Little Platoons of the Pattern

On a Saturday morning at virtually any general aviation airport in America, something remarkable is happening.

A group of volunteers is pulling covers off aircraft, checking oil, reviewing maintenance logs, and briefing routes. Some of them will fly today with patients who cannot afford commercial transportation to distant medical centers. Some will fly with cancer patients whose treatment protocols require weekly trips to specialist facilities hundreds of miles from home. Some will fly with children whose families have exhausted every other option.

They will pay for the fuel themselves. They will donate their time. They will make these flights because they were asked, and because they are pilots, and because being a pilot means something.

This is Angel Flight. There are other organizations like it — Pilots N Paws, which transports rescue animals between facilities and foster homes. Wings of Mercy. AirLifeLine. Mercy Medical Airlift. Each is staffed primarily by volunteer pilots who have decided that their certificates are good for more than personal recreation.

None of them were created by government. None of them are primarily funded by government. They were created by pilots, for people who needed what pilots could provide, because pilots saw the need and filled it.

Edmund Burke would have recognized this immediately.

Little Platoons

Burke argued for the importance of the small, voluntary associations that form the connective tissue of civil society. To be attached to the subdivision, to love the little platoon we belong to in society, is the first principle — the germ as it were — of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed towards a love to our country and to mankind.

Burke was not writing about aviation — the Wright Brothers were still a century away. He was writing about the guilds, the churches, the local associations, the neighborhood institutions that French revolutionaries were sweeping aside in their enthusiasm for the universal and the rational. These small, particular, imperfect institutions were, Burke argued, where the real work of civilization was done. They were where human beings learned the habits of cooperation, the discipline of commitment, and the satisfaction of serving something beyond themselves.

The aviation community is one of the most robust collections of little platoons in American civil society.

The Experimental Aircraft Association

The Experimental Aircraft Association was founded in 1953 by a small group of pilots in Milwaukee who wanted to build and fly their own aircraft. They met in a basement. They shared tools and knowledge and the particular camaraderie of people who are attempting something difficult together.

The EAA now has more than four hundred thousand members in more than a thousand chapters worldwide. Its annual gathering at Oshkosh, Wisconsin — AirVenture — draws more than six hundred thousand visitors, making it one of the largest aviation events in the world. It operates the world's most comprehensive collection of historic aircraft, runs an extensive education program for young people interested in aviation, and provides the community infrastructure within which tens of thousands of homebuilders have constructed aircraft that they then fly.

It was not chartered by Congress. It was not created by the FAA. It was not funded by federal grants in its formative years. It grew because people who cared about general aviation found each other, organized themselves, and built something that no government program would have thought to build.

This is the pattern that Burke observed and that American conservatives have always celebrated: voluntary association producing social goods that the market wouldn't provide and the state hadn't thought to address.

Civil Air Patrol

The Civil Air Patrol was founded on December 1, 1941 — six days before Pearl Harbor — by a group of civilian pilots who wanted to contribute to national defense before the country was formally at war. They offered their aircraft, their fuel, and their time to whatever the government could use.

Within weeks of Pearl Harbor, CAP was flying submarine patrol along the Atlantic coast, where German U-boats were sinking American merchant ships at a devastating rate. Civilian pilots in light aircraft, carrying improvised bomb racks and working from coastal airstrips, spotted and attacked submarines, forced them to submerge, and coordinated with the Navy on confirmed kills. The German submarine command modified its tactics in response to CAP's activities.

CAP today performs search and rescue operations, disaster relief flights, and aerospace education programs, and operates the cadet program that has introduced hundreds of thousands of young Americans to aviation over the past eight decades. Its members are volunteers. Its aircraft are largely donated or purchased from dues. It is, in organizational terms, a little platoon that has been doing consequential work for more than eighty years.

The Pattern

What unites these organizations is not their subject matter but their structure and their source.

They were created by people who saw a need, gathered others who shared their concern, and built something to address it. They did not wait for government to identify the need, commission a study, allocate a budget, draft regulations, and hire staff. They acted. They organized. They built the thing that was needed.

This is the conservative theory of civil society in operation: the belief that human beings, given the freedom to associate and the responsibility to address their own community's needs, will produce voluntary institutions that are more responsive, more flexible, and more humane than anything that can be designed from the top down.

The aviation community's little platoons work because aviation itself selects for a certain kind of person. The pilot certificate is, as I've written elsewhere, an earned credential — the product of demonstrated competence, continued practice, and personal accountability. The culture that produces pilots also tends to produce people who take their responsibilities seriously, who understand the relationship between freedom and accountability, and who are inclined to use their skills in service of others when the need is clear.

What They Teach

The patient who boards an Angel Flight aircraft on a Tuesday morning in a small-town airport is receiving something that no government program provides: the direct, personal attention of a skilled professional who is there entirely by choice, who is not being paid, who has no institutional incentive to be kind or thorough or careful beyond his own character.

That's worth something that is difficult to quantify and easy to underestimate.

The little platoons of the pattern — the EAA chapter that mentored the young pilot who is now flying those Angel Flight missions, the Civil Air Patrol cadet program that gave him his first flight, the local flying club where he honed his skills — are each a link in a chain that extends from the individual to the community and back.

Burke understood that love of country does not begin in the abstract. It begins with attachment to the particular — the neighborhood, the community, the organization, the little platoon you belong to and work for and care about.

For many of us, the little platoon has wings.

Take care of it. It takes care of more than you know.