Month: November 2019

Twin Commander pilot departs on a pole-to-pole flight

by philg

Check out this comprehensive web site on a pole-to-pole flight in a Twin Commander (turboprop) scheduled to start today. The pilot, Robert DeLaurentis, dead-sticked a Lycoming-powered Piper Malibu Mirage into Kuala Lumpur (newspaper story, short on tech details) during a previous round-the-world trip, which is the subject of Zen Pilot.

The Zen Pilot book explains a fair amount about the Malibu trip and the oil system failure. The reputation of the Malibu Mirage is that the engine does not need any encouragement to fail. However, DeLaurentis had equipped the plane with an aftermarket system for adding oil to the engine from within the pressurized cockpit. Airplane engines that are burning nearly one quart of oil per hour will still fly for 3-4 hours without incident. What if one has planned a 12-hour flight, though? It might be possible to burn through all of the oil. So DeLaurentis had the ability to add a quart at a time. Some part of the aftermarket piping likely came loose or was damaged by the Malaysian mechanics trying to change the oil.

Some excerpts from Zen Pilot, whose author seems to be a true son of California:

By anybody else’s measure, I was living the American Dream. I had grown my real estate business to one hundred units. I had all the material comforts anyone could hope for. Yet, I had hit a wall taller than the highest thunderstorm I would face in my years of flying. I was holding myself back from the life that I wanted, and inside me was an emptiness I yearned to fill. My entelechy was nudging me, telling me that at forty-five years of age, I had less and less time to fulfill my life’s true intentions. One day, as I took my daily walk through Balboa Park, something changed. I had begun not to just notice the sights, sounds, and smells I had experienced on my previous walks, but to feel gratitude for them. I determined at that moment to begin my journey to bring purpose and passion into alignment with a higher power. I knew that if I had an impossibly big dream, the Universe would get behind me and partner with me. The resistance would fall away and things would start to flow, slowly at first and then at a feverish pitch.

In the next four years while completing an advanced degree in spiritual psychology with an emphasis in consciousness, health and healing, …

How does a Californian get rich enough to purchase a Piper Malibu and fly it around the world without a plaintiff coming in and taking 75 of those 100 units away via a California family court lawsuit? The author notes that he was never married and had no children. This enabled him to buy a 1997 Malibu in the 18th year and 1400th hour of its life.

Envy the luxury and elegance of traveling around the world in a private airplane?

The survival gear I carried with me on my trip weighed about forty pounds. During my flight I wore my neoprene survival suit, which I not so affectionately referred to as my “Gumby suit.” It smelled like perspiration and rubber and was designed to cover the entire body from head to toe and form a tight seal around the face. Imagine a red ping pong ball floating on the water getting kicked around by waves for hours on end while taking in an occasional mouthful of saltwater, with God only knows what swimming around you. I also had packed items including a life raft, lighted life preservers, dye packets, fishing gear and a knife and an ax to cut my way out of my seat belts and the plane if necessary. My plane had an onboard satellite locator beacon and I wore another one around my neck. The survival bag had backup handheld marine and aviation radios as well as a satellite phone. Additionally, I was required to carry several million dollars in survival insurance; I had evacuation and medical insurance as well.

A critical part of this kit is the Garmin inReach satellite SOS and text message handheld.

If women are the new children, what happens when a white adult male sets off to conquer the vast oceans with one middle-aged piston engine? No mucho, as they say in San Diego:

My digital marketing PR team had crafted and released an amazing press release the day before my departure. We hoped the sendoff would have reporters from major TV channels, newspapers and radio stations. Surprisingly, the media was nowhere to be seen.

How well does Piper’s notoriously Mickey Mouse landing gear hold up on the round-the-world odyssey? It fails less than one minute into the first leg:

At four hundred feet above the runway my landing gear failed to properly retract. I was dragging my nose wheel. The engine—a 350-hp Lycoming twin turbocharged one—was at full horsepower trying to deal with the extra weight of the ninety gallons and 540 pounds of extra fuel I was carrying.

Maybe a TBM next time!

Like everyone else who isn’t an airline pilot, he has trouble using and interpreting the onboard weather radar.

Our California hero gets some advice from a young MIT hero:

I recall a text response I got from fellow earthrounder named Matt Guthmiller when I inquired what weather site he used. He said that he found most of the weather info worthless once he got into Asia because the different weather reporting services forecast towering cumulous clouds and thunderstorms every day. So you would either park your plane and not fly for the next two months or deal with it. He was right. Flying without reliable weather reporting around the world was a chilling point to consider.

Controllers in foreign countries make the author appreciate FAA-run ATC. Our Malibu pilot gets vectors into weather that might make sense for a heavy jet with hot wings. Foreign airports similarly make the author appreciate even the most rapacious U.S. FBO. Muscat, Oman is a particularly bad stop. The author is left out on the ramp in 110-degree high humidity weather, interrogated and nearly arrested, and delayed for a day before the folks at the airport can be bothered to deliver some 100LL fuel at $20/gallon.

The author has some difficulty in managing the extra fuel tanks. He mistakenly pumps some extra fuel from a ferry tank into one of the main tanks, where it is promptly vented overboard. Not great when you’re paying $20/gallon and hoping to cross an ocean with a decent reserve. He takes advantage of a 23-knot tailwind and slows down to an economy cruise speed.

He is not impressed with what the white man has brought to Samoa:

The four days I stayed on Pago Pago, the capital of American Samoa—a cluster of tiny islands in the middle of the Pacific and two thousand nautical miles from any real form of civilization—were frightening for me. It’s hard to describe, but the feel of the island made my skin crawl. Imagine a tribal culture that somehow was rapidly updated with some American infrastructure with cell phones, an airport, McDonald’s and sketchy Internet. But beyond that, it felt like the people were still driven by thousands of years of tribal tradition, like they didn’t really want any of the new lifestyle that had been thrust upon them. And for that matter, they could do without the occasional visitors as well.

Haris Suleman‘s round-the-world Bonanza flight came to a sad end on departure from Pago Pago. The author’s very nearly does as well. He was distracted with some mechanical issues (the engine had possibly burned as many as six quarts of oil in the preceding eight hours!) and did not explicitly ask for the 10,000′ runway. The controller assigned his plane, 10 percent overweight, to the 3,800’ crosswind runway. He accepted the clearance and barely made it over a fence. Good reminder to always have the airport diagram in front of you when taxiing!

Think that pilots are intrepid heroes?

I never told anyone I was afraid, but the truth was that after the engine out in Malaysia I was genuinely terrified every day. It was like I was stepping into a flying coffin.

I had taken enormous risks each and every day of the trip. The people who had begged me not to do the trip were in fact right.

Flying around the world didn’t make me a more confident pilot. If anything, it made me more aware of the risks that were possible. I had become more paranoid, detailed, serious, cautious and just simply afraid. I was questioning what I could really control in my life.

He finds out that veteran ferry pilots are also routinely scared prior to departure. He has conversations with God. (She reassures him that “You are being prepared for something greater than you can even imagine. … You are loved more than you will ever know. You are always with me.” But why wasn’t she with Haris Suleman and his father?)

My summary: Being is a pilot is not about never being afraid. It is about acting rationally even when you are afraid.

Pilots are constantly reminded that training is important:

I thought back to my three years of graduate-level spiritual psychology training. I could not believe that the voices in my head could be true this time.

On the last leg from Hawaii, he writes about how the job can be made easy with proper engineering:

I had been instructed to turn the HF radio on once I was about seventy-five miles out from Honolulu. I was reporting my position every hour. The radio was constantly hissing, popping and shrieking. I could hear the commercial airline pilots reporting their positions as well. I thought about the fact that they were doing this trip with much less stress than I was. No HF radio power supply and heat source mounted one-quarter inch from a fuel tank sitting behind them; no piston engine pounding away at 2,400 rpm trying to blow itself apart; no issues of low manifold pressure; no mystery oil-loss issue but instead two or four giant Rolls-Royce turbofan engines that were each purring away one hundred times more reliably than mine. They had multiple pilots so one could take a nap if he got tired and let’s not forget lots of hot food and flight attendants. I thought, I need a flight attendant. On my next trip I would definitely have one.

He doesn’t have a flight attendant, I don’t think, on this flight, but he does have two turbine engines. Good luck to Robert DeLaurentis.

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Why isn’t Apple Wallet smart enough to delete old boarding passes?

by philg

Software is so smart that it will soon be driving us around, recognizing and dodging pedestrians. WIRED and similar cheerleaders for technology assure us that our software pals will also diagnose us based on medical imaging and other tests.

Apple Wallet is an app from one of the world’s leading software companies. Every time I open it there is a boarding pass from a flight that occurred a month or two ago. The software is neither smart enough to delete the pass a month after the flight (and after the location subsystem shows that the flight was actually taken) nor pop up a “would you like to delete these old boarding passes?” offer.

If this is the best that Apple can do, how is it that we can have confidence in the hard problems being solved?

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Why is the Gender Snowperson white?

by philg

Lexington, Massachusetts runs what is generally considered the best of the Boston-area public school systems (a task made slightly easier because the typical student there now is the child of Chinese-American PhDs). Unlike our suburb, when they want to build a gold-plated new school building they (a) do it with roughly 50 percent state money, and (b) do it in the parking lot or soccer field of the old school so that nobody has to move into trailers for three years.

Part of being the best: “Public School Uses ‘Gender Snowperson’ to Teach 9-Year-Olds Never to Assume Boys Have Penises” (Pluralist). The best comment: “Why is the snowman white?”

[How good are the best public schools in our state? A Chinese-American PhD friend who lives there says “Most of the teachers are bad.” Fortunately, no matter how bad they are at their job, the union contract guarantees them a paycheck through retirement!]

Related:

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Whites cashing in on non-white victimhood

by philg

Tonight at our local school (free tickets):

Waking up White and Finding Myself in the Story of Race

Please join the Lincoln community as we welcome Debby Irving – local author, racial justice educator, and public speaker. Debby will present in a workshop format utilizing stories from her life to exploring systemic racism that goes largely unnoticed but feeds long-held radicalized belief systems. By sharing, her struggle to understand racism and racial tensions, she offers a fresh perspective of bias stereotypes, manners, and tolerance. As she unpacks her own long-held beliefs about color blindness, being a good person, and wanting to help people of color, she reveals how each of these well-intentioned mindsets actually perpetuated her ill-conceived ideas about race. She also explains why and how she’s changed the way she talks about racism, works in racially mixed groups, and understands the racial justice movement as a whole.

From Amazon:

Debby Irving is an emerging voice in the national racial justice community. Combining her organization development skills, classroom teaching experience, and understanding of systemic racism, Irving educates and consults with individuals and organizations seeking to create racial equity at both the personal and institutional level.

Irving grew up in Winchester, Massachusetts, during the socially turbulent 1960s and ’70s. After a blissfully sheltered, upper-middle-class suburban childhood, she found herself simultaneously intrigued and horrified by the racial divide she observed in nearby Boston. Her career began in a variety of urban performance-art and community-based non-profits, where she repeatedly found that her best efforts to “help” caused more harm than the good she intended. Her one-step-forward-two-steps-back experience of racial understanding eventually lead her to dig deeply into her own white privilege, where she found truths she never knew existed. Waking Up White describes that journey and the lessons learned along the way.

Now a racial justice educator and writer, Irving works with other white people to transform confusion into curiosity and anxiety into action. She’s worked in private and public urban schools, both in the classroom and at the board level, to foster community among students, teachers, staff, and families by focusing on honest dialog that educates and connects people through shared interests and divergent backgrounds. A graduate of the Winsor School in Boston, she holds a BA from Kenyon College and an MBA from Simmons College. Waking Up White is her first book.

Amazon reader reviews:

A summary of the book: a white person from a wealthy, old-money, well-connected family has a crisis of conscience, then proceeds to take the pain and suffering of hundreds of millions past and present people of color, co-opts it and makes it all about herself, then sells a book to other white people and makes even more money. At the center appears to be a desperate concern about what others think about her. She wants you to think that she is a good person. Your opinion on that topic matters greatly to her.

She gave a talk at my school. Her examples are very dated and her research limited.

There are few books that will lower one’s IQ faster than this smarmy self-centered tome dedicated to the joke called “white privilege.” Leftist drivel combined with pitiful and laughable narratives combine to make a it a horrific read. My horror mounted as I realized that some poor students probably had to read this dreck and pretend that it has meaning in order to obtain the mandatory credit in a self-hate course.

Complete and utter trash. Ideal for use with an open fire, BURNS WELL!

Related:

  • the school building, renovated or brand new as of 25 years ago, will soon be bulldozed and replaced with the most expensive, per-student, school ever built in the United States (residents voted enthusiastic for the spending project and are now arguing bitterly over how to distribute the burden of paying for it!)
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Charity idea: Raspberry Pi to Oaxaca for Kids on Computers

by philg

My personal favorite charity (after the Clinton Foundation, of course), is Kids on Computers, which sets up labs in public schools. They are headed to Oaxaca, Mexico in December and if you want an end-of-year tax deduction as well as the satisfaction of helping out, you can send a Raspberry Pi straight from Amazon to Oaxaca (Amazon added shipping and an import duty reserve so my bill for one worked out to $114.)

If you want to do some networking and setup while in one of the world’s most beautiful and historic places, try to jump on as a volunteer!

Related:

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STEM: doing what you don’t love for a short career and minimal extra $$

by philg

On STEM boosterism… “In the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure” (nytimes):

The [annual salary] advantage for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) majors fades steadily after their first jobs, and by age 40 the earnings of people who majored in fields like social science or history have caught up.

Men majoring in computer science or engineering roughly doubled their starting salaries by age 40, to an average of $124,458. Yet earnings growth is even faster in other majors, and some catch up completely. By age 40, the average salary of all male college graduates was $111,870, and social science and history majors earned $131,154 — an average that is lifted, in part, by high-paying jobs in management, business and law.

The story was similar for women. Those with applied STEM majors earned nearly 50 percent more than social science and history majors at ages 23 to 25, but only 10 percent more by ages 38 to 40.

The article doesn’t get into the brevity of the typical STEM career. I know plenty of sales guys who are still working and valued at age 70. Although I know more programmers than sales guys, I don’t know of any programmers who are still working (as programmers) and valued by employers at age 70.

So the lifetime earnings of a STEM graduate might be substantially lower than those of a history major!

Related:

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Poem for Combat Pilot Veterans

by philg

It is Veterans Day.

When I was in Ireland back in May/June, I learned that, despite being part of the UK at the time, Irish men were exempt from the World War I draft. Nonetheless, quite a few volunteered. The most dangerous job was surely that of pilot. William Butler Years wrote a poem about these volunteers: “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.” The first few lines…

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate
Those that I guard I do not love;

In our risk-averse age it is difficult to fathom how anyone would have volunteered to serve in combat in World War I, let alone volunteer to get into a machine that most pilots would today consider far too dangerous to take around the pattern.

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Should we expect less pollution with a larger population?

by philg

“Air quality in the US is getting worse and could be killing thousands, study finds” (CNN).

The implication of the article is that, given sufficiently aggressive government regulation, we should expect improved air quality every year.

But if we combine a growing population (chart) with a trend toward greater urbanization (data), wouldn’t our starting assumption about air quality be that the typical American would be breathing filthier air every year? If we hit any kind of technological plateau, a larger denser population should experience dirtier air, no?

We are gradually adopting some cleaner technology, but we are also gradually growing in number of people and density. Why is CNN shocked that one growth curve can’t beat the other consistently?

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Tesla Road Trip

by philg

Our plan to fly to Washington, D.C. on a recent Friday was thwarted by 40-knot wind gusts and a SIGMET for “severe turbulence.” The goal was to attend a 7:30 pm concert so we couldn’t simply wait out the weather. We didn’t see a way to have reasonably comfortable passengers and arrive at the hall before 8:00 pm.

The Google said that it would take 7 hours and 20 minutes to drive from our Boston suburb, so my friend picked me up in his Tesla X at 10:40 am. Not only would we make it to the concert on time, but we’d save the Earth in the process. Generations from now, this would be remembered as the moment that the oceans began to recede and the planet began to heal.

The car had not been been plugged in overnight so we had only about 100 miles of range at the beginning. The Tesla owner said that this wouldn’t make a lot of difference to our total time because the superchargers work much faster when the car is down to below 50 or 100 miles of range.

There are no supercharger stations at the rest stops on the Mass Pike, so we left the highway near Worcester to charge at the Auburn Mall. As we wandered among the half-derelict retail, my friend checked his app and found that the charge rate had slowed. When we got back out to the car we found that someone had pulled into the adjacent bay. “The charging points share a feed,” my friend said. “So you only get full power if there is nobody on either side.”

The Tesla software automatically calculates charging stops, but offers no interface to tweak the plan. If there is a supercharger you’d particularly like to visit, you might have to enter it yourself as the destination. The software is also unaware of how many people are at or going to be at a supercharging station so the software does not factor “charging congestion” when choosing a stop.

The next stop was a rest area on the Merritt Parkway. These have a Dunkin Donuts, a Subway, a convenience market, and a handful of interior chairs for scarfing down a Subway sandwich. They seem to have been designed with the idea that people would stop for 5 minutes to tank up the car, use the restroom, and perhaps purchase a coffee. With the Tesla, however, we were there for 40 minutes to bring the car up to 200 miles of range. This does not include our brief wait for planet-destroying cars that identify as planet-saving cars to back out of the Tesla charging spaces:

Traffic in the NY Metro area slowed to a crawl starting at 3 pm. Combined with two additional stops (NJ Turnpike and Chesapeake House on I-95 just over the border into Maryland), we arrived at the concert hall at 9:15 pm, roughly 10.5 hours after departure. The hotel was 2 miles away. We got there with 30 miles of range, but fortunately the parking lot had a $1.50/hour public charging point. This was adding range at the rate of 16 miles per hour (not too different from D.C. traffic!) and at a slightly higher cost than an efficient midsize sedan would consume in gasoline.

Starting with a full battery would have made the trip go faster, but given the charge level at which we started I don’t think we could have done the trip more efficiently. The car was plugged into a supercharger during every minute that we were stopped.

The entire trip was done in 55-60-degree temperatures. My friend says that the range for a given battery charge would have been substantially less in the winter, perhaps 30 percent less.

Traffic jams could occur at any time or any hour. Note the stopped traffic next to the new “American Dream” mall. Soon the American dream will be to have a transportation system as efficient as the one in Mumbai or Delhi?

How about comfort? The Tesla is significantly noisier at highway speeds than our Honda Odyssey, so it is more fatiguing to ride in. The Tesla also does not absorb bumps as well, but fortunately the roads were mostly in great shape.

As someone who loves a good road trip, I notice that the Tesla changes the character of a leisurely journey. In a gasoline-powered vehicle, favorite Connecticut stops are a NY-style deli, an aquarium store, Cabela’s for the taxidermed trophies, etc. Tesla keeps the Climate One Percenters tied to shopping malls and highway rest stops with their national fast food chains. There is no point putting a supercharger on a back road, in the parking lot of a local diner, or next to an obscure tourist attraction.

On the plus side, we did get to see what kind of souvenirs our best business minds can come up with for rest stops on I-95:

Maybe conversations at the superchargers could make up for the lack of local color? It would be like the Turkish Airlines San Francisco flight. Despite the fine weather, however, people did not stand around chatting near their beloved planet-saving vehicles. We did not actually meet any fellow Tesla believers.

(We did catch enough of the performance to make the trip worthwhile and also an after-party in which the conductor referred to “a coloratura soprano”. I gently remonstrated with him: “We don’t say that anymore. It is ‘soprano of coloratura’.”)

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