The other day I was reading a New York Times article about the power outages in Texas and the potential troubles ahead for the Texas G.O.P., when I encountered a strange phrase:
…energy experts say that state regulators appointed by the Republican governors in power for decades in Texas have been loath to do anything that might raise electricity prices.
“They wound up basically creating an old-style Soviet bureau,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economics lecturer at the University of Houston, referring to ERCOT. “This is a controlled flight into terrain.”
Turns out that Hirs was metaphorizing a concept borrowed from from the world of aviation safety. A controlled flight into terrain, also known by its acronym CFIT (pronounced see-fit) is “an accident in which an airworthy aircraft, under pilot control, is unintentionally flown into the ground, a mountain, a body of water or an obstacle.”
Terrifying! And what a great metaphor! It manages to capture quite a bit of nuance about the Texas G.O.P.’s poor oversight and management of the state’s power grid, culminating a major winter storm that led to rolling blackouts and surging energy prices for consumers who still had power. Worth a closer look? Here’s how you might graph out this clever metaphor:
Texas’s power grid = airworthy aircraft
Texas state population = aircraft passengers
Texas G.O.P = faulty or misleading flight navigation system (or instruments)
G.O.P.-appointed regulators = capable but unaware pilots
Massive winter storm = mountainside, lake, ground, etc.
What I like so much about the metaphor (besides its real doom-and-gloom vibe) is that idea that the massive winter storm, which crippled the unprepared Texas power grid, is not treated in the metaphor as a possibility or probability, but as a stark reality that could have been avoided, just as an aware pilot might have redirected her aircraft away from a pending mountainside collision. In other words, the metaphor doesn’t let anyone off the hook.
Taylor Coe 