“Please pray for him not to suffer from this accident,” said Dong Yun Yoon of the marine pilot whose disabled plane snuffed out the lives of his mother-in-law, wife, and two daughters last year in San Diego — Man who lost family when jet hit house: I don’t blame pilot. If you haven’t yet seen the video of Mr. Yoon’s press conference in December, be warned; it’s a tearjerker, but also a testimony of human dignity, the strength that comes from community, and grace through unspeakable tragedy — ‘Horrible thing to happen’.
Well, it turns out the pilot is in real need of our prayers, as “the crash might have been averted” according to news today — Military jet had chance to land before fatal crash. Milblogger GI Korea suggests that “the Marines messed up big time on this” and says of the pilot that “it appears he had two chances to avoid crashing in the residential area and ignored them” — Marine Corps punishes 13 for San Diego jet crash.
Shortly after the tragedy, American Christian libertarian William N. Grigg wrote an excellent essay on the subject — Leviathan Devours a Family. In it, he suggested that that “it was the moral duty of the pilot to sacrifice his own [life] – assuming, of course, that there is a coherent moral code underlying the institutions of American militarism.” More:
This lieutenant thus confronted that rarest of things, an opportunity for a member of the US Armed Forces actually to defend the lives of American civilians. In this case, he could have done so by turning around and attempting to make it back to the Abraham Lincoln, rather than flying over a heavily populated area aboard a stricken fighter jet.
Had he done so, he may have had to ditch his plane in the ocean and dying at sea. But he would have protected the civilian population, which is supposedly the reason our government has a military in the first place.
05/03/2009 at 12:04 am Permalink
I think a lot of junior pilots are inherently reckless and no amount of hindsight is going to change this, although it will hopefully assist in preventing it from happening again if maybe training flights are restricted to less densely populated areas.