John Carr’s Gone Fishin’

Anyone who follows the happenings of the FAA and air traffic control knows John Carr. He spent more than a couple of years at the helm of NATCA, the controller’s union, and was Pat Forrey’s predecessor. I had the pleasure of interviewing John just about a year ago today in fact here at Jetwhine.

Until last week, John wrote the blog The Main Bang.

His weblog was most often a peek inside the lunacy that is the FAA that, unfortunately, runs most of our lives to some degree or another. If a blog was supposed to be passionate to be good, then John’s was excellent. You could just tell that he wasn’t writing to make money or win friends – hardly, some might say – but rather to make readers feel what he felt. This he did, with thunderbolts of insight about what’s wrong with the air traffic control system today.

If you missed reading The Main Bang, you’ll need to be patient before you see it again, because last week John shut the blog down tighter than Fort Knox.

He decided it was time for a break, so John pushed away his keyboard and hung up his Gone Fishin sign. As the author of an occasionally passionate piece of social media myself, I can well understand how much this kind of thing takes out of editors and writers so John’s break is well deserved.

Will the Main Bang return again? While some hope it never again sees the light of day, I can only say I hope his name pops up again. But only John knows for sure. You may not have agreed with him at times, but boy John sure knew how to get people talking about air traffic control.

Until then, catch a big one buddy. And stop by the other aviation blogs occasionally and tell us what you and family are up to in the wilds of Florida. We’ll miss you and your barbed civil servant tongue.

Rob Mark, editor