It builds up, doesn't it? You make some airline flights and get treated like Grade Z beef cattle on the good ones. Then you have one where the experience is so rotten that you vow to use general aviation forevermore. And then the price of avgas goes up. Again. The TSA imposes yet another moronic rule making it tougher to get to your tiedown or the FBO where you rent an airplane. Your state wants background checks on general aviation pilots. On top of that it's announced that the geniuses who bankrupted the airlines are successfully putting pressure on the administration to impose user fees that will drive general aviation out of existence so as to force us to ride buses of the sky. (And you wonder how any self-respecting pilot can willingly operate an air vehicle called a "bus." Have they no shame at all?)It just keeps building up and you begin to wonder why you ever in your life had any interest in rising up off the ground into the sky when doing so seems to incur the wrath of the remaining 99.99% of the population. (Pilots make up about one tenth of one percent of the U.S. population.) These people spend their sheltered, myopic lives beetling across the face of the earth, rarely looking up and only considering the sky when it is to do their utmost to ground those who have the imagination and determination to spend time above the face of the earth. You begin to wonder why you don't just shut off your brain, accept the shackles of gravity, disconnect your imagination, forget the stunning views from aloft and conform to the ways of those who are so jealous of you that they do what they can to strike you down.Sadly, each year, too many of us do just that. Too many of us give up the struggle to fly and the freedom of the world aloft, and accept the chains of earth because it is just too hard to do otherwise.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/features/the-pilots-lounge-110-bad-news-coming-refuse-delivery