The Instrument Panel We Threw Away

Let's face it: most people hate history. They were taught to hate history in school. Read a few boring textbooks. Watch a boring history movie. "This doesn't apply to my life!"

In a YouTube video, a 21-year-old pilot with 80 hours of flight instruction is in peril. He was only trained for VFR (visual flight), and he flew into weather. But in fact, he sealed his fate earlier, even before he got into the cockpit. The plane he owned had problems with its artificial horizon. It did not work. Nor did the turn indicator. Nor the autopilot. In fact, the only instruments he had that worked were the magnetic compass and altimeter. Maybe in fair weather all of this is fine. What made matters worse? He bought the plane in that condition. He knew what he had. No surprises.

Experienced pilots will tell you that you become disoriented when you get into weather. Up is down. Left is right. That's what happened to this young man. Once he got into the clouds, he lost all frame of reference. He lost context. He was only ten miles from a safe airport. Not long before he died, he said he was floating; an indicator he was inverted. His last words were, "Tell my parents I love them."

History is our artificial horizon. Our altimeter. It's our entire instrument cluster. Except, perhaps the autopilot.

Not all times are calm. In the past half century, we have faced a few crises. One a decade? Probably more. And when societal crises are not addressed, they stack. Just like clouds. A VFR pilot can manage a tiny cloud. But a storm front? Not without working instruments.

History gives context. It helps you understand how we got from tranquil to crazy. And it gives us ideas of how to steer through the crazy back to tranquil skies. But we have to be trained in it. I realized this as a teenager over 40 years ago. We need history to ground us.

As a teenager, I realized I had been sold a faulty plane of history. I had a coach reading from the textbook. Multiple-choice questions that took me less than 15 minutes to ace. He did not teach me a love of history, but to reject poor education. Yet it is obvious from the surrounding populous that decades of poor history education has stripped us of the ability to know which way is up. We are in some nasty weather.

Buckle up.