Blue Angel F/A-18

Blue Angel F/A-18, originally uploaded by Gavatron.

It’s the Canadian International Air Show this weekend.

Most of my colleagues hate this kind of thing, but I profess that I love military aircraft. Perhaps not what they do, but the technology that has created the machine. And while it’s easy to call the airshow a war show, I find the whole relationship between these machines, political machines and our lives a bit more complicated. If you’ve ever flown somewhere on a commercial aircraft built by Boeing or Airbus, you’re implicated in “enjoying” the benefits of the technologies that has helped create this particular object. It’s that whole military-industrial complex thing we were warned about…

I personally abhor and don’t ignore the fact that aircraft of this type are used to kill—they are clearly killing machines—my context, however, is different with these aircraft than, say, if I had grown up in Sarajevo in the ’90s.

So, it’s a true guilty pleasure.