Month: May 2005

The trip back from Quebec City involved a stop in Burlington, Vermont to clear customs, borrow the “crew car” at the airport gas station (FBO), rent bikes along the lakeshore, and fly back to Boston at around 6:30 pm when the afternoon thunderstorms were supposed to be dissipating.  Each leg of the flight was about one hour and we were in the clouds almost the entire time.  The new airplane has a datalink with the National Weather Service’s NEXRAD system for finding rain showers, thunderstorms, and lightning strikes.  As another demonstration of the power of U.S. government bureaucracy this datalink adds about $10,500 to the cost of the airplane.  If you buy a battery-powered receiver to plug into your laptop and use without connecting to the airplane’s electrical system the cost is about $800.  Consequently, just as with the GPS systems that would warn Cessna pilots out of the Washington, D.C. airspace, hardly anyone with an older airplane has this kind of datalink.  On the second leg the datalink proved very valuable.  The air traffic controllers in this region have a simultaneous display of air traffic and weather and you can ask them for vectors to keep clear of heavy rain but it is very nice indeed to see it all in on the airplane’s dashboard moving map.

As it turned out the rainstorms and lightning were still active in some areas of Vermont and New Hampshire.  But with the datalink we were able to steer clear of anything worse than light rain.  My old plane didn’t have the datalink and I probably would have chickened out and stayed on the ground until the FBO’s weather terminal showed the RADAR calming down.

I’m already missing the friendly people of Quebec.  The Departure controller asked if I’d enjoyed my weekend there.  I especially remember Eric Proulx, a farmer in the city market who showed us photos of his goats at the Ferme Tourilli, and gave us samples of his delicious Cap Rond cheese, which he says is available in one Boston store (I’ve emailed him to find out which one; he couldn’t remember at the time).

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I promised a friend to take her for an excursion by private airplane to a foreign country where they speak a strange tongue unknown to 97 percent of the world’s population.  She readily agreed.  We folded ourselves into the four-seat propeller-driven single-engine Cirrus SR20 and entered the clouds above Hanscom Air Force Base near Boston.  We didn’t see the ground again until about 600′ above a long runway amidst a cold rain-soaked landscape.  “Welcome to Quebec City,” I said to her.

[Tip for dogless travelers:  the Auberge St-Antoine is truly a fine hotel in the old city.]

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I’ve posted a review of my new airplane, the Cirrus SR20, at http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/cirrus-sr20

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Step 1:  Insert Incredibles DVD Disk 2 (Extra Features) into DVD Player.

Step 2: Select Index from the menu.

Step 3: Select Next Page to go to the next page of options.

Step 4: Wait about 20 seconds for a weird little spider to appear in the top right of the screen.

Step 5: Hit the Up key on the remote and then the Enter key to select the little spider.

Step 6: Sit back and enjoy a clip of my cousin Doug Frankel riding a scooter through the hallways of Pixar.

Much more fun than the latest Star Wars movie (where is the humor that they had back in 1977?) and less time-consuming.

[Doug works as an animator at Pixar.  His character on the Incredibles was Edna E. Mode, the fashion designer.]

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Julian and I arrived back in Boston this evening in our new Cirrus SR20, N707WT.  The trip back was a good illustration of the pluses and minuses of small airplane travel.  Although I was fairly tired after 10 hours of flight training all day Friday and Saturday morning we departed Duluth Saturday afternoon in order to stay ahead of a line of thunderstorms.  After gazing down at the interesting colors in Lake Superior and the top portion of Lake Michigan we stopped in Pellston, Michigan near where Lakes Michigan and Huron meet and then departed for an instrument flight rules (IFR) flight around the top of Lake Huron and over Toronto into Buffalo, New York.  The lake and the city lights were quite beautiful from 7000′ above sea level.  We did an uneventful instrument landing system (ILS) approach through some rain into Buffalo.  It was dark by then so it was nice to have the centerline and touchdown-zone lighting.  The FBO at Buffalo found us a $52/night hotel and we collapsed until 9:00 am this morning.

From Buffalo to Boston is only about 2.5 hours but one must cross the Berkshires (3000′ high) and the forecast was for moderately low clouds, ice in those clouds, rain, and a really low freezing level due to the cold temps on the surface (only about 48 degrees in Albany today).  It wasn’t safe to go under the clouds given the numerous obstructions from towers, hills, and mountains.  The Cirrus doesn’t have a turbocharger so it wouldn’t have been able to climb over the top of the clouds, forecast to 20,000′.  We waited on the ground in Buffalo until 3:00 pm for some of the rain to dissipate on the RADAR and for some of the temperatures aloft to warm up.  We decided to fly to Albany at 7000′ and if we picked up any ice we’d go to the minimum enroute altitude (5000′) and see if that was above freezing.  If it wasn’t we’d continue to descend and land in Albany where we knew that the temperature would be above freezing.  We would not continue across the Berkshires where it would be impossible to descend as far or as quickly due to the mountains.

We entered the clouds about 2500′ above the runway at Buffalo and broke out about 6000′ above sea level.  This was a great illustration of the advantages of an instrument rating.  Instead of bumping around near the ground we were above the clouds in smooth air.  Gradually, however, we approach a wall of higher clouds.  This was the rain system we’d seen on the RADAR and that we could also see in our airplane, which has a receiver to get weather information from the XM radio satellites (this instrument runs from the Avidyne multi-function display, which had failed during a training flight and restarted automatically but then crashed and got stuck on our trip into Buffalo, so we didn’t have much confidence in this).  At 7000′ the main outside air temperature (OAT) gauge showed +4 degrees C.  This is the one associated with the engine-monitoring system and in most Cirrus airplanes is the only one enabled.  We had met a mechanic on Saturday, however, who knew how to reenable the OAT gauge on the primary flight display (PFD), which has its probe farther out on the wing.  This read -2 degrees C.  We asked Air Traffic Control to ask some of the airliners for temperature reports at 7000′ and we learned that it was probably much closer to -2 than to +4. 

Heading towards Albany we picked up a little frost on part of the wing as the temperature dropped to -4 degrees C (or +2 if we believed the standard instrument).  We asked for 5000′ and the temperature rose and the frost came off.  We asked for a routing closer to Hartford, Connecticut to stay over lower terrain and into warmer air.  ATC gave us the new routing over Westover Air Force Base in Western, MA.  The rest of the flight was uneventful though almost solidly in the clouds the whole time.  My landing wasn’t quite as smooth as the ones that I had done in training though by no means was it hard.  The primary flight display (PFD) did not like the little bump, however, and drew red X’s across its electronic attitude indicator and gyro compass, telling us not to trust them and to refer to the backup “steam gauges”.

Our total flight time from Duluth to Boston was about 7 hours despite slight headwinds almost the entire way (this is unusual when going west to east; it is supposed to be a tailwind).  The Cirrus is a fast little plane that is economical to operate and reasonably priced.  But we couldn’t fly on our schedule and we never knew whether we were going to make it through Albany or not.  The minimum airplane that is practical for transportation as opposed to recreation is something like a Piper Malibu with a turbocharger to climb above the clouds and de-icing equipment sufficient to earn FAA certification for “flight into known icing”.  The Malibu would have climbed over the top of all that weather and then come down into Boston.  We never would have had to turn on the de-icing gear.

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Picking up an airplane in Duluth, Minnesota is a bit different from my last experience picking one up in London, Ontario.  The Canadian factory didn’t have a “Guns are banned from these premises” sign out front.  Another difference is that the Cirrus factory has an F-16 parked right next to it, belonging to George W. Bush’s beloved Air National Guard.  This F-16 is apparently in need of some maintenance because it has been sitting out for the entire winter.  Only our government can afford to leave a $30 million airplane outside exposed to the harsh northern elements!

One thing that is more or less the same is the miserable weather.  For the morning flight today the weather was 100′ overcast and 1/4 mile visibility.  I went to the Duluth Aquarium instead and then to the Richard I. Bong museum in Superior, Wisconsin.  Bong was a Wisconsin farm boy who went on to become the U.S.’s most successful P-38 fighter pilot in the Pacific War, downing more than 40 Japanese planes.  The museum staff, having noticed my coupon from Cirrus, hauled out an old movie on “how to fly your new P-38” from Lockheed circa 1942.  The product was described in the video as a “real fighting man’s airplane” and a “man’s airplane”.  Close-to-the-ground maneuvers were described as “not likely to be a habit-forming.”  The plane worked well for Bong, who survived all of his combat missions.  Sadly he was killed while test-flying a jet-powered fighter in 1945.  Major Bong was 24 years old.

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The end.

[Story put out by Famous Dave’s, a bbq place in downtown Duluth, Minnesota.]

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A lot of folks up here have asked about the two-seat Cessna that flew over downtown Washington, DC last week, spreading panic among the bureaucrats.  How could this have happened, they wonder, imagining that the average small plane has at least the computing and display power of a Honda Accord with the navi system option.  In reality an old plane like the Cessna 150 is worth less than $20,000.  Thanks to the miracle of FAA bureaucracy, a moving-map GPS unit that can be legally installed in the dashboard costs around $10,000 plus another $500/year to keep the database of airports and navigation aids current (this is government info so it would be possible for the FAA to make this available on the Web in a machine-readable form and encourage owner’s of cheap planes to keep it current).  Consequently the Cessna 150 that these guys were flying didn’t have one.  It is possible to get handheld GPS units for $500-1000 but they rely on AA batteries and never seem to have juice left when you need them.  Without a GPS or some earlier form of electronic navigation it is reasonably easy to get lost.  Look to the left:  sprawl, Walmarts, McMansions, SUVs.  Look to the right:  sprawl, Walmarts, McMansions, SUVs.  Look straight ahead:  sprawl, Walmarts, McMansions, SUVs.  Making matters worse the DC area is fairly flat with no distinctive terrain and the weather tends to be hazy so if you’re flying low you usually can’t see more than five strip malls ahead.

My favorite part of these flight restriction violation incidents is the actual bust.  When the two-seat 40-year-old airplane is finally forced to land it is surrounded by 20-30 law enforcement officials, each carrying a semi- or fully automatic pistol or rifle.  By this time the airplane and its pilot are 30 or 40 miles from the restricted area and they’re at a big airport with miles of grass and fence all around.  There would be no way for the pilot to escape.    Yet despite the fact that in no case has one of these pilots ever been carrying any kind of weapon the 20-30 cops have their guns drawn and pointed at the poor schlub standing next to his 1000-lb. airplane.  The pilot is pushed down onto the pavement and handcuffed (see the photos from the recent incident at Frederick; another good one was a pipeline patrol pilot in Pennsylvania during the last presidential election who didn’t find out about a last-minute visit by George W.).  To me it always made the government look weak and paranoid.  If they are this afraid of a confused unarmed guy in a 1962 Cessna 150 (who in all of the cases so far had kept his transponder turned on for the entire flight to facilitate FAA tracking) how can they possibly handle our actual enemies?

[The Cessna 150 seems to be the preferred choice for presidential intimidation.  The 1994 suicide crash of a light plane into the White House was, as one would hope conspiracy theorists would soon note, a Cessna 150 (see http://www-tech.mit.edu/V114/N40/crash.40w.html for more on this incident).]

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A friend recently attended a demo of Microsoft’s latest operating system, Longhorn.  This is the long-delayed replacement for Windows NT, which was introduced in the early 1990s and has been improved into Win2000 and WinXP.  The main risk for a project like Longhorn is Second System Syndrome.  A group of programmers is given an existing product and a list of 100 things that people have said they don’t like about the product.  They boldly plan to build a Second (new) System from scratch that will solve all of the problems the First System solved plus have the 100 new nice-to-have features.  Traditionally Second Systems are late and often, on balance, don’t solve any more problems than the First System.  Longhorn was particularly at risk due to the fact that a larger challenge was attacked with very similar tools to those used to build Windows NT circa 1990.  Programmers haven’t gotten any smarter since 1990; how can we expect better results than were obtained back then unless there is a shift to radically new tools?

Longhorn has in fact been running quite late (two years?) and Microsoft has been reducing the scope of its ambition.  My friend was underwhelmed by the result.  One of the big features of Longhorn is a more searchable file system, something that WinXP users can get right now by downloading Google Desktop Search.  Longhorn will let you create a virtual folder that represents the results of a persistent search, e.g., you can have a folder with all files containing the word “Samoyed” and it will be updated quickly when a new matching document appears anywhere in the file system.

Does Longhorn have a versioned file system?  No.  I.e., you can’t ask the system to show you what a spreadsheet or document looked like two months ago.  Probably the vast majority of user-created documents in a file system are there because of this lack of versioning in WinXP’s NTFS file system.  You have “Whizco Contract”, “Whizco Contract pre-lawyers”, “Whizco Contract post-legal-review”, “Whizco Contract with comments from Whizco”, “Whizco Contract 20050510”, “Whizco Contract Final”, “Whizco Contract Final Signature Copy”, etc.  If Longhorn had a versioned file system, as became available for commercial Unices in the early 1990s, there would only be perhaps 1/10th as many user-created documents on the typical system.

The hierarchical file system with its folders and subfolders was created for mainframe programmers in the early 1960s.  Let’s call it a Multics-style file system to pay homage to this pioneering system built in the 1960s by MIT and Honeywell.  Alan Cooper, one of the creators of Visual Basic, and a perennial consultant to Microsoft, has persuasively attacked the idea of exposing this hierarchy to end-users.  It was built by programmers for programmers but somehow leaked out into consumer consciousness with the Apple Macintosh and the original DOS on the IBM PC.  Do we need this?  How many documents can one person create?  Even a professional writer such as Stephen King hasn’t generated an overwhelming number of stories and novels.

Why not start with a versioned file system?  Then we can get rid of the “save” and “save as” commands in word processors and spreadsheet programs and replace them with a “name this version” command.  When you’re done working on a document you close it.  If you want to go back a couple of months you ask for the version circa 20050301 or a version with a specific name.  Given a versioned file system we provide access to documents via a chronology.  If you’re looking for something related to your 1999 taxes, scroll back to April 1999 and it will probably be there.  If that doesn’t work resort to a full-text search.  If we need to organize a bit more let us aggregate documents in named folders, as in a mail-reading program, most of which don’t allow or don’t encourage subfolders.

There is nothing wrong with the hierarchical file system as a tool. Assuming you know a file’s name, it provides O[log N] access to a corpus of N documents.  This makes a hierarchical file system great for computer programs and computer programmers but why should users have to see the innards?

Apple and the Linux folks aren’t doing any better in this area than Microsoft.  For years I have been hoping that Google or Yahoo! will show the way with a replacement for Microsoft Office and the underlying desktop file system.  The average household user of a personal computer doesn’t need anything with many more features that the Palm OS or Microsoft Outlook and probably has far fewer megabytes of documents than he or she has of archived email.

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Doug Kaye, whom most people know as the creative force behind IT Conversations, turns out to be an accomplished Bonanza pilot.  He graciously invited me out for a day of goofing off in the sky on Monday.  Under rainy skies we departed Marin County’s Gnoss Field in the Bonanza, a “machine invented to make sure that the world didn’t become overpopulated with doctors and lawyers”, and retracted the landing gear before climbing 1000 feet-per-minute up through a hole in the clouds.  Thanks to a turbonormalizer the engine maintained good power right up to 15,500′ where we had to stay to remain clear of the ice-filled cumulus clouds.  We landed on the 12,000′ runway at the former Castle Air Force Base in Atwater, California.  The base closed 10 years ago, devastating the town’s economy, but an airplane museum remains with a collection of WWII and Cold War planes.  The largest is a B-52 and the weirdest is an enormous B-36 with 6 huge pusher propellers on the mid-wing-mounted piston engines and four turbojet engines slung under the wingtips for takeoff assistance.

George W. Bush’s F-104 is represented among the fighters as well as one of the F-111s that Ronald Reagan sent to Libya in 1986 to demonstrate our irritation with its owner’s attacks on American interests.  (Young folks: this incident was notable because Ronbo went to sleep after ordering the bombing of Libya; he terrified Qaddafi by not caring enough about the operation to let it disturb his sleep).

We decided to return to the Bay Area underneath the 5000′ overcast. Before departing the Castle area I practiced some chandelles and lazy-eights from the right seat.  These precision maneuvers are required of applicants for a flight instructor rating and I’d only done them in my old Diamond Star and the clunky Piper Arrow trainers. A chandelle is a maximum performance climb while turning 180 degrees. The Bonanza has so much power and so little drag with its gear retracted that this turns out to require a much more extreme pitch-up attitude than in the Arrow.

As we steered our way around the heavier downpours I noticed that we were coming up on a large town and asked Doug what it was.  “Modesto, home of Scott Peterson,” he replied.  For any man who has been dumped or divorced by a woman reflecting on Scott Peterson ought to be a humbling experience.  Consider that Scott was beloved by both his wife, a beautiful and kind person, and his massage therapist girlfriend.  This despite the fact that Scott was an adulterer and murderer, both black marks against a person’s character.  So the only reasonable conclusion that a rejected man can draw is that he is less attractive, as a package, than Scott Peterson.

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