MOTA JetJat Ultra VR Drone
- Rotor, rotor, rotor, rotor, rockin’ everywhere
- Connect to your smartphone via Wi-Fi for livestream mode and fly in first person view
- Five-minute flight time, more than enough to recite the “Can You Read My Mind?” flying poem from Superman to yourself while you’re aloft
- Model: JJ-ULTRA-W (missed opportunity here, should have been JJ-DYN-O-MITE)
Grounded
Maybe you dreamed of being a fighter pilot. Maybe you used to watch Top Gun over and over on VHS. Maybe you saved up for sweet Ray-Ban Aviators or their discount equivalent.
Maybe you heard about the various physical requirements, and were disappointed, but not totally discouraged, because maybe the positive-reinforcement ethos of the time had worked so successfully on you that you took your parents and teachers at their word when they said “you can do anything.” And sure, maybe you had asthma, but maybe there’d be a fix for that down the line.
And maybe you got hold of one of those old flight simulator “games” like ATP, and just played the snot out of it. Maybe every friend you showed it to got thoroughly bored after the first 10 minutes, but you were on it for hours. Maybe you honestly thought of it as your training.
Maybe you even joined your local Civil Air Patrol. And maybe you learned a ton about planes and flying. And maybe one thing you learned was that you weren’t really sufficiently mathematically-minded to master the material. And maybe you also learned that the other kids at school found CAP utterly weird — even those of them who were in equally niche organizations like the FFA, and so really shouldn’t have been throwing stones about it.
And then maybe there was also the question of your poor eyesight. But maybe you had started hearing about new surgical techniques they had to improve people’s vision, and maybe you thought one of them might work for you when the time came.
(And maybe when the Air Force actually did revise its policy on LASIK eye surgery in 2007, and no longer regarded it as an automatic disqualifier, even though it was way too late to make a difference in the course your life had already taken, you felt unaccountably bitter about the change. And maybe this feeling of bitterness itself was confusing to you, since you thought you had totally let go of all your fighter pilot fantasies back in childhood.)
Maybe, many years later, when you started reading articles about military drone pilots, you wondered if you could have ended up in that role, if you’d gone a different way. But then maybe, since that reporting was always about the problematic aspects of drone warfare, and since you find heavy, moral questions exhausting to contemplate, you just sort of shrugged and decided the way your life worked out was for the best, and everybody has childhood dreams of one kind or another, and most of them are never realized, and learning to accept the gap between what you wish for and what you get is key to being a healthy adult, because anyway what good does it do to wish you were someone else?
Well then, maybe you’re the kind of person who would sometimes enjoy flying this remote control aircraft on the weekends.
