school counterparts.
California, at one time a leader in public higher education, has in recent years been a laggard on the community-college front. We'll be saying more on this front. Thus I was glad to see in this morning's news that Jerry Brown, beginning his fourth and final term as governor, has proposed a boost in state efforts here. According to EdSource:
The governor’s budget proposal for 2015-16 includes $876 million for career technical education and other job training initiatives at K-12 schools and community colleges – welcome news for programs that saw course offerings cut and enrollments decrease over the past several years.
The governor identifies the programs as a key part of a larger, $1.2 billion statewide effort aimed at “reinvesting and reshaping California’s workforce preparation systems.” The effort aims to get students into training programs that are more closely linked to regional workforce needs and to better coordinate job training programs at colleges and schools.
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Good news from aviation, bad news from the most populous country, good news from our most populous state. We muddle ahead.
This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2015/01/updates-airplane-parachute-selfie-the-immortal-boiling-frog/385006/
