The world watches in horror as the splintered remains of a Germanwings Airbus are collected off a mountainside.  Since the airplane disintegrated, it’s hard to imagine the terror the helpless travelers experienced when they realized their impending fate.

Eager to reach a set destination, passengers full of hopes and dreams boarded what we now know was a doomed aircraft.  Instead of arriving safely, they were trapped like animals by a copilot whose evil undertaking was realized at the expense of 149 innocent lives.

What happened to 144 passengers and the five-member flight crew is incomprehensible. 

Why would copilot Andreas Lubitz purposely lock himself inside the cockpit, refuse to let anyone inside, and decisively steer a fully functioning airplane full of people into the side of a mountain at 400 miles per hour, murdering everyone aboard?

And while what befell the A320 travelers boggles the mind and rattles the senses, the jarring reality of it feels strangely similar to what is taking place in a nation piloted by a methodical aviator manually forcing the country he leads into a steep decline.

Think of it – in 2008, the sky was clear as the nation boarded the Barack Obama Airplane.  Unfortunately, it didn’t take long to realize that although the conversation in the cockpit started out cordial, talk quickly deteriorated into a tense exchange.

Early on into the flight, a calm and collected president locked out advisors, rebuffed allies, angered world leaders, and overruled anyone who disagreed with his self-serving objectives. 

Then, slowly but surely, the passengers aboard Air Obama began to realize that what seemed historic at takeoff was quickly turning disastrous.  Worse yet, mid-flight, the awareness set in that no one on either side of the aisle had the political will to halt what was “fundamentally transforming” into a vertical descent.

Much as the Airbus’s technical sophistication didn’t prevent a man set on suicide from taking 149 people with him, our nation has fallen prey to an undeterred pilot aggressively subjecting 300 million people to endure a constitutional tailspin of his own making.

Over the French Alps, an amateurish pilot managed to seize the controls, then he locked out the qualified, and proceeded to calmly and deliberately ram a plane into the side of a mountain – which, figuratively speaking, is precisely what Captain Obama is attempting to do to America. 

The president has gripped the controls; his breathing is steady and calm.  From the look of things, he appears to be unwavering in his determination to shatter whatever is left of this country’s future.

Regrettably, what’s lacking on America’s doomed flight is the sort of political determination the locked out pilot of the Germanwings Airbus exhibited when he attempted, but failed, to chop through the cockpit door with an ax.

Before our nation meets a similar fate, we can only hope and pray that the perilous ride our nation is currently on will not result in such a tragic end.  That’s why, while there’s still time, what happened over the Alps shouldn’t shock America.  It should be a warning we identify with and an analogy we can learn from.  

Jeannie also hosts a blog at www.jeannie-ology.com.