A New Orleans flight instructor reads about Ukraine’s restricted drones and Washington’s diesel diplomacy, and finds her own little Cessna oddly relevant
Friday, 23 October 2026. New Orleans Lakefront Airport. Post-flight, sitting on the wing of the Cessna with a bottle of water, 1.30pm.
A Slow Aeroplane And A Strange Fact
My Cessna 172 cruises at about a hundred and ten knots, which is roughly a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. It is a lovely, honest, slightly asthmatic aeroplane that has taught thousands of people to fly. It is also, as I discovered this morning, faster than the speed above which, according to reports, some Ukrainian drones were losing their military satellite connections.
I read the report on how Trump tried to stop Ukraine bombing Russian oil refineries by restricting its drones in the crew lounge after my morning lesson. The jokes are sharp: an American speed limit for drones in a war zone, an army that may have to tell its commanders the invasion is going well but the Wi-Fi package has expired. The facts underneath are not jokes. Russian strikes left roughly six hundred thousand Ukrainians without power in one day. Ukraine announced it would resume hitting refineries. And Washington appeared, at least in the piece’s telling, very concerned about diesel.
Airspace Is A Shared Thing
As a pilot, the line that hit me hardest was the observation that commanders now have to worry not only about the enemy’s electronic warfare but about whether their own internet package is suitable for combat. In aviation, we rely on systems we do not control constantly. GPS, radio, air traffic control. We accept that somebody, somewhere, can switch something off. What we do not accept is that they would switch it off because of something unrelated to the flight. If a controller cut my radio because the price of jet fuel was bothering a refinery in Texas, I would land at the nearest field and write a very long letter.
Ray Thibodeaux, our chief instructor, read the piece over my shoulder. He served twenty years in the Navy. He said nothing for a long time. Then he said, you do not change the rules mid-sortie. That was all. It was enough.
The Joke About Customer Service
The report imagines a Ukrainian soldier ringing technical support when their drone loses signal and being told all representatives are busy helping other customers, with an estimated wait until the next ceasefire. I have been on hold with an aircraft parts supplier in Wichita for fifty-five minutes trying to get a gasket. I know the hold music. It is a jazz version of a song that was not jazz to begin with, which is a crime in New Orleans.
The difference, of course, is that my gasket can wait. A drone intercepting a missile over a city cannot. The joke works because the customer service voice is so calm and the stakes are so high. It is the same gap that makes a lot of history unbearable to read: the clerk filing the paperwork, the city burning outside the window.
History Has A Word For Diesel Diplomacy
As a history graduate, I kept thinking of how often in the twentieth century oil decided who got help and when. Fuel shaped campaigns in both world wars. It shaped alliances in the Middle East for decades. It sat behind more decisions than anybody admitted at the time. The report has a line about a Geneva Convention on reasonably priced diesel, and I laughed, and then I did not, because historians will write that chapter one day, and it will be dull to read and awful to have lived.
What A Small Plane Teaches You
When you fly a small plane, you learn that the sky is not empty. It is full of other people, rules, weather and agreements. Everyone up there depends on everyone else following the same procedures, being honest on the radio and keeping their promises. It is the most cooperative thing I know, apart from a New Orleans second line, where a hundred strangers somehow agree to dance in the same direction for three miles.
A ceasefire, the report points out, should involve both sides ceasing to fire. That is not a radical position. It is the aviation equivalent of both aircraft agreeing which runway is in use. Without that, nobody lands safely. Not the pilots, not the passengers, not the people underneath.
A Prayer On A Wing
I am part of a small church in Mid-City, and on Sundays our pastor reads a list of places to pray for. Ukraine has been on it for years. This Sunday I am going to ask him to add something specific: the people going into winter without electricity, and the drone operators sitting in cold rooms trying to keep the sky over their cities clear, at whatever speed they are allowed to fly.
The Cessna is cooling under me, ticking the way small aeroplanes do after a flight, like a kitchen clock in a quiet house. My next student arrives at two. We will climb to three thousand feet over the lake, do some turns and come back down, with full radio contact, a working GPS and nobody adjusting our speed for reasons we cannot see. I will try to remember, while I am up there, how lucky that is.