Month: August 2006

I don’t generally follow news from the Middle East because so little truly new happens there. The Lebanese/Israeli conflict of recent weeks has caught my attention, however. I’m pretty sure that it is the first time in more than 1000 years that a non-governmental group of non-Jews has attacked a group of Jews and suffered in any way. For more than 1000 years in Europe and the Arab world, mob violence against Jews was a harmless diversion, at least for the Christians and Muslims. Oftentimes, the non-Jews would profit handsomely from their efforts, at least in the short run, by being able to occupy houses vacated by Jews, taking Jewish property, and confiscating Jewish bank accounts. The closest that non-Jews ever came to suffering any negative consequence from a pogrom was Kristallnacht in Germany, November 9, 1938. The Christian Germans on the rampage had a lot of fun, but the Christian-owned insurance companies afterwards complained that they would have to pay for the thousands of shops destroyed. Fortunately, the German government ordered the Jews themselves to pay for the damage. (A recent book on Jews who survived Auschwitz but were killed by their Polish neighbors upon returning home shows that even after WWII there were essentially no negative consequences for mob violence by European Christians against Jews.)

One might argue that the Palestinians have suffered for their attacks on Jews, but they never did suffer significantly for the mob violence that they inflicted on Jews before 1948. Any suffering of the Palestinians since 1948 has been primarily due to their being caught in the middle of a pan-Arab war that they had little part in starting. The Syrian, Jordanian, and Egyptian armies have also had difficulties at the hands of the Israelis, but these were professional soldiers sent by their governments and the average citizens of Amman, Cairo, or Damascus have not been displaced from their homes at any time during the 60-year war.

Lebanon 2006 offers a completely different experience of Jew-hatred and violence against Jews. A substantial subset of Lebanese citizens decides that they would like to kill Jews and that therefore it would be fun to launch some rockets into the residential neighborhoods of Israel. They expect to enjoy this activity for many months or years. Most of what they’ve read about Jews in school and in newspapers comes from old educational materials translated from the German. Jews are weak. Jews operate in secret committees behind the scenes. Certainly if they have studied history they’ve learned that when a Muslim mob attacks a community of Jews, it is invariably the Jews who end up having to flee Baghdad. Tehran, or Morocco or wherever, leaving their homes and property behind.

What happened this time? The Jews, armed to the teeth, came over to where the rockets were being fired and made the place unlivable. The Lebanese who thought they would be sitting in their living rooms watching Jews die on their television sets were forced to flee to the north or to Cyprus. This is a truly unprecedented situation.

[Of course, many Lebanese who never fired a rocket are suffering the consequences of their fellow citizens’ actions, but military conflict hasn’t gotten a whole lot more precise since King George III observed to Parliament on October 27, 1775, that he was “anxious to prevent, if it had been possible, the effusion of the blood of my subjects; and the calamities which are inseparable from a state of war”]

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One of my helicopter pilot friends owns a car dealership. He is selling a fairly new, but out of warranty, convertible Ferrari on behalf of a customer. He drove said Ferrari to Hanscom Air Force Base, the airport where we do our flying, a few weeks ago. After we landed, he tried to move the power seat backward. It wouldn’t budge. He drove the car back to his dealership with his knees against his chest. The other day I asked him if he’d sold the Ferrari. “I didn’t get it back from the shop yet; they are still fixing the seat.” The problem turned out to be a broken switch, the kind of thing that the standard automakers buy in China for $1 and that seldom fails. How much did Ferrari charge for a replacement switch? $2200. With labor, it was $5000 to fix the “seat is stuck” problem.

Josh and I flew the Cirrus down to Teterboro, NJ today to pick up a friend. We told him the story. He said “Oh yeah, my old business partner Will spend $300,000 on a new Ferrari 360. It had a fancy pushbutton F1 transmission. You had to press a button to go into reverse, but the button was always failing and he would have to take it back to the dealership over and over again.”

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Rich guys sometimes ask me “What’s a good way to give money to my kids without spoiling them?” My idea: For every dollar they earn, give them $N. That way they have to work, but they don’t have to work a repulsive yuppie job to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle. The main objection to this approach is that it is tax-inefficient. If the kid earns $50,000 per year doing something he finds rewarding and you give him $150,000 that year, you have to pay a big gift tax. Some sort of trust fund and/or life insurance policy that the kid can claim after you die would be more efficient.

Is an increased tax liability so bad? Not for the truly rich. These guys intend to give most of their wealth away to non-profit organizations. The federal government funds roads and airports that we all enjoy using. The feds pay for health care for the poor and the old. Our tax dollars pay for intrepid military personnel who go out and kill angry foreigners (in most cases) before they can arrive on U.S. soil and kill Americans here at home. For a non-profit organization of its size, the federal government is surprisingly efficient. Most federal employees work in big box-like office buildings, not in $300 million monuments to some architect’s ego. George W. Bush gets paid only $400,000 per year, less than half of what a lot of university presidents earn.

Can we tweak the $N bonus idea at all? What if a kid becomes a repulsive yuppie despite the lack of financial necessity? Won’t his siblings become envious when Chad, Jr. gets a $3 million check from Chad, Sr. to supplement his $1 million/year earnings at J.P. Morgan? Perhaps there should be a sliding scale for the bonus where the first $100,000/year is muliplied by 4, the next $100,000 by 3, the next $100,000 by 2, and the rest of the kid’s income is not subject to a parental bonus. Or there could be a lifetime cap of $10-20 million per kid (no Gulfstream for Johnny 🙁 ).

How about tweaking the tax liability? Perhaps the money could go first into an irrevocable trust, but only paid out by the trustee as a multiple of income. I’m not sure if this escapes gift/estate tax.

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I visit Las Vegas every 5-10 years and there is always something interesting to photograph (some of my old photos). The sprawl and the traffic get worse on every trip, but the city doesn’t seem to have any difficulty attracting newcomers. One thing that I love about Las Vegas is how democratic the place is. To succeed in New York society you need to be from the right family, be intelligent, and know something about culture. To succeed in Washington, D.C., you need to have connections to power. To be admired in Boston you need to be well-educated. To be cool in Los Angeles, you need to know the right movie industry people. In Las Vegas, they don’t care about your family, race, intelligence, education, criminal background, knowledge, power, etc. All you need is money and a willingness to spend it conspicuously. If you drive an expensive car and wear designer clothes (available in every casino), any girl in town is going to be happy to meet you. They won’t ask where you went to college or what you do for a living. They’ll ask where you’re taking them for dinner and entertainment and what you’re going to buy them.

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What do a couple of pilots do when overnighting in Lincoln, Nebraska? Go to the Grand Theater downtown to see Miami Vice. The movie isn’t as sunny as the TV series. As pilots we enjoyed the helicopter scenes but couldn’t decide whether or not to feel insulted by the fact that Detective Tubbs seems to have become a qualified business jet pilot. Tubbs flies a bizjet to Haiti for a meeting with a bad guy. Then he talks about filling up his turbine-powered machine with “avgas” (you actually can do this for a few hours, but Jet-A is preferred). There is also a scene with the Adam A500 centerline thrust twin-engine plane, an almost mythical beast (Adam promised to deliver lots of these, but they couldn’t get FAA certification for anything more than the kinds of altitudes and conditions in which you’d fly a 1956 Cessna 172 with busted gyros (retails for $20,000), which has reduced demand considerably for the $1 million plane). Finally they have an Avanti Piaggio, indicating that the filmmakers did go down to the local airport and say “drag all of your weirdest planes out of the hangars.”

Anyway, it is great that aviation is featured in the film, at least as a tool for drug importers. But to those of us who struggle to maintain proficiency and add ratings, it is humbling that a guy who spends most of his time playing with guns, cars, boats, and criminals seems to be able to fly anything with wings.

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Wynn Las Vegas is the latest and greatest hotel on the Strip. It was built and is managed by Steve Wynn, the man behind the Mirage and Bellagio. Wynn is built on the grounds and golf course of the Desert Inn, dynamited in 2001. The Desert Inn was quiet and all of the rooms had balconies on which one could sit, read a book, and enjoy the desert air. What happened to make the Desert Inn unprofitable? “Starwood bought it and they didn’t understand the casino business,” a bellman said. “I worked at the D.I. for 24 years. The new managers came in and fired the casino hosts because they were expensive. A casino host makes a base salary of $250,000 per year and then gets a percentage of whatever the people he brings in lose. So you can see why someone would want to cut them out, but it turns out that you need these guys.”

The Desert Inn had 700 rooms; Wynn has 2700. The hotel portion of Wynn is a big high-rise with plate glass windows that don’t open. Forget balconies. When you’re in your room, it is like being in an office building. When you’re in the rest of the facility, it is like being in a shopping mall. The surfaces and finishes are sort of luxurious, but the environment makes one desperate to get out and see what the air feels like.

Because the Wynn is so huge and makes so little use of information technology, there is no advantage to being a guest. If you want to get your car out of the valet, you need to have your ticket. They don’t record the name of the owner or the room number associated with a car. If you lose your ticket, we were informed, you have to drive around the entire lot with a valet and look for your car. When you find it, you have to prove that you own it (good luck with an airport courtesy car!). If you want to walk out on the terrace and see the waterfall, you have to pay $20+ for drinks. If you want to visit the Ferrari dealership on the ground floor, you and your fellow Wynn guest will have to pay $20 to get in (and then pay $38 for a baseball cap or $280,000-400,000 for a car (more than a brand-new four-seat Robinson R44 helicopter)), just like the rabble who walk in off the Strip.

The entire hotel and casino pulses with a Pop music beat. The pool area doesn’t open until 8:00 am and the music is loud in every corner of the patio. If you want to use the exercise machines, you have to pay an additional $25/day. If you and your friend want to escape back to your room and use the Internet, it will cost you about $24/day to hook up your laptops. When you’ve just about finished writing a Weblog post and hit “submit”, Wynn’s service will decide that you need to renew your agreement to pay for Internet service. Your work will be thrown away and your browser redirected to a screen where you promise to pay them.

Some good things about Wynn: comfortable beds, large and intelligently designed bathrooms (though it would have been nice if they cleaned the bathtub between our first and second night), friendly, helpful, and well-informed staff. The nightly show, Le Reve, is fantastic. The stage is a big round swimming pool with elaborate platforms for the Cirque de Soleil alumni to run around on. Prodigious quantities of rain fall from the ceiling. People fly and then dive.

Practical travel tips: If you have the $400+/night to spend on a Las Vegas hotel room, but want a bit of fresh air, consider the Ritz Carlton in Lake Las Vegas, a short drive east. Some of their rooms have balconies, a feature that hotels on the Strip have been eliminating due, supposedly, to suicides by distraught gamblers. If are on a tighter budget and want to be in a place where you can walk out of the casino into a public street, consider downtown Las Vegas where you can stroll on the shaded and misted Fremont Street. If you really want to hang out at Wynn, stay for $45/night across the street at The Frontier where you can drink $1.99 margaritas while viewing the nightly female mud wrestling and bull riding. Now you have an extra $350/day and can easily afford the services of the Wynn ($85 for a man’s haircut, $70 for two people to dine at the buffet, etc.). When you’re done with Wynn, you get a bit of fresh air strolling back across the street to your hotel room.

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This is a report to friends and family on my main activity this week, a trip from Boston to Las Vegas in a Diamond Star DA40. The owner, my friend Tom, started the trip with 150 hours and a Private pilot’s certificate. His goal is to get an instrument rating within the next few months. Tom’s knowledge is almost perfectly complementary to mine. He knows about running marathons, living in the suburbs, keeping and wife and kids happy, and investing in bonds.

The trip started Saturday morning with a 4:00 a.m. alarm clock. Tom showed up at 4:45 a.m. in an Aston Martin convertible. We struggled to fit our luggage and flight gear in the trunk and back seat. Only the British could make a car that is more expensive to own, less reliable, and less capacious than a trainer airplane. We lifted from the Minuteman airport in Stow, Massachusetts (6B6) at 6:15 am and went to Worcester, MA for a practice ILS approach then onward to Ithaca, NY for another ILS and a fuel stop. Our next leg was to Youngstown, Ohio where haze and cumulus clouds forced us to get a real instrument clearance and fly an ILS through actual conditions to land in the withering heat and humidity of the late morning. Our final destination was Chicago Midway where we went downtown to meet Jen for “Venetian Night” (crowds, lit-up boats), then collapsed at the Hampton Inn next to Midway.

On Sunday we departed Midway at 7:30 a.m. for Iowa City, Iowa. The temperature was well into the 90s and a crazy high school girl was preparing to take her first flying lesson. After pounding back some cold drinks and chatting with folks at one of the country’s friendliest FBOs, we departed for Lincoln, Nebraska. We landed in 102-degree (39C) heat and got organized with a rental car and rooms at the Cornhusker Marriott downtown. I walked over to the university to check out the three art galleries, including one designed by Philip Johnson. There are enough interesting paintings and sculpture to inspire rebellion in the soul of the next Jackson Pollock (born in Cody, Wyoming, but the same general idea). We had a good dinner in the Haymarket district with Doug and Amy’s friend Jill.

Over dinner at Fireworks, Jill told us of a sad local case involving a medevac helicopter pilot whose fancy turbine Agusta’s tail rotor failed. He must have done some sort of autorotation because there were survivors, but he was not among them. He left behind a wife and seven children who are suing the manufacturer. It is hard to believe that anyone can make money in aviation because, under the American legal system, Agusta ends up selling insurance when they thought they were selling helicopters. The engineering reality is that it is impossible to make a helicopter that won’t break. If you made everything incredibly strong, the helicopter would be too heavy to fly. Pilots are aware that at any time the engine or transmission or tail rotor could fail and it will be time for an autorotation. There are areas of the planet and phases of flight where this won’t result in a soft landing and that is one reason why being a commercial helicopter pilot is probably the most dangerous job in the U.S. (I’ve not seen the stats broken out separately, but commercial pilot is one of the most dangerous and it includes airline 747 crew, whose jobs are not dangerous at all). Nobody with a wife and seven kids depending on his next paycheck should take a job flying a helicopter unless he has a lot of life insurance.

On Monday, after donning our oxygen cannulas, we departed Lincoln at 7:00 a.m., planning to follow I-80 to Salt Lake City. The sensible ways to cross the Rocky Mountains are I-80 (passes up to 9,000′ or so) and I-40 (passes up to 7,500′). There were some thunderstorms and/or rain developing over both of these routes, so we diverted to Jeffco airport in the northwest suburbs of Denver, Colorado and refueled. I called flight service for an update and found that the winds aloft were light and mostly from the north, which meant that we wouldn’t have too much lee side turbulence approaching the Rockies. More interestingly, there were a couple of pilot reports from small Cessnas that had made it across in the preceding hour or two. We were emboldened. We took off from Jeffco around 11:00 a.m. and climbed up to an indicated 14,500′ on the altimeter. Due to the high heat, we were closer to 15,000′ above sea level, a fact confirmed by the GPS, and well above the numerous 14,000+ peaks that I-70 threads its way throught. For flatlanders, this kind of flying is unnerving, but it was never unsafe. We landed in the early afternoon at Canyonlands (CNY) in Moab, Utah. This was Tom’s first landing at a high density altitude (8000′ or so) where he had to fly a pattern (at Jeffco we’d done a practice ILS approach). I said “you’re going to be going really fast over the ground at normal pattern airspeeds, so be sure to widen out”. Tom did so, but got down to a slower than normal airspeed of about 70 knots without realizing it. The ground rush was consistent with our 85-90 knot groundspeed, so he thought he was flying a standard DA40 downwind at 85 knots or so. We rented a brand new Jeep Wrangler, which was much noisier and bumpier than a 1995 Kia, did a short hike in Arches National Park, and had dinner at Buck’s Grillhouse. An older biker couple walked out to their Honda Goldwings. The guy wore a badge on his leather jacket that had exactly the right shape and color for Harley Davidson’s logo, but instead of reading “Harley” the badge read “Asshole”.

On Tuesday, we enjoyed a smooth morning flight over Bryce and Zion national parks, then did a practice instrument approach and landing at St. George, Utah. It was getting bumpy and windy by the time we landed, just after noon, at Henderson, Nevada (HND). 22.9 hours on the Hobbs meter.

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When Boston’s Big Dig project was getting started, in the late 1980s, an MIT professor of civil engineering and I went over to see the guy in charge. We showed him a bunch of computer software that we’d built and pitched him on the idea of using computers to track the flow of materials and the state of the work, much as is done in any modern factory. He said “I’m not interested in anything that might save money. This is a cost-plus project and the more we spend, the more profit we make. If we build this new highway using the same technology employed by the Romans, that’s fine with me.”

Predictably, the project cost a lot more than planned, the guy we talked to made a lot more profit than budgeted, and the schedule slipped. What wasn’t predicted were the quality problems that have come to obsess Boston in recent weeks, after the death of Milena Del Valle.

What would the French have done? (WWtFhD) The contract would not have been to build the road. The contract would have been to build the road and maintain it for 20 years, thus giving the contractor an incentive to maintain high quality.

[Note that this is a separate practice from the French allowing private companies to build, maintain, and operate private toll roads.]

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One of the things that I always wondered was “How am I ever going to teach someone to land an airplane?” The flare happens fairly fast and the difference between a reasonable and damaging landing is a matter of just a few seconds and/or an inch or two of stick movement. One year after receiving my CFI, I think that I’ve finally figured it out. Most people flare too early. They are going 60 knots and plummeting toward what looks like a hard and unforgiving asphalt surface. When that runway gets close, they start to yank back on the stick. The result is a balloon, the airplane loses flying speed about 15′ above the ground and then the sickening sink begins. The instructor wonders “How am I going to live this one down if we bend the gear?” while adding power. The student is frustrated because the controls have been grabbed.

My new religion:

• insist that student trim the airplane for approach speed and verify that it is properly trimmed by removing hands from stick at 200′ AGL
• remind the student to look far down the runway as we approach the ground
• put a fist behind the stick so that the potential travel of the stick is limited
• talk the student through the flare

The student will probably still try to flare too hard and maybe too high, but it won’t matter because you’ve limited the rearward movement of the stick. After a few of these, the student learns the correct attitudes for landing and stops pulling back so hard.

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Resting up in a Moab, Utah hotel room, a news item flashed across the TV screen concerning Fidel Castro handing over power, temporarily, to his brother Raul. Coincidentally, the July 31, 2006 New Yorker magazine carries an interesting article on Cuba by Jon Lee Anderson, author of a very interesting biography of Che Guevara. Some interesting items from the article:

• “Castro has a fascination with Alexander the Great” and named three of his sons Alexis, Alexander, and Alejandro (Castro has a whole bunch of kids from at least two wives).
• Raul’s wife, Vilma Espin, is “M.I.T.-educated”.

Castro’s continuing ownership of Cuba is a great example of the limits of American power. We pay taxes to support a vast military force. You’d think that, for all the money we spend, it wouldn’t be possible for a guy to run around talking trash about the U.S. while amassing a personal fortune estimated at around $1 billion (it would be a lot more except that the 11.3 million Cubans don’t produce much that is valuable in our globalized economy). Yet Fidel Castro has done pretty much whatever he wanted since 1959.

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