P-51D

wrote in message
ups.com...
As long as warbirds fly there will be an attrition rate. What makes me
NUTS is the people who have the priviledge (and $$$) to own/fly these
irreplaceable aircraft and race them putting them at risk of damage or
total loss. Risking the loss of a piece of history, to say nothing of
the pilot, just for the sake of a 400mph thrill ride is insane.

What's insane is thinking that it's for some reason important to preserve
these planes. As I already pointed out, if they were so important to
preserve, we shouldn't have been building them to be destroyed in the first
place.

More importantly, it's irrational to be concerned about not being able to
replace the airplanes. They aren't useful objects anymore (except, perhaps,
for the entertainment value they provide at air races and other airshows).
It is a fundamental truth that every last P-51 will eventually be destroyed,
just as every other thing that humanity has ever created will eventually be
destroyed. Even if P-51s were important to our survival as a species (and
they clearly are not), it would be futile to expect any to not eventually be
destroyed.

I find this irrationality even more amusing in the context of a newsgroup
where there were a handful of folks talking about how "irrational" people
with religious faith are. I suppose folks here don't mind being irrational
as long as it's their own preferential brand of irrationality. If it's
someone else's, that's apparently cause for derision.

I'd
like to see them all restored to their military condition and flown at
air shows. Much less chance of accidents there IMHO.

Oh. So it turns out, you're not actually against the destruction of these
warbirds after all. You would just rather see them destroyed for your
pleasure at airshows, rather than for someone else's pleasure at air races.

The only way to guarantee there won't be a crash is to not fly the plane.
Even stored in a building, they will all eventually be destroyed (though
perhaps not in our lifetime). But flying them, even just for display at
airshows, they are unlikely to suffer significantly less attrition than for
air racing (your statement was obviously made without bother to compare
accident statistics for the air races to those for flying displays at
airshows).

Pete