I Came Here For The Peace And Quiet, For Frick's Sake
This past weekend marked the return of the big annual air show at the local executive airport (read: airport that the common unwashed rabble don't get to use), and I think I speak for the majority of us townies when I say I'd like to kick the organizers someplace sensitive. There's plenty of ground-level come-look-at-the-cool-planes that sounds like fun, especially for families with kids, but the issue is that the headliners this year were the Air Force Thunderbirds. A big draw and a big get, to be sure, so they were given the clearance to arrive early to rehearse, and then had multiple performances over several days. Fun!
Except.
When I say it's the local airport, I mean way local. I mean we drive past the airfield daily. I mean said airfield is on Bath Road, and some weekends we walk to Bath Road. Jets, however, don't have a concept for the term "local". Jets need space to operate, especially if they're rehearsing flight formations, and the space they operate is the entire surrounding space, i.e. right over every house and business in town. Back when I lived in Glens Falls, we had the balloon festival, which meant occasionally looking up and going, "Oh hey look, hot air balloons!" Much less fun is having naps interrupted by jet engine screech, with no recourse other than stomping onto the porch in your skivvies and impotently shouting "PIPE DOWN, MAVERICK, WE GOT IT THE FIRST TIME".
And if it were just about inconvenience, I'd only be grumbling a little. That kind of inconvenience is the price of living in a populated are, the kind that comes with parades and street fairs beet festivals and whatever else your town boosters like to do. But I'd like you to take a moment to think about how veterans with PTSD react to fireworks displays, and just imagine subjecting them to repeated jet fighter flybys like a nonconsensual pro-am restaging of Top Gun directly above their backyard that lasts for four days. The point I lose my patience is the point where inconvenience tips over into hazard. That point is somewhere behind us.
On the other hand, I got to watch a plane do a bank-and-roll maneuver over the Hannaford parking lot without having to pay the $60 admission price. That was kinda cool.