Swimming Outside the NAVAIR Pool

By Jay Friess
Editor

Alongside the common private expressions of anger and disgust that accompanied the sequestration presentations by the Chamber of Commerce and the Naval Air Systems Command this month was a lot of fear and even fantasy.

Apocalypse porn is all the rage in visual and interactive entertainment these days, but I keep hearing it come out of the mouths of people who aren’t prone to fantasizing. The rant pattern is remarkably similar. It starts at the base of the Fiscal Cliff and makes stops at gun control and nationalized health care before plunging headlong into predictions of unrest and even revolution.

Really?

Apocalyptic media can do better than feed our fantasies of a Fight Club-style reset that rescues us from mortgages, credit cards, child support and student loans. In 1998, the rock band Tool received a Grammy for Best Metal Performance for their recording of  “Ænema,” a song about the city of Los Angeles washing into the Pacific Ocean. It received widespread radio play despite the fact that it was six and a half minutes long and had to be “bleeped” 21 times for objectionable words.

Don’t play it around the kids.

Despite its vulgarisms, the song is an elegant expression of apocalyptic prayer, and it offers the best solution to our latest predicament  – “Learn to swim.”

St. Mary’s County’s economy is a monopsony. Like the mirror image of a monopoly – which has many buyers and one seller – a monopsony has many sellers and one buyer. It has, until now, been a climate controlled wading pool with clearly posted rules that has vastly benefited our community for a decade and a half.

The problem is that it’s just about the only splash pond in town.

The county’s economic development department once calculated that the Naval Air Systems Command and the Patuxent River Naval Air Station account for around 80 percent of the economic activity in St. Mary’s if you account for secondary and tertiary economic relationships (stores, restaurants, services, etc.). The wave of sequestration cuts set to take effect this week will hit the county very hard.

The outsized influence of NAVAIR and Pax River’s influence on the county economy is being felt this week as the Navy has begun dialing back on its service contracts and prepares to furlough its civilian workers for one day a week for the rest of the year. Pax River and NAVAIR will continue to be a significant factor in Southern Maryland’s economy for the foreseeable future, but, as sequestration is warning us, they cannot be our only future.

Southern Maryland will likely continue to be the place where the Navy tests its newest unmanned aircraft. But it also needs to become the place where cartographers, farmers, cargo carriers and law enforcement come to test theirs.

Last week, the Federal Aviation Administration released specifications for the selection of six sites to begin testing the integration of unmanned aircraft into domestic airspace. If our business community, government and academic institutions can pull together to support Mid-Atlantic Unmanned Aerial Systems Coalition, Southern Maryland has a good chance of becoming one of these sites and thus the center of a revolution in commercial aviation.

We need to look outside of the NAVAIR pool where our business can float on a vast global ocean of private technology enterprise. That’s going to require re-learning how to do business. So, at the risk of finally exhausting this metaphor, strap on your water wings, dip your toe in the waves and get ready to swim with the sharks.