Because I didn't state anything about no dedications etc. You jumped in with a silly statement "So, no more dedications of air display either, as the Snowbirds/Hornet Demo do at virtually every show?"
Please show me where I demanded no more air shows (that is what I inferred from the a/m). As for the Grey Cup, did the team or fighter a/c fly over for every Cup match? I can't recall seeing the snowbirds doing that. Or I was getting beer and I missed it
Look, it was a great show of support for the victims and the community but where does it stop? Simple question, n'est-ce pas?
Where does it stop?
ANYBODY can make an application for a flyby or full-blown air display on the Airshow website. These are vetted by the Special Events staff and pushed out to applicable Wings for acceptance or denial.
Most got turned down. They're too far away, or nobody/nothing is available, or some other reason makes them impractical/impossible to accommodate.
We got hundreds, annually, sent to us - everything from Miss Smithers' kindergarten class Sunday picnic with twenty kids to massive airshows in fun US locations.
We didn't turn down too many ourselves, but passed them out to our Squadrons based upon their geographic locations, or because we knew that they were planning a flight/had a mission in close geographic and temporal proximity so "couldya/doyouwanna". If they said "no, sorry, can't", we did not push, nor did anybody
ever complain when we politely declined with regrets. I generally responded to the requestors personally.
But for those few that we could accommodate, well, they meant a
lot in many ways. They gave back something to local communities (whose inhabitants paid for our machines and salaries), they inspired kids to join, and they demonstrated that we cared. I always told kids that, if they wanted to do this themselves, they should first work
very hard in school, set goals, and never lose sight of them.
But somebody's
always got to grump and bitch...
We had a PA system for the Kiowa. A speaker was mounted on one side, facing forwardish. There was a cumbersome cassette tape system in the back, inaccessible to the crew. We had to do one trip annually with it for currency purposes. One year, some of us decided to swan around Petawawa (village) and Pembroke and blast out Christmas carols from a couple of thousand feet (normally, I despised going anywhere near that height).
The sound would carry quite some distance, but unevenly and intermittently, wafting on whatever breeze was present - disembodied music from the heavens, from a source that could not often be pinpointed.
The local MP's secretary was fairly active with the local Air Cadet Squadron, for which I was the 427 Squadron Liaison Officer. She mentioned, one night, that she'd received many calls from appreciative citizens, many of whom just guessed that it must have been from us, but also one from some McScrooge who ranted at length about "waste of the taxpayers' money" and "freedom from religion" and "bah, humbug" and such.
She correctly surmised, and told buddy, why we chose to do this, guessing at the currency requirement and that we had to do it somewhere so either the bears and deer in the training area could have their savage breasts soothed by our music's charms or those that paid for the trips regardless could benefit.
There were understandable grounds for complaint on one occasion where the cassette got jammed up so GY, my Copilot, croaked out the first line or three of various carols before reaching the limit of his memory of each, hummed a bit more, then moved on to another carol.
And these gestures cost virtually
nothing. The machines and their maintenance and aircrew and groundcrew salaries are paid for, an annual allotment of flying hours have to be flown, and crews get training value from almost everything - enroute navigation, instrument time for longer distances to display sites, timing and co-ordination.
But, "bah, humbug"...