Month: March 2019

Conventional to have a 200-hour copilot on a Boeing?

by philg

Friends have been asking about the recent (second) Boeing 737 MAX crash (Wikipedia). I wrote some stuff about the first crash, e.g., in

(Summary: A single sensor going bad can cause a “runaway trim” situation from the pilot’s point of view. In theory, pilots can handle runaway trim. In practice, quite a few crashes have resulted from runaway trim.)

The latest crash has friends asking a new question: Was it normal to have a low-time pilot in the right seat? (see “Ethiopian Airlines said the pilot of Flight 302 had 8,000 hours of flying time but the co-pilot had just 200.” (nytimes))

I wrote about this question back in 2009 in “Foreign Airline Safety versus U.S. Major Airlines”:

Buttonhole any pilot in a U.S. commercial airport and you’ll learn that the major airlines hire only those pilots who have previously been captains of regional airliners or military planes. And the regional airlines, which supply most of the nation’s major airline pilots, mostly hire from among those who have been flight instructors for 750-1500 hours.

What’s changed since 2009? Following a regional turboprop crash in Buffalo, in which both pilots had more than 1,500 hours, Congress decided that they would prevent future crashes by requiring that all airline pilots have at least 1,500 hours (the possibility of the $30 million plane having 1/100th of the intelligence of a consumer drone was not considered).

Another change is that Corporate America’s passion for “diversity” enables members of official victim groups, e.g., pilots identifying as “women”, to be hired by a major airline without first flying for a regional (see https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/05/12/the-purported-airline-pilot-shortage/).

Back to my 2009 article:

A foreign major airline, by contrast, does not have a large pool of regional airline pilots, ex-military folks, and flight instructors from which to draw. Most foreign countries do not have an infrastructure of airports, flight schools, and private pilots. There would be no work for a flight instructor in such a country. Unless the country is very large, there won’t be any regional airlines. Due to the shortage of qualified nationals, the foreign airline may screen young people and send the most promising to flight schools in the U.S. until they are trained to the minimum legal standards. For example, Japan Airlines runs a training center in Napa, California. Lufthansa trains its pilots in Arizona. A 23-year-old who can barely speak English and barely knows how to fly can go directly to the right seat of an Airbus.

So the crew experience situation on the accident aircraft was unusual by U.S. standards, but not by the standards of European or Asian airlines.

Friends have been asking whether they should fly the B737 MAX. With about 350 delivered so far and all during the last two years, the plane is developing a worse safety record (per year, if not per flight hour) than the four/five-seat Cirrus SR22. My advice: take the Airbus, if one is available. The Airbus fly-by-wire computer-in-the-middle philosophy is to protect the aircraft and passengers from pilots who aren’t at their best, for whatever reason. (Example: Captain Sully had the yoke full back during his famous approach into the Hudson River; a B737 would have stalled and spun given that control input, but the Airbus software kept everyone safe.)

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Financial Times: People turn socialist when they can’t afford an apartment

by philg

“Quantitative easing was the father of millennial socialism” by David McWilliams, an Irish professor (Financial Times), says that the bailouts following the Collapse of 2008 helped out older property owners, by reflating the prices of the stuff that they had unwisely purchased, on the backs of millennials.

He notes that “the worst of investments are often taken in the best of times.” (Maybe good to point out to anyone with money or income considering getting married and living in one of the U.S. states that provides for winner-take-all divorce litigation!)

He notes that average hourly earnings have gone up 22 percent in the past 9 years while property prices are up 55 percent in Houston, 67 percent in LA, and 96 percent in San Francisco: “The young are locked out.”

(The article says that 79 percent of the same folks who can’t afford apartments also think that “immigrants strengthen the US”. Certainly every landlord would agree that more demand is a good thing, but why are landless peasants happy to see another caravan of housing-seekers arrive?)

Why are people so obsessed with wealth inequality these days? The author says that “wealth inequality was not the unintended consequence, but the objective, of [quantitative easing] policy.”

The close:

For the purist, capitalism without default is a bit like Catholicism without hell. … what if the day of reckoning was only postponed? What if a policy designed to protect the balance sheets of the wealthy has unleashed forces that may lead to the mass appropriation of those assets in the years ahead?

Appropriation? Could it happen here? Elizabeth Warren has proposed to take wealth gradually, via a 2 percent tax on rich bastards (over $50 million in wealth). If they try to escape by renouncing their U.S. citizenship, she’ll hit them with a 40 percent exit tax. (Slate) Not too scary to the merely comfortable, right? Remember that income tax started out in 1913 between 1 and 6 percent and it was limited to those with incomes over $103,000 in today’s mini-dollars ($4,000/year for a married couple at the time). Once the structure is in place, the rates and thresholds can be tweaked as necessary.

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Righteous Americans develop a fondness for long prison sentences

by philg

My Facebook friends are expressing their dismay that Paul Manafort was recently sentenced to only about 4 years in prison for tax evasion. CNN describes the prison sentence as “light” in “Manafort’s light sentence shines a light on US prison inequality”.

Certainly I would expect this kind of zeal for long prison terms from executives in the American prison industry, but none of these folks owe their paychecks to the incarceration mill.

How does Manafort’s first sentence (he’s still being chased by some other prosecutors for some other crimes) compare to sentences considered fair a few decades ago?

The Growth of Incarceration in the United States says that circa 1980, the average time served in prison for an American convicted of murder was 5 years.

Japanese war criminals responsible for killing thousands rather than millions of innocent people were released after about four years (nytimes, 1949; see also the Wikipedia page on Japanese war criminals (none served more than 13 years)). The typical convicted Nazi war criminal was released after a few years (Wikipedia list of the highest-profile ones). Some of the higher level ones were imprisoned until the mid-1950s (example: Otto Hofmann, one of the architects of the death camp system at the Wannsee Conference).

Damir Dosen was “indicted for persecutions, inhumane treatment and torture as crimes against humanity and for outrages upon personal dignity, torture and cruel treatment as violations of the laws or customs of war”, pleaded guilty, and was found “responsible for crimes against humanity”. The Bosnian Serb was sentenced to 5 years and served 3.5 (released in 2003).

How about Jussie Smollett? He has now been indicted for 16 felonies as a consequence of trying to expose Trump supporters for who they really are (unfortunately he didn’t know where to find any actual Trump supporters). He could be imprisoned for up to 64 years (Vox).

Related:

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New York Times tried to teach Americans how digital computers worked…

by philg

… back in 1967: “The Electronic Digital Computer: How It Started, How It Works and What It Does”:

Many men have played pivotal roles in the evolution of technologies important to computer science. Among them are the following:

George Boole (1815-1864), a British mathematician who developed the concepts of symbolic logic.

Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose Cybernetics systematized concepts of control and communications.

Alan M. Turing (1912-54), a British mathematician who formulated a definition of automatic machines, worked out a mathematical model of an elementary “universal computer and proved theoretically that it could be programmed to do any calculation that could be done by any automatic machine.

John von Neumann (1903-57), a Hungarian mathematician who came to the United States where he developed the concept of the stored program for digital computers.

Claude E. Shannon, now aged 50, of M.I.T, who defined the application of symbolic logic to electrical switching and is even better known for his basic work in information theory.

The journalists missed the Atanasoff–Berry computer (1937-1942), but it apparently didn’t become widely known until a 1967 patent lawsuit.

There is some real technical info:

The stored-program concept involves the storage of both commands and data in a dynamic memory system in which the commands as well as the data can be processed arithmetically. This gives the digital computer a high degree of flexibility that makes it distinct from Babbage’s image of the Analytical Engine.

Despite its size and complexity, a computer achieves its results by doing a relatively few basic things. It can add two numbers, multiply them, subtract one from the other or divide one by the other. It also can move or rearrange numbers and, among other things, compare two values and then take some pre-determined action in accordance with what it finds.

For all its transistor chips, magnetic cores, printed circuits, wires, lights and buttons, the computer must be told what to do and how. Once a properly functioning modern computer gets its instructions in the form of a properly detailed “program,” it controls itself automatically so that it responds accurately and at the right time in the step-by-step sequence required to solve a given problem.

Progress has enabled us to use more lines of code of JavaScript to format a web page than the pioneers used of assembly code to run a company:

Developing the software is a very expensive enterprise and frequently more troublesome than designing the actual “hardware”—the computer itself. As an illustration of what the software may involve, it is often necessary to specify 60,000 instructions or more for a large centralized inventory-control system.

Hardware:

A flip-flop is an electronic switch. It usually consists of two transistors arranged so that incoming pulses cause them to switch states alternately. One flips on when the other flops off, with the latter releasing a pulse in the process. Thus, multiple flip-flops can be connected to form a register in which binary counting is accomplished by means, of pulse triggers.

Stable two-state electronic devices like the flip-flop are admirably suited for processing the 0 and 1 elements of the binary-number system. This, in fact, helps to explain why the binary-number system is commonly used in computers.

Math:

In Boolean representation, the multiplication sign (x) means AND while the plus sign (+) means OR. A bar over any symbol means NOT. An affirmative statement like A can therefore be expressed negatively as Ā (NOT A).

Hardware again:

There are three basic types of gates: the OR, which passes data when the appropriate signal is present at any of its inputs; the AND, which passes data only when the same appropriate signals are present at all inputs; and the NOT, which turns a 1-signal into a 0-signal, and vice versa.

All operations in the computer take place in fixed time intervals measured by sections of a continuous train of pulses. These basic pulses are sometimes provided by timing marks on a rotating drum, but more frequently they are generated by a free-running electronic oscillator called the “clock.”

The clock-beat sets the fundamental machine rhythm and synchronizes the auxiliary generators inside the computer. In a way, the clock is like a spinning wheel of fortune to which has been affixed a tab that touches an outer ring of tabs in sequence as the wheel revolves. If a signal is present at an outer tab when the wheel tab gets there, the appropriate gate is opened.

Each time-interval represents a cycle during which the computer carries out part of its duties. One machine operation can be set up for the computer during an instruction cycle (I-time), for example, and then processed during an execution cycle (E-time).

Click through at the bottom to the scanned page and you will see flowcharts, circuit diagrams, and an instruction set.

The public used to be interested in this stuff, apparently!

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Private airplanes built in 2018

by philg

General Aviation Manufacturer’s Association 2018 Annual Report is available. If you love numbers and love flying, this is a fascinating document.

Table 1.1 shows total piston deliveries were 1,139, less than half the recent peak of 2,755 (2006). Turboprops are actually up compared to 2007 (465 to 601). Bizjets are off from 1,317 (2008) to 703, but higher prices mean that $22 billion in total revenue is down only to about $18 billion (1.2).

The percentage of piston-powered airplanes going to Asia has doubled since 2007 while bizjet deliveries are up even more (1.3).

Gulfstream is doing quite well, with 121 jets shipped compared to a peak of 156 in 2007. Even the G280, which cannot legally be landed in most Arab countries, is pretty successful (29 delivered). Cessna, on the other hand, is down to 188 from a peak of 466 (2008). So it sort of looks like the rich are getting richer until you look at Boeing and Airbus monster bizjet sales. There were a total of only 7 delivered in 2018 compared to 27 in 2010. (Table 1.4a)

Standout successful jets are the Cirrus SF50 (63 delivered), Bombardier Challenger 350 (60 delivered), the Embraer Phenom 300 (53 delivered), and the Pilatus PC-24 (brand new, but 18 delivered). Honda delivered 37 of its relatively new jet, compared to 43 the previous year.

Pilatus delivered 80 PC-12 turboprops, down from a peak of 100 in 2009. Piper achieved an all-time record of 56 for its six-year PA-46. Textron sold 94 King Airs (off a peak of 172 in 2008) and 92 Caravans (off a peak of 107 in 2012). The TBM is enjoying record near-record sales of 50 per year.

Down in the piston ghetto… Cirrus delivered 380 planes, of which the volume leader is the SR22T (maybe this is the best version, since the prop is governed to a maximum of 2500 RPM, which should be quieter than the 2700 RPM of the SR20 and SR22). This is down from 710 planes sold in the glorious year of 2007. Cessna and Piper delivered 193 and
173 , respectively. Italy’s TECNAM actually made more planes than Piper: 180. Austrian/Canadian/Chinese Diamond is down at 134, off a peak of 471 in 2007. ICON managed to deliver 44 planes. That’s a total of 59 delivered since inception.

Airbus delivered 323 helicopters. Bell was at 245, including an astonishing 116 of the new 505. Robinson was at 316, down from a peak of 893 in 2008. It looks as though the Guimbal Cabri (priced like a four-seater; sized like a two-seater) is failing. Sales are down to 25 from a peak of 50 in 2016. Robinson managed to out-sell this purpose-built two-seat trainer with 33 R22s. Note that these numbers include military helicopter sales.

Table 1.5 is depressing. The U.S. made at least 5,000 general aviation airplanes from 1956 through 1981. During the Jimmy Carter malaise year of 1978, the factories made 17,811 planes, 17,032 of which were piston-powered. In 2018 it was 1,746, of which 829 were piston-driven. The revenue numbers (Table 1.6) show a flatter picture, even for the piston world. Cirrus’s $1 million SR22 prices are apparently helping. We’re exporting about 42 percent of our airplanes, measured in dollars.

Tables 2.2 and 2.3 show that Americans flew 140,000 aircraft approximately 7.8 million hours for personal/recreational reasons. Flight instruction occupied 16,000 aircraft for 5 million hours.

Table 2.5 shows the increasingly static society that Tyler Cowen wrote about. Despite population growth from 1980 to 2017 of 226 to 326 million, total hours flown in general aviation fell from 41,000 to 25,000.

Table 2.6 shows how much sitting on the ground planes do. The average piston-powered airplane flies only 95 hours per year, down from 130 in 2000. The average bizjet flies only 286 hours. Helicopters fly an average of 239 (piston) and 351 (turbine) hours per year. Homebuilders tinker with their planes rather than fly them (only 46 hours per year).

Table 2.9 shows that getting environmentalists to Davos in their Gulfstreams uses a lot of dinosaur blood. Piston fuel consumption is down from 333 million gallons in 2000 to 210 million in 2017. Jet fuel, on the other hand, has gone from 972 million gallons up to 1535 million.

The average age of a single-engine piston airplane is 46 years and 44 for a piston multi. Average jets are 16 years old. (2.11)

General aviation is making less use of Air Traffic Control. Operations at towered airports fell from 38.4 million in 1992 to 27.7 million in 2017.

The U.S. pilot numbers have fallen from 702,659 (5.77 percent women) in 1990 to 633,318 (7.34 percent women; 42,127 of whom may live outside of the U.S.) in 2018. U.S. population, meanwhile, grew from 250 million to 330 million. Holding a pilot certificate is becoming more unusual. (6.1)

The average age of all pilots is not rising as fast as one might expect from hanging around a GA airport. It was 41.9 in 1994 and is 44.9 today (essentially steady since 2012).

The busiest GA airports: KDVT (Deer Valley, AZ), KAPA (Denver), KHWO (Florida), KTMB (Tamiami, Florida), KGFK (University of North Dakota), KVNY (Van Nuys, California). The obvious suspects such as Teterboro are not on the list (7.3).

Even as the U.S. adds population, we are losing public airports, down slightly from 5,288 (2004) to 5,119 (2016).

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International Women’s Day at Harvard and Google

by philg

On the breakfast table this morning in a Harvard cafeteria:

Typing “oppression of” into Google results in “oppression of women” as the first option:

Clicking on Google’s “Women’s Day” graphic brings up pages celebrating Yoko Ono and Frida Kahlo:

What’s the message here, though? Weren’t these artists famous primarily due to their sexual relationships with successful male artists? (both of which male artists happened to be married at the time that the sexual relationships commenced) Was it a good day for Cynthia Lennon when Yoko Ono began having sex with her husband John Lennon? If Google is going to pick female role models, why not pick women who made it as artists without the assistance of a male sex partner? Mary Cassatt, for example, Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, or Louise Nevelson in visual art. Aretha Franklin or Mitsuko Uchida in the world of music.

Or maybe that actually is Google’s intentional message? The way for women to advance is with an already-successful male sex partner and the selection of the partner should not be limited to those men who are unmarried?

Readers: How did you celebrate International Women’s Day?

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Provincetown Public Library

by philg

One of the exciting things that I am able to do after 18 years of flight training is go to public libraries in different towns. The photos below are from a recent rare calm-wind, above-freezing day in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Adjacent books in the featured Young Adult Non-Fiction section:

From the rest of the shelf:

What about New (and/or featured) Children’s Fiction?

I do hope that at least one candidate in 2020 adopts Gordon Jack’s slogan of “When they go low, we go slightly lower.”

In between the fiction and non-fiction sections:

What about for little kids? The library is in a converted church and makes great use of the high ceilings:

There is a restroom:

The little kids have their own books, in which it turns out that adults and cisgender boys are guilty of cisgender-normative and hetero-normative prejudice.

The reviews of I’m a Girl on Amazon:

  • A wrongheaded picture book attempts to celebrate “girl power” and the rejection of traditional gender roles but ends up perpetuating stereotypes. … The damaging fallacy extends in every direction, though, as the bystanders’ sometimes derisive comments, which assume that she’s male (“Ugh! Boys are so messy.”), support an additional set of (binary) gender stereotypes.
  • Besides the message of “you can be as annoying as you want as long as you’re breaking gender stereotypes,” having to read “I’m a girl!” with emphasis throughout the entire story gets tedious.
  • Intentional or not, it’s about gender identity and being misgendered. … It never says she is trans, but could easily be read that way

And of 10,000 Dresses:

  • I am building a collection of books and lessons to help my children understand what the GLBTIQ crowd experiences to help teach them how to treat others and how NOT to treat others.
  • I selected this book as part of an independent English literature course that I am taking that involved examining LGBT experience through literature. This is an excellent selection for starting discussion on transgender identity in childhood. The author’s use of pronouns is especially insightful and overall it’s a reaffirming story. I removed one star from my review because the main character’s parents and sibling are rude and intolerant and the book in no way addresses this.
  • I do have a problem with the girl running to a stranger’s house and going in as if that is a perfectly safe behavior.
  • I returned mine today and was appalled as I read the story to my son before reading it to myself. Kids need to feel safe at home, especially when dealing with gender non-conformity.
  • This book seems intended to be positive about a boy wearing dresses, but in the story, the boys’ parents and sibling reject him, and one girl becomes his friend and makes dresses with him. The issues with his family are never resolved.
  • [From American University] 10,000 Dresses is a true depiction of what a young child goes through when feeling that they do not fit in. … There are also no diverse races in this book; every character that is depicted is Caucasian. Since children of color are unable to see themselves represented in the book, they cannot relate to the greater message behind the story.
  • The story is poorly conceived: the parents are unsupportive and cold, while a stranger provides comfort.
  • A child is systematically mocked by each member of his family, only to find refuge with a random stranger.

Should these paper forms be called “Normally aspirated tax”?

From the convenience store, we learn that customers are passionate about marijuana, but that the claimed health benefits for humans do not translates into health benefits for our canine companions:

What’s happening in the rest of the town?

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Google shows that James Damore and Econ 101 were right?

by philg

James Damore, the Google Heretic, was cast out for saying that intelligent people who identify as “women” did not enjoy staring at a screen and typing out pages of boring C and Java code (while simultaneously wearing headphones and rubbing elbows with other nerds?).

Damore suggested that the programming job be reconfigured so that it would be more appealing to people identifying as women. Instead of doing that, Google fired him for his thoughtcrime.

If Damore were correct, Econ 101 would predict that women at Google would be getting paid more than men for doing the same job. Otherwise, why would they be there doing something that was distasteful to them?

“Google Finds It’s Underpaying Many Men as It Addresses Wage Equity” (nytimes):

When Google conducted a study recently to determine whether the company was underpaying women and members of minority groups, it found, to the surprise of just about everyone, that men were paid less money than women for doing similar work.

Doesn’t this tend to show that both Damore and Econ 101 are correct?

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Less than a month to go before Google breaks hundreds of thousands of links all over the Internet

by philg

Google purchased Picasa, a super efficient photo editor that offered seamless integration with online publishing (e.g., you add a photo to an album on your desktop computer and it automatically gets pushed to the online version of the album). When they were pushing their Facebook competitor, Google+, they set it up so that Picasa created Google+ albums.

They wasted a huge amount of humanity’s time and effort by shutting down Picasa (previous post on the subject).

Now they’re going to waste millions of additional hours worldwide by breaking links to all of the Google+ albums that they had Picasa create. People will either have to edit a ton of links and/or, having arrived at a broken link, will have to start searching to see if they can find the content elsewhere.

Example: my review of an Antarctica cruise on the Ocean Diamond. It was so easy to publish the photos via Picasa that I just linked to the photo album from the HTML page. Now I will have to move the photos somewhere else, edit the HTML file, git push, git pull, etc. Then repeat for every other blog posting and web page that links to a Picasa-created album.

Maybe this is why Google has a corporate mission of making the world’s information accessible? They’re the primary force now in making information inaccessible?

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Why weren’t families coming over the border to seek asylum 30 years ago?

by philg

“Border at ‘Breaking Point’ as More than 76,000 Migrants Cross in a Month” (nytimes):

The number of migrant families crossing the southwest border has once again broken records, with unauthorized entries nearly doubling what they were a year ago, suggesting that the Trump administration’s aggressive policies have not discouraged new migration to the United States.

At least 70 such groups of 100 or more people have turned themselves in at Border Patrol stations that typically are staffed by only a handful of agents, often hours away from civilization. By comparison, only 13 such groups arrived in the last fiscal year, and two in the year before.

The difference is that the nature of immigration has changed, and the demographics of those arriving now are proving more taxing for border officials to accommodate. Most of those entering the country in earlier years were single men, most of them from Mexico, coming to look for work. If they were arrested, they could quickly be deported.

Now, the majority of border crossers are not single men but families — fathers from Honduras with adolescent boys they are pulling away from gang violence, mothers with toddlers from Guatemala whose farms have been lost to drought. Most of these migrants may not have a good case to remain in the United States permanently, but because of legal constraints, it is not so easy to speedily deport them if they arrive with children and claim protection under the asylum laws.

… the practical effect is that most families are released into the country to await their hearings in immigration court. The courts are so backlogged that it could take months or years for cases to be decided. Some people never show up for court at all.

Given U.S. law and policies, all of this makes sense. But why was it different 20 or 30 years ago? We haven’t changed our laws or policies, have we?

Is it Guatemala that has changed for the worse? The population was 8.9 million in 1990 and is now over 17 million (Wikipedia). In other words, there are twice as many people trying to share whatever resources they have down there. But, on the other hand, from 1960 to 1996, the country was embroiled in a civil war. Despite the pressure from the near-doubling of population, surely life in Guatemala today is better than during an actual war.

How about Honduras? Population was 4.9 million in 1990 against 9 million today (Wikipedia). But the 1969-1999 period is summarized as “Wars and corruption” by Wikipedia. Life in Honduras overall should be better today compared to 30 years ago.

Related:

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