You've Seen The Rosy Projections From The Alphabet Groups...

Here's Our Resident Cynic's Top Ten Predictions For 2006:

10. United Airlines Management will vow sometime in January that this will be the year they turn the company around. A blogger will create an animated .gif that shows that it's exactly the same as the pledge they made on entering 2003, 2004 and 2005 in Chapter 11.

09. Cessna will announce that they outproduced Cirrus on single-engine aircraft in 2005. Cessna dealers will have some great deals on slightly dusty 182s by midyear. (Cessna counts planes as "sold" when they go to a dealer. Cirrus, when they go to an end user).

08. Paul Moller and his Skycar will do their superannnuated Tom Swift thing on the talk shows and make the cover of Popular Tinkering magazines. Moller will be looking for investors in his automated, 300-kt, vtol, roadable chimera which will fly "this year." (He's from a planet with a very large orbit, perhaps?) Now we know who's United's inspiration.

07. At least one airline union will play frog-and-scorpion with management. As they sink beneath the waves, management will ask, "but why did you sting me when we were so close to shore?"

"Because this is the airline business! It doesn't have to make sense."

07b. America will discover how courteous maintenance technicians and gate agents can be. "Welcome to Wal-Mart!" or perhaps "Would you like me to super-size that, sir?" will replace "management doesn't let me stock that part" and "Sorry, if you wanted an aisle seat, you probably should have arrived before boarding started."

07c. After encountering the forgotten phenomenon of native English speakers in service jobs, Americans will want more airlines to go belly-up.

06. People will finally wake up to the fact that 100LL is going away soon -- and Lycoming and Continental appear to have no plan for their big-bore motors. There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth.

05. After the hearings that SecTrans Norman Mineta apparently dragooned some junior chekists from the Secret Air-Police into attending, the Secret Police will be back to their usual two phrases: "Papers!" and "Talk to the hand."

04. The Secret Police will no more allow the ADIZ to go away than they would recommend to His Majesty that the Stamp Act be repealed... uh, sorry, rift in the space/time continuum.

03. The FAA, which blew $100 million to regulate the SpaceShipOne program (program cost, $25 million), will try to break that record with the amount of money they are squandering on the NPRM that addresses the 'serious' problem of spectator deaths at airshows. (No spectator has died at an airshow in the US, UK or Canada since September 6, 1952). We obviously need to deal with this outrage by cracking down on those risky airshows, taking control away from the people who've run them for the last fifty-three years and give it to the people who cleared two planes onto the same Sarasota runway in 2000.

02. In both Canada and the US, elections will take place in 2006, or to put it another way, the silly season is upon us. Politicians of all kinds will be grandstanding and looking for a member of some voiceless minority group to kick around like a political football. (Like, uh, aviators!) In the midst of all this ballyhoo, you just know some rocket scientist is going to bust a TFR. Or the ADIZ.

01. The Iranians will stop their attempts to build a bomb -- when a bunch of planes with blue six-pointed stars on them blow the living daylights out of every physics lab between Turkey and Afghanistan.

Which brings us to our final prediction: it's gonna be an interesting year. Stay tuned!

FMI: 2005 Year-in-Review Comments?