As you may have heard, factional disputes in the US have reached the point in which significant portions of our population and leadership have no problem with relying on unpaid air traffic controllers. I very much hope this blog won’t become an evil portent after a tragic crash, but hope is about all I can do. To illustrate the issue, a news program displayed the following graphic from flightaware.com. There are approximately 10,600 planes represented.

At first glance, I loved it. Look at all those planes! Boy, are we asking for it!

Then I thought about it. While flying, it is rare to spot another plane between airports, as in, it nearly never happens. Even realizing that these planes are flying at various altitudes, I couldn’t square that with this congestion.

Then I measured it. These flat plane icons are enormous: my very rough estimate is that each one covers about 1786 square miles. That’s a little bigger than a real plane! Even the largest Dreamliner extends across a viewed-from-above 2D area of only 44,000 square feet, or 0.00158 square miles.

That is, these plane icons are over a million times larger than a real plane.

Mentally reduce these icons to dots a millionth of their original size and you’ll be able to see a lot more of the underlying map. Not sure? Just think about each icon being half-sized, then a tenth, then a hundredth. At a hundredth I think each one of them could be replaced by a small dot, like the period at the end of this sentence, and that’s not nearly small enough for a realistic representation, even if all 10,600 were Dreamliners.

Can you see the map now? If you did it right, there is a lot of space and only a few planes, with the only clustering near major airports.

This misleading graphic is induced fear in action, and it came from a liberal show, proving neither side has a monopoly on truth manipulation. Unpaid ATCs are not a good thing for many reasons, but swarming-bee-level clumps of airplanes is not one of them. Because that’s not a Thing.

So much of our lives are spent worrying about phantoms. What’s real in America right now is hundreds of thousands of government employees forced to work with no pay, struggling with their bills, facing disastrous short-term financial decisions, with no end in sight. That said, I confess that I would not encourage the Dems to fund the Wall, mostly because I was once the mother of a toddler. When the child decides to scream until his wish is fulfilled, that is one time we can guarantee the wish will continue unmet. We negotiate only when the screaming stops.

That leads to less screaming in the future.

Happily, toddlers are relatively powerless in the overall scheme of ruining innocent people’s lives. Why can’t that real harm and unfairness loom larger in our thoughts than giant airplanes?