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My first helicopter instructor, who became a friend, died yesterday. Joris Naiman was a gentle soul, aged 61, and succumbed to liver cancer, to which I lost my dog George back in 1991. I went to visit Joris last week at his home on the dammed-up portion of the Charles River known as the “Lakes District” in Waltham. We watched a pair of mute swans taking off and landing. Joris and his wife Lesya explained to me that the swans had reared seven children to adulthood in the previous season. Joris shared all that he knew about their feeding and breeding habits and explained the legal status of these visitors from Russia. Joris and Lesya had converted part of their living room into a greenhouse overlooking the river and thus Joris was able to indulge his love of nature from a recliner chair. We talked about plans for the summer and certainly nobody in the room thought that there would be a chance of Joris being gone this week.

Joris worked hard on behalf of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service despite a realistic appreciation for the limits of what government regulation could accomplish. I would often phone him at work at 9:00 pm. He could recognize that the politically connected or simply savvy could work around most regulations while simultaneously not being cynical. Joris enjoyed aviation for most of his adult life. He and his wife would fly a four-seat Piper on sunny days to various corners of New England and then get out to hike in the woods. He was very eloquent on the joys of helicopter flight, explaining that it was only with a helicopter that we could feel as though we’d escaped from the laws of gravity and our Earthbound natures.

Joris and Lesya were great dog-spoilers. My Samoyed Alex would stay with them while I went away for a long weekend and he would come back with a treat-stuffed smile and a new fluency in Lesya’s Ukrainian. Although he did not have children, Joris was a favorite of my daughter Greta.

Joris was a moderating influence in nearly every conversation. If you were talking about how the future was incredibly bright Joris might remind you that things tended not to work out as planned. If you were suffering a misfortune Joris would remind you that things probably wouldn’t be as bad as you feared. He kept an even emotional keel right through my last two visits (in March and April), mentioning the irony of the nurses at the Lahey Clinic waking him up at 4:00 am to ask whether he was sleeping well in his hospital bed.

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/milestones shows that Joris and I had known each other for 10 years. I will miss him.

Submission is an impressive achievement because the protagonist is a literature professor and the author says, in the acknowledgments at the end, that he was never either a graduate student or a professor.

Here are a few samples:

Through all the years of my sad youth Huysmans remained a companion, a faithful friend; never once did I doubt him, never once was I tempted to drop him or take up another subject; then, one afternoon in June 2007, after waiting and putting it off as long as I could, even slightly longer than was allowed, I defended my dissertation, “Joris-Karl Huysmans: Out of the Tunnel,” before the jury of the University of Paris IV–Sorbonne. The next morning (or maybe that evening, I don’t remember: I spent the night of my defense alone and very drunk) I realized that part of my life, probably the best part, was behind me. So it goes, in the remaining Western social democracies, when you finish your studies, but most students don’t notice right away because they’re hypnotized by the desire for money or, if they’re more primitive, by the desire for consumer goods (though these cases of acute product-addiction are unusual: the mature, thoughtful majority develop a fascination with that “tireless Proteus,” money itself). Above all they’re hypnotized by the desire to make their mark, to carve out an enviable social position in a world that they believe and indeed hope will be competitive, galvanized as they are by the worship of fleeting icons: athletes, fashion or Web designers, movie stars, and models.

I was poor, and if I’d been given one of those polls that are always trying to “take the pulse of the under-25s,” I would certainly have checked the box marked “struggling.” And yet the morning after I defended my dissertation (or maybe that same night), my first feeling was that I had lost something priceless, something I’d never get back: my freedom. For several years, the last vestiges of a dying welfare state (scholarships, student discounts, health care, mediocre but cheap meals in the student cafeteria) had allowed me to spend my waking hours the way I chose: in the easy intellectual company of a friend.

The academic study of literature leads basically nowhere, as we all know, unless you happen to be an especially gifted student, in which case it prepares you for a career teaching the academic study of literature—it is, in other words, a rather farcical system that exists solely to replicate itself and yet manages to fail more than 95 percent of the time.

all he’d written was a vague dissertation on Rimbaud, a bogus topic if ever there was one, … Millions of dissertations were written on Rimbaud, in every university in France, the francophone countries, and beyond. Rimbaud was the world’s most beaten-to-death subject, with the possible exception of Flaubert, so all a person had to do was look for two or three old dissertations from provincial universities and basically mix them together. Who could check? No one had the resources or the desire to sift through hundreds of millions of turgid, overwritten pages on the voyant by a bunch of academic drones.

My interest in the life of the mind had greatly diminished; my social life was hardly more satisfying than the life of my body; it, too, presented itself as a series of petty annoyances—clogged sink, slow Wi-Fi, points on my license, dishonest cleaning woman, mistakes in my tax return—and these, too, followed one after another without interruption, and almost never left me in peace.

More: Submission

If you asked me how often I’m able to complete a planned flight in the Cirrus, I would say “almost never”.  It seems that low IMC or icing or horrible turbulence or baking heat interferes.  Today, however, we managed to get four people up to Portland, Maine and back almost as quickly and easily as if we had driven.  The turbulence wasn’t too bad.  The visibility was superb.  Both BED and PWM had cleaned up after the big snow storm and hadn’t yet been hit with tomorrow’s freezing rain and snow storm.  My friend Adam was kind enough to swing by the hangar yesterday and plug the airplane’s heater in so we were able to start it in the 20-degree cold without damaging the engine (about $40,000 to replace).

We started with a sightseeing tour over downtown Boston and then up the shoreline to Cape Ann.  We continued up the beach and landed with a 15-knot wind straight down runway 36 at Portland, turning off into the FBO.  They handed us the keys to an SUV, which we drove to the Duck Fat sandwich/fries/beignet shop.  After that, we visited the art museum (report over on photo.net) and then returned to the airport for a night flight back to BED.

Upon pulling up to the hangar and wondering how I was ever going to get the plane uphill and over a little snowbank, my friend Joris appeared with a car and a snow shovel.

One passenger had never been in a small plane before.  After landing, she said “That was one of the coolest things that I’ve ever done.”

The helicopter instructors at East Coast Aero Club spent today doing some recurrent training in simulated engine failures and 180-degree autorotations with a Vietnam vet who has tens of thousands of hours of helicopter time.  For 25 years, he ran a helicopter flight school with a lot of Japanese students.  “They would come to our school through the U.S. Commercial license and then go over there for about 10 hours of training and some ground school.  They would take their checkride in an R22 and fail the first few times.  Most of them gave up after that.”

How hard is the check ride in Japan?

“I would fail it,” this expert pilot said.  “The checkride takes 2.5 hours and involves a three-leg cross-country.  You aren’t allowed to use any navigation equipment.  No GPS.  No VOR.  The instructor forces you to fly off course for 15 or 20 minutes.  Then you have to use an E6B to calculate an intercept angle to the original course and figure out a new ETA and fuel consumption.”

You have to use an E6B while keeping your hands on the flight controls?  “Yes.”

We went around the room.  Paul said “I couldn’t use an E6B while flying an R22.”  Joris said “I couldn’t use an E6B while flying an airplane.”  I said “I don’t think I could use an E6B while sitting here at this conference table eating a sandwich.”

Now we know why it is rare to find a Japanese who is unqualified for his or her job.