Donald Trump hates wind turbines.
For one thing, he fought the Crown in court in Scotland over the Crown’s windmills. (Literally, belonging to the then Queen’s estate. But any court action involving the government in the U.K., whether criminal or civil, the government is referred to as “the Crown,” just as we would say “the District Attorney” or “the government.) Trump didn’t like the view of turbines off the coast from his Turnberry golf club. So he has hated wind turbines for a long time.
Power doesn’t come for free until we figure out how to engineer the positive fusion power recently discovered by physicists. It will happen, but no one knows whether that will be 15 years from now or 50. Otherwise, the only “free” power we have is the sunlight that warms the Earth for us.
Wind turbines do kill birds, some in more threatening areas than others. But dams kill salmon. The “Salmon River” in Idaho no longer has many “salmon,” and “Redfish Lake” in Idaho, named after the red chinook salmon that used to inhabit the lake during mating season, no longer has salmon at all. Not to mention that a dam may be grand, but a cement wall over a river is uglier than turbines. There is no free power.
Petroleum spills, killing 50 square miles of the Gulf of Mexico, pipes break and get oil into precious farmland while also crossing land promised to Native Americans and First Nations. Then it heats the globe dangerously by pumping excess carbon.
Solar farms take up a lot of space used by local habitats and are still inefficient in the grand scheme of things, especially when compared to water turbine power or petroleum.
There is no free power.
But wind power is free from an aviator’s perspective. Wind farms do not move around, and they do not grow. They are fixed at a certain elevation. If your little motorcycle plane can’t get above the wind turbines, they are marked on maps, and you can go around them. So are mountains.
They do not build wind turbines one hundred yards from the beginning of a runway, nor the end. The aviation industry is a pretty cautious and meticulous group. Commercial planes cruise at heights too high to even see the turbines below. Cesnas fly at 10,000 ft.
So it is just typical Trump to say something to an audience so idiotic that even the MAGAs don’t believe him but don’t care that he’s stupid. He did so this weekend. From Time Magazine.
Well, that was something. By the time former President Donald Trump left a high school auditorium Saturday afternoon—his return to the campaign trail after an unusually sleepy start to his 2024 campaign—he had ricocheted off many of his standbys: indulging conspiracy theories, nursing conservatives’ fears about race and gender, and offering an alternative reality to his successor’s record.
The hour-long diatribe suggested Joe Biden would have been shrewd to throw his son, Hunter, under the bus, that the Taliban were incapable of fighting at night because they lacked “binoculars,” and that wind turbines routinely knock planes out of the sky. It was, in essence, a standard Trump speech, but with a more uneven pacing, and a little weirder and meandering.
“Routinely.” Name one. One. I’m sure it’s happened because, damn, near everything happens once. It could have been one of those instances where someone used the most common last words of the dying: “Guys, watch this!”
And someone tried to fly in and around wind turbines. That’s it.
Also, notice Trump was speaking in a high school gymnasium. I think that’s relevant right there. No longer filling arenas. We might wonder where DeSantis would hold his rally. (Democrats hold speeches. MAGAs hold rallies.)
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[email protected], @JasonMiciak, SUBSTACK: MEMPHIS HORROR; GOP ACTIVELY FIGHTS AWAKENING TO OUR INHUMANITY
If windwmills are a danger to aircraft they must be really BIG. The FA specifies the minimum altitude for flgit (excluding landing and take off) as 1,000 feet above ground level (for model aircraft there is a maximum altitude of 600 feet a.g.l.)
So for an aircraft to be damaged by a wind turbing the pilot is way below the legal limit – and no serious aeromodeller is going to aim his pride and joy at a huge set of rotating blades (mark you, I wouldn’t put it past some of the idiots who fly quadcopters aka ‘drones’)
But here’s a thought. There have been windmills in the Netherlands for centuries – has there ever been any accident involving one of those and an aircraft?
No says Trump. Those are shitty Dutch windmills with water wheels and a pump. He’s talking American… and Scottish Windmills.
Since Europeans settled what’s now the U.S. we’ve had windmills here for centuries too. And our Continental Air Force used them to great effect to bring down British aircraft during the Revolutionary War. Trump can tell you all about it, being the military “genius” he is!
In the ‘windmills’ in his head, planes crash, plates crash, casinos crash, secret service cars almost crash, and Don Jr. crashes regularly.
Doonald Jr chrashes routinely. I fixt it.
Doe he really think they’re going to put wind turbines in the takeoff/landing path so close to an airport as to be a hazard?
(I’ve heard of small planes and helicopters running into broadcast transmitter towers, and power liens are always a problem, but not for commercial flights. *Mountains* are a bigger problem than any of those.)
The better question would be does he think. I believe we can stop right there because, of course, the answer is “no”.
There was one in South Dakota in 2014 and one in NW Germany in 2017. They seem to be very rare.
That is absolutely awesome research. Thank you! So my instincts were right, at least in the United States. It’s happened once because everything has happened once. A plane flew into a flock of geese, lost two engines, and landed safely in a river… once. I was once… never mind.
Was this a commercial aircraft or general aviation craft?
The other issue about dams is something we’re seeing in the Southwest with that little concrete structure not too far from Vegas: Hoover Dam.
When the dam doesn’t have any water to help generate the dam’s power, it can’t do its job. And when a dam is built on a river that’s flowing through pretty much nothing but desert and scrub land and the river isn’t being replenished from melting snow from the mountains because the region is suffering from a pretty significant drought–and it’s next to impossible to *create* rain and snow in such dry arid regions–you end up having a big concrete block that does nothing but remind you that water USED TO FLOW in its direction.
In some cases, dams that don’t produce enough electricity to be profitable are not maintained. In the case of Wixom and Sanford Michigan, one dam failure leads to another downstream. Small town homes and businesses are flooded out and formerly waterfront home values are decimated. Corporate owners declare bankruptcy and walk away.
Actually,allow me to.correct you: the correct wording is “Y’all watch this!” before doing some thing that qualifies them for the Darwin Awards. Think of it as retroactive birth control.
Gilliam, don’t forget the famous last words, “Hold my beer.”
Same old idiot traitor on parade.