Flying – Page 5 – Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Hanna Reitsch flying helicopters and jets

July 24, 2024July 5, 2024 by philg

A second post based on The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a book about Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg. This supplies some detail about Hanna Reitsch’s pioneer flights in the world’s first practical helicopter.

One day [in September 1937], however, Karl Franke asked Hanna to fly him over to the Focke-Wulf factory at Bremen where he was due to take up one of the world’s first helicopters, the precarious-looking Focke-Wulf Fw 61, for a test flight. Professor Henrich Focke’s pioneering machine had overcome the two fundamental problems facing autogyro and helicopter designers: the asymmetric lift caused by the imbalance of power between the advancing and retreating ‘air-listing screws’, or rotor blades, and the tendency for the helicopter’s body to rotate in the opposite direction to its rotors. The solution was to use two three-bladed rotors, turning in opposite directions, which were fixed up on outriggers, like small scaffolding towers, in place of wings. An open cockpit sat below. It was not an elegant design; some papers described it as looking ‘like a cross between a windmill and a bicycle’, but it worked. According to Hanna, when she landed at Bremen with Karl Franke, Focke wrongly assumed that she was there to give him a second opinion. Seeing that she was ‘brimming with joy’ at the thought of taking the helicopter up, Franke was generous enough not to disabuse the great designer. Franke flew the machine first, as a precaution keeping it tethered to the ground by a few yards of rope. Unfortunately this also trapped him in reflected turbulence, buffeting the helicopter about. Such an anchor did not appeal to Hanna. Before she took her turn she had the rope disconnected and a simple white circle painted on the ground around the machine to guide her. As Hanna later recounted the story, with typical lack of false modesty, ‘within three minutes, I had it’. From now on Franke would argue that, in Germany, Hanna and Udet were the ‘only two people who were divinely gifted flyers’. The Fw 61’s vertical ascent to 300 feet, ‘like an express elevator’, with its noisy mechanical rotors literally pulling the machine up through the air, was completely different from the long tows needed by gliders, or even the shorter runs required to generate lift by engine-powered planes. To Hanna it was like flying in a new dimension. Despite the heavy vibrations that shook the whole airframe as she slowly opened the throttle, the revolutionary control of her position in the airspace at once fascinated and thrilled her, while the machine’s sensitivity and manoeuvrability was ‘intoxicating!’ ‘I thought of the lark,’ she wrote, ‘so light and small of wing, hovering over the summer fields.’ Hanna had become the first woman in the world to fly a helicopter.

(the above section is extensively referenced)

That February [1938], Germany was showcasing a range of Mercedes-Benz sports cars as well as revealing plans for the forthcoming ‘Volkswagen’ to an international audience at the prestigious Berlin Motor Show. ‘The story of the Berlin exhibition since National Socialism came to power,’ the national press fawned, ‘has been an uninterrupted triumph.’ Hitler wanted to use the 1938 show as more than a trade fair. It was to be a demonstration of German engineering excellence for unprecedented numbers of visitors. For this he needed a star attraction. Hanna was booked to head the programme: she was to be the first person in the world to fly a helicopter inside a building. The theme of the motor show was Germany’s lost colonies: ‘at that time a much ventilated grievance’, Hanna noted. In preparation, the great Deutschlandhalle sports stadium, then the world’s largest arena, had been furnished with palm trees, flamingos, a carpet of sand and, in Hanna’s words, ‘a Negro village and other exotic paraphernalia’. This was the scene she was to rise above in the Focke-Wulf Fw 61 helicopter: a symbol of German power and control. At first Hanna was scheduled to make only the inaugural flight, after which the chief Focke-Wulf pilot, Karl Bode, was to take over. During a demonstration for Luftwaffe generals, however, knowing that the helicopter’s sensitivity meant any slight miscalculation could take him sweeping into the audience, Bode refused to risk rising more than a few feet above the ground. It was safe, but hardly impressive enough for the crowds who would be looking down from the galleries of steeply tiered seating. Then, through no fault of Bode’s, one of the propellers broke. ‘It was dreadful,’ Hanna told Elly. ‘There were splinters from the rotor blade flying around and the flamingos were all creating.’9 Once the blades had been replaced, Hanna took her turn. With typical insouciance, she lifted the helicopter well above the recommended height and hovered in the gods. Göring quickly ordered that she was to make all the motor show flights. Bode never forgave her.

It turns out that the public back then didn’t love watching helicopters any more than they do now:

But when Hanna revved up the rotors [inside the stadium] she was horrified to discover that the machine refused to lift. The reputation of the Reich, her own career and, Hanna must have realized, possibly even her liberty, hung stuttering in the spotlights just a few inches above the floor. Surrounding her, watching every manoeuvre of both machine and pilot through a growing cloud of dirt and sand, were some 8,000 spectators, including many representatives of the international press. Hanna was certain that the problem was caused by the helicopter’s normally aspirated engine being starved of air by the breathing of the vast audience. Painful minutes passed while the technicians debated, but then the great hall’s doors were opened. Hanna and the Deutschland immediately ‘shot up to about twenty feet’ and slowly rotated on the spot. At first ‘the audience followed the flight intently’, but such a controlled display held little drama and the applause grew desultory. At the end of the demonstration Hanna neatly lowered the machine with her head held high, executed a perfectly timed, stiff-armed Nazi salute, and landed safely on her mark. She had practised this countless times for Udet while he sat comfortably ensconced in an armchair, puffing at a cigar.

(Maybe opening the doors reduced the temperature and, therefore, the density altitude?)

I had always thought that Hanna was the world’s first female jet pilot, but the book says that she likely never flew the Me 163 under power. (It’s actually a rocket-powered plane, but that’s close enough.) Her job was to test fly it in glider mode, which was how every flight in the plane ended. Nazi leadership did not want their star female pilot to be killed by the Me 163:

… the famous Me 163b Komet, was powered by extremely combustible twin fuels kept in tanks behind, and on either side of, the pilot’s seat. The fuels were a mixture of methanol alcohol, known as C-Stoff, and a hydrogen peroxide mixture, or T-Stoff. Just a few drops together could cause a violent reaction, so they were automatically injected into the plane’s combustion chamber through nozzles, where they ignited spontaneously producing a temperature of 1,800°C. Several test planes with unspent fuel blew up on touchdown. ‘If it had as much as half a cup of fuel left in its tank,’ one pilot reported, ‘it would blow itself into confetti, and the pilot with it.’ Several simply exploded in the air. Hydrogen peroxide alone was capable of spontaneous combustion when it came into contact with any organic material such as clothing, or a pilot. To protect themselves, test pilots wore specially developed white suits made from acid-resistant material, along with fur-lined boots, gauntlets and a helmet. Nevertheless, at least one pilot would be dissolved alive, after the T-Stoff feed-line became dislodged and the murderous fuels leaked into the cockpit where they seeped through the seams of his protective overalls. ‘His entire right arm had been dissolved by T-Agent. It just simply wasn’t there. There was nothing more left in the sleeve,’ the chief flight engineer reported. ‘The other arm, as well as the head, was nothing more than a mass of soft jelly.’

Hanna wasn’t scared by these deaths and injuries and tried to get into the powered test program. She was seriously injured even without the deadly fuel/engine:

Her Me 163b V5, carrying water ballast in place of fuel, was towed into the air behind a heavy twin-engined Me 110 fighter. But when Hanna came to release the undercarriage, the whole plane started to shudder violently. To make matters worse, her radio connection was also ‘kaput’.83 Red Very lights curving up towards her from below warned her something was seriously wrong. Unable to contact her tow-plane, she saw the observer signalling urgently with a white cloth, and noticed the pilot repeatedly dropping and raising his machine’s undercarriage. Clearly her own undercarriage had failed to jettison.

Hanna could have bailed out, but chose to try to preserve the airplane. She paid for this decision:

Hanna had fractured her skull in four places, broken both cheekbones, split her upper jaw, severely bruised her brain and, as one pilot put it, ‘completely wiped her nose off her face’.87 She had also broken several vertebrae. She was rushed to surgery but, knowing her arrival would cause a sensation, she insisted on travelling by car rather than ambulance, and on walking into the hospital through the quieter back entrance and up a flight of stairs before any members of staff were alerted.

In case you were tempted to complain about your own health woes:

Hanna spent five long months in hospital. After her condition stabilized, a series of pioneering operations included surgery to give her a new nose. Although she would always have a faint scar, and people who met her noted it was ‘evident something had happened there’, the reconstruction work was excellent.

Still suffering from headaches and severe giddiness, her first priority was to recover her sense of balance, without which she knew she could not fly. The summerhouse had a flight of narrow steps running from the ground up to the steep, gabled roof. Hanna climbed them cautiously until she could sit astride the ridge of the roof with her arms firmly clinging to the chimneystack, and look around without losing her balance. After a few weeks her vertigo began to ebb and she risked letting go of the chimney. Within a month, through pure determination, she could ease herself along the entire length of the ridge without feeling giddy. She built up her strength by walking, then hiking, through the forest. Despite setbacks and some despondency, in time she began to climb the pines, branch by branch, ruefully recalling the days of her childhood when ‘no tree had been too high’.

She was cleared to return to flying.

More: Read The Women Who Flew for Hitler.

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Celebrating Women in Aviation on the First Day of Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture)

July 22, 2024July 22, 2024 by philg

It’s the first day of EAA AirVenture in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, the world’s largest fly-in and general celebration of aviation. In particular, there tends to be a lot of official celebration of women in aviation. Thus, today’s blog post is about the greatest female pilots in history, chronicled in the book The Women Who Flew for Hitler. Hanna Reitsch, who taught herself to fly a helicopter, is already well-known, but the book also covers Melitta von Stauffenberg whose career was actually far more impressive. While Hannah was a great stick-and-rudder pilot, Melitta was one of Germany’s most important aeronautical engineers and a far more disciplined test pilot (the author refers to both women by their first names). As Melitta isn’t as well-known, a few excerpts

In October [shortly after graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering Melitta] was interviewed by the head of the aerodynamics department at the prestigious German Research Institute for Aeronautics, better known as DVL,* at Berlin-Adlershof airbase. Having temporarily closed its doors during the war, the institute was now aiming to restore Germany’s international reputation in technology, and was keen to employ the brightest graduates. Invited to watch a test flight, Melitta was deep in conversation when the plane she was there to observe plummeted from the sky to crash only a hundred metres away from her. The entire crew was killed on impact. Although she was shaken, Melitta’s resolve did not falter. The following year, aged twenty-five, she received her diploma and started work at DVL as a flight mechanic and mathematician in experimental aerodynamics research. Her initial brief was the operation of propellers, then known as ‘airscrews’, with particular focus on the sound and drag caused by high altitudes.

Adolf Hitler was an early adopter of aviation and a big proponent of the industry as well as women within it.

‘Hitler wanted the Germans to become a nation of aviators,’ the wife of Hanna’s friend Karl Baur, a Messerschmitt test pilot, later wrote. ‘If there was some kind of celebration in a city, an air show was a must.’

‘Women have always been among my staunchest supporters,’ Hitler told the New York Times in July 1933. ‘They feel my victory is their victory.’ While working to return women to their rightful and respected role, as he saw it, of hausfrau, Hitler had been keen to exploit any support for his National Socialist Party. At times this required rising above a tide of female fan mail and enduring more than one public display of adoration. ‘He was often embarrassed’ by such women, his friend and official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann later remembered, but he ‘had no option but to accept their veneration’.

Hitler ended up supporting and decorating both of the women whose careers are chronicled in the book and, famously, admitted Hanna Reitsch to his inner circle.

[It is interesting to compare the book’s description of Hitler’s platform to what today’s politicians promise: “[Hitler] promised a higher standard of living with a car for everyone, beautiful homes, affordable holidays, marriage loans, respect for mothers and a defence against Bolshevism.” Is it fair to say that Democrats promise to take cars away, move people into apartments in 15-minute cities, give women money if they don’t get married, and, instead of defending against Bolshevism, to deliver the best aspects of Bolshevism adapted for domestic use.]

Some recent books describe aviators, including German fighter pilots, as anti-Nazi. A Higher Call is one prominent example. Pilots find themselves accidentally wearing swastikas and doing whatever Hitler tells them to do. The Women Who Flew for Hitler points out that German aviators were early enthusiasts for Hitler:

Organized by the meteorologist Walter Georgii, the first Rhön gliding competitions had been held on the Wasserkuppe mountain in 1920. Every summer since, thousands of sightseers had journeyed by train and foot up to the annual rallies held on the bare summit of the Wasserkuppe, the Rhön valley’s highest point. According to contemporary German flight magazines, by the late 1920s the highest slopes of the mountain hosted a glider camp with its own water and electricity supply, hotels, bars and restaurants, a post office with special-edition stamps, and indeed everything, ‘like in the big cities. Even dancing. Even bobbed hair!’

By the 1930s, over 20,000 people regularly travelled to the Rhön valley at weekends. On the day of the 1932 Reichstag elections, a temporary voting station had even been set up on the mountain, and Walter Georgii called on the people of Germany to ‘do as the gliders have’. His message was clear – it was time to recognize the forces of nature and embrace a brave new future characterized by technical prowess, a love of freedom and a deep sense of national pride. With the Nazis securing over 50 per cent of the mountaintop vote, the Wasserkuppe fraternity’s support for Hitler was considerably above the national average.

If you think that motion sickness will prevent you from achieving greatness in the air:

Hanna quickly proved her capabilities and was accepted by her peers. Most of the flying suits were too large, and she needed cushions to boost her height in the cockpit, but she learned to fly loops, turns and rolls in a Focke-Wulf Fw 44, a two-seat open biplane known as the Stieglitz, or Goldfinch, and carefully concealed her initial sickness by throwing up neatly into one of her gloves.

Americans loved Hanna Reitsch before and after World War II and she loved Americans. Here’s an interesting quote from 1938:

Nevertheless, although she favourably compared the USA to a Europe ‘intellectually overburdened with centuries-old cultural legacy’, she still had some reservations. ‘The American’s uncomplicated acceptance of life-as-it-comes,’ she decided, ‘exposes him to the dangers of absorbing uncritically the opinions served up to him by press and radio.’

While Hanna was celebrated for winning gliding competitions, Melitta was doing a combination of aeronautical engineering and test piloting her own creations:

Melitta’s new assignment was to perfect the aircraft technically, to eliminate as much risk as possible. The main task was to evaluate and improve the targeting devices, and in particular the dive-sights for the two-man Junkers Ju 87 Stuka, with its distinctive gull-wing shape, and the popular four-man Ju 88 dive-bomber developed for larger-scale strategic air war. This involved registering the continuously changing angle of the dive, speed and dropping altitude, all without modern instruments. She also worked on developing dive-visors, ensuring that the autopilot levelled off the aircraft automatically when a bomb had left its cradle so as not to put too much strain on the machine’s airframe, and that the automatic pullout sequence functioned at 6G – the point at which most pilots suffered G-force-induced loss of consciousness.

Every morning Melitta cycled across the airfield from her dorm on her heavy-framed pushbike, before swapping her beret for her leather flying cap, donning her overalls and clambering into a Junkers’ cockpit. She would take her machine up to 4,000 metres before rolling sideways and tearing down again at speeds of up to 350 mph, the engines howling and the surfaces of the plane whistling as the dive angle steepened until it was at least seventy-five to eighty degrees – not far from vertical. As Melitta plunged towards earth, her gloved hands tightly gripping the steering column, the whole frame of her plane would be shaking with the mounting pressure. The vibrations made it difficult to read her instruments accurately, so many of her dives were filmed to provide the detailed information required to enable incremental improvements to the targeting devices. Sometimes she would also release between four and ten cylindrical cement bombs to test her work. At between 150 and 200 metres, just as correction seemed impossible, Melitta would lift her plane’s nose and skim low across the fields before circling back to land. After several such tests over the course of a morning, her colleagues would heave her from her cockpit, unclip her parachute harness and help her out of her flying suit, so that she could return to her engineering role. Over desk and drawing board she would now conduct a precise evaluation of the dives, often working late into the night ‘without making any fuss about it’, her colleagues noted, to calculate the alterations required before testing could begin again.6 Undertaking a few such dives without any of the engineering work had been enough to exhaust Udet some years earlier. Even with automatic dive-brakes, trainee Stuka pilots were often sick, and sometimes plunged into the sea. Yet Melitta might complete fifteen such test dives in one day: a performance unmatched by any pilot in history.

… As an engineer–pilot, Melitta already had all the qualifications needed for a technical general staff officer so she now started work on a PhD. Her new work was focused on the development of a special night-landing device for single-engined night fighters. She was ‘testing landings with fighter planes for unlit, improvised emergency airfields’, and ‘blind-flying’ without any electrical landing systems, Jutta explained.

Melitta ended up doing more than 2,000 test-dives and had a full staff of men working for her. By contrast…

Messerschmitt’s chief test pilot was Heini Dittmar, the gliding champion who had travelled to South America with Hanna before the war to study thermal winds. Unfortunately he and Hanna had since fallen out. Hanna now had a reputation for demanding access to whichever aircraft she chose, sometimes delaying desperately needed trials. Furthermore, when she undertook test flights her reports were not always conclusive. ‘She flies with her heart and not with her brains,’ one pilot complained, or ‘at least without critical understanding of her work’.39 More than once, deficiencies were found in aircraft that Hanna had signed off.

The other huge contrast was that Melitta was actually part-Jewish and, though immensely useful to the Nazi war effort, was at best ambivalent about National Socialism. Hanna Reitsch, of course, was an ardent admirer of Hitler before, during, and decades after World War II.

More about this book and these women in a follow-up post…

Melitta:

Hanna:

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Israeli hostage rescue mission was exactly what Igor Sikorsky wanted

June 9, 2024 by philg

CNN shows some video of Israelis who’d been unwilling guests of the Palestinians getting into a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter. Sikorsky first flew this machine in 1964.

This is exactly what Igor Sikorsky talked about: “If a man is in need of rescue, an airplane can come in and throw flowers on him, and that’s just about all. But a direct lift aircraft could come in and save his life.” (Noa Argamani did not identify as a “man”, of course, but the Sikorsky quote predates our world of verbose explicit gender inclusions.)

The big mystery is why there were any deaths or injuries on either side of this event. We are informed that Palestinians are unarmed and entirely peaceful. Picking up these four guests of the Gazans, therefore, shouldn’t have involved more violence than an Uber pickup from the Apple Store in Newport Beach, California. If Palestinians weren’t shooting at the IDF with weapons that they don’t have, why was there shooting? Were IDF soldiers shooting at each other?

From the Guardian:

We are told that the Gazans, as well as many of the righteous in Europe and the U.S., object to the events surrounding the departure of their hostages. Maybe the Palestinians should have taken only Americans hostage because the U.S. certainly hasn’t threatened to use military force to get back the U.S. citizens held hostage by the Gazans (supposedly 5 living and 3 dead bodies currently). In fact, Joe Biden has done more to bolster the Hamas/UNRWA/Palestinian Islamic Jihad war effort than anyone. A continued supply of US-funded aid keeps Palestinian fighters funded (since the “aid” is immediately confiscated by the legitimate elected government of Gaza (i.e., Hamas) and then sold in the marketplace). Joe Biden has also been instrumental in hamstringing the Israeli military operation.

A smaller mystery is why Noa Argamani wasn’t released in November 2023 when Hamas agreed to release women and children civilian hostages in exchange for Israel releasing captured and convicted Palestinian fighters. Noa Argamani wasn’t serving in the Israel military. She seems to have identified as a woman. Is the answer that Hamas wasn’t actually holding her hostage, but some other group of Palestinians was?

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Blue Angels movie streaming on Amazon Prime

June 3, 2024May 24, 2024 by philg

We took our family to elite entertainment last month (movie theater) and then a Michelin-starred restaurant (Cheesecake Factory). Total cost after the inflation that the government says doesn’t exist: $300, which includes AAA-estimated mileage rate for the 12-minute drive in an exclusive luxury vehicle (three-year-old Honda Odyssey EX-L).

What movie was worth $300? The Blue Angels documentary, now streaming for free on Amazon Prime.

The movie showed that the Blues go to the desert in El Centro, California for three months of pre-season “winter training”. That’s three months away from family who are back at the home base in Pensacola, Florida. There is no explanation for this move, though presumably it has to do with potential rain or low ceilings in Pensacola washing out training days and perhaps also more airspace being available in this forgotten corner of California.

Nerds will be cheered to learn that the Blues like to use multi-color BIC pens during briefing sessions. Medical nerds will be surprised to learn that the flight surgeon also plays the role of critic/judge during training. In other words, a person with no significant flying experience watches with binoculars and writes down everything that the pilots are doing wrong.

Perhaps reflecting Americans’ lack of interest in anything technical, the movie doesn’t bother explaining the weight at which the F/A-18 is operated, the airspeeds for the various maneuvers, or the flight control inputs that are required. We don’t get a tour of the cockpit and an explanation of the controls and instruments. We don’t see the maintenance people at work or learn what the need to do to keep the planes airworthy. Nor do we learn if they bring a spare plane! We’re told that there are 6 performers, but “Blue Angel #8” is shown with no explanation of what her role might be (the Navy says
“Events Coordinator”). We don’t find out what the demonstration pilots use for ground reference, especially important in the converging head-on maneuvers. We can guess that it is “keep right of the runway” for land-based air shows, but how do they do it when performing off a beach? (The Blue Angels web site has the explanation in a Support Manual; boats in fixed positions are used to create a “show line”.)

The movie failed to inspire our kids to want to become naval aviators. In fact, they were put off by the description of the hard work that was required, the blackouts in the centrifuge, the entire year mostly away from family, etc. Speaking of blackouts, the Blues don’t use the g-suits that Navy fighter pilots normally wear. They are bracing their arms on their legs and don’t want to risk suit inflation moving an aircraft out of formation enough to hit another aircraft. So they need to use muscles to push blood back up into their heads for demo maneuvers that are up to 7.5g. (No Auto GCAS on the F/A-18.) Speaking of muscles, the movie is a good reminder that everyone should take a job where he/she/ze/they is paid to work out at the gym. The Navy pilots look great compared to the same-age civilians in the movie!

Related (what the movie could have been in an ideal MIT Course 16 world; the F/A-18 is also a fly-by-wire aircraft):

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Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 6 (Abilene to Kentucky)

May 25, 2024January 6, 2025 by philg

We didn’t start quite as early as planned in Abilene, but we managed to crank shortly after 8:00 am:

We flew over the Promised Land of free wind energy and then straight over the top of DFW:

You might think that it is rude to fly directly over one of the world’s busiest airports. However, that’s often exactly what the best controllers want you to do because airplanes don’t take off or land vertically and, therefore, a helicopter direct overhead doesn’t present a separation challenge.

We stopped at Galaxy FBO at KADS, one of the busiest general aviation airports serving Dallas. There, I received the happy news that inflation has been conquered by our wise leaders and their appointed technocrats in Washington, D.C. It is just that our used minivan keeps going up in price because it is so rare and desirable.

If you don’t like California’s lockdowns and 13.3% state income tax, it seems that they aren’t going to run out of houses in the Dallas suburbs any time soon:

From there, it was on into Arkansas and over the mountains to Mena (KMEZ) for lunch at Cruizzers Drive-In (better for sculpture than food):

Our next leg took us to Jonesboro, Arkansas (KJBR) for fuel and then across the Mississippi river to KCKV (“Outlaw Field” in Clarksville, Tennessee):

Our final leg was to KSME, Somerset, Kentucky, a truly magnificent facility:

At the Marriott, I wondered if they wouldn’t get more people to cooperate with their environmental goals with a sign reading, “Like Jeffrey Epstein, these towels aren’t going to hang themselves.”

Next: Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 7 (Kentucky to Great Barrington)

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Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 5 (trying to get through all of Hell and half of Texas)

May 24, 2024January 6, 2025 by philg

Discouraged by reports of low clouds at various points along Interstate 10 and Interstate 20, but encouraged by forecasts of improving conditions, we launched from El Paso (KELP) to Van Horn, Texas (KVHN). The airport was deserted, but we managed to get the FBO guy on his cell phone and he popped right over to help us fuel the R44 from the pumps. The big users of this airport have been the U.S. Army with some drones and Blue Origin/Jeff Bezos with Gulfstreams and helicopters coming to see rocket launches (not stopping to chat with anyone at the airport).

We departed after refueling and, sure enough, the forecast great weather hadn’t materialized. As the highway climbed, the cloud deck didn’t move, which meant that the ceiling kept getting lower and lower. We hadn’t gone more than 10 minutes from KVHN before making the decision to do a 180-degree turn. We then called our FBO guy back to get the keys to the crew car and went into town for a truly great early dinner in a classic hotel:

After dinner… the same damn clouds. But they certainly didn’t look very high. Maybe we could go over them at 7,500′ and… we did! It’s unusual to fly over a cloud deck in a helicopter and if we’d had to do an autorotation to the highway it could have been challenging, but I have done autos on instruments in training. Anyway, the faithful Robinson never hiccupped so we made it over the last of the mountains and the broken cloud layer without incident and landed at Abilene just as it was getting dark. Abilene Aero lent us their crew car for the overnight hotel stay.

Next: Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 6 (Abilene to Kentucky)

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Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 4 (El Paso Interlude)

May 23, 2024January 6, 2025 by philg

In Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 3 (They Built the Wall in Texas) we saw that man proposes and God disposes with respect to flying weather. Unable to proceed over the next batch of mountains, we enjoyed El Paso, Texas for about 26 hours.

Downtown El Paso seems to have been set up to serve Mexicans who came over for a day of shopping and then returned over the bridge. Here’s what it would look like to arrive from Ciudad Juárez:

After our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters from south of the border get through the 1950s-style shopping district, they arrive at the Square of the Sacred Rainbow Flag:

On the way they might pass this multi-story mountain lion (64 feet high!), fashioned from recycled trash by Bordalo Segundo of Portugal:

Inspired by the street art, it was time to duck into the (free) art museum. Meanwhile, I checked the radar to see whether we’d made a good decision (“sunk cost fallacy”?). From 2:30 pm:

The art museum had the usual stuff, plus an exhibit on Selena Quintanilla-Pérez, murdered by an embezzling employee who tried to hide her crime by claiming to have been sexually assaulted.

Here’s another temporary installation, a sculpture by Vanessa German:

Black Girl on Skateboard Going Where She’s Got to Go to Do What She’s Got to Do and It Might Not Have Anything to Do With You, Ever, 2022. Lemony things: vintage French beaded flowers, a yellow skateboard like I never had when i was a fat little Black girl in Los Angeles when riding a skateboard meant that you could fly, Capidomonte Ceramic Lemon Center piece, a dance in my thighs, high yellow so-flat paint, porcelain bird figurines, decorative resin lemons, papery yellow flowers, meanness transmuted, love, oil paint stick, rage, self-loathing transmuted, a joy-bitch, masturbation, plaster, wood glue, black pigment, giddiness, freedom in the body, freedom in the Soul, wood, tar, wire, a distinct and purposeful healing, hope, yellow flood light, heart, yellow decorative ceramic magnolia figurine, acceptance, abandon, not being afraid to be full of your own self in your own divine body, divinity, fear transmuted, plaster gauze, magic, silicone, tears, epoxy, water, tomorrow, now, yes.

Wandering around after the art museum, we happened on the Paso Del Norte, a hotel that put our Marriott to shame:

Some images of downtown, including the very first Kress store (part of the fortune built turned into the art museum and its collection). See if you can spot the Science-following photographer:

We enjoyed dinner at Tex-Mex institution L&J Cafe (1927), preceded by a walk in the grass-free graveyard:

Then it was time to enjoy El Paso by night, including a minor league baseball game (packed with enthusiastic spectators) and fireworks from our hotel’s pool deck:

The next morning I did my annual visit to the gym and also looked out from the pool deck:

Speaking of the gym, they still had their coronapanic signs up. Is there any kind of procedure for taking these safety notices down?

To undo any negative effects from the gym, we hit the Glazy Donut on the way out of town. Note how easily Internet content can be corrupted:

Then it was back to the airport where the skies were clear at least to the next stop (Van Horn, Texas) and forecast to improve beyond Van Horn:

Next: Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 5 (trying to get through all of Hell and half of Texas)

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Helicopter pilot’s review of The Holdovers

May 21, 2024May 14, 2024 by philg

I’m a huge fan of Alexander Payne (not just because my cousin produced About Schmidt). If you’re not familiar with his work, try Election, Sideways, and The Descendants.

The Holdovers (streaming on Amazon Prime) is Payne’s latest and features a teacher who loves giving bad grades so I can’t relate to that part (I don’t think that teachers should be allowed to grade their own students!). A Bell 206 Jet Ranger helicopter makes an appearance so I will try to confine my review to what I know. First, the Bell holds a maximum of five people, including the pilot, and the movie suggests that at least six people go on a flight in the machine. The helicopter comes in because one prep school kid’s dad is supposedly the president of Pratt & Whitney and the machine is his corporate perk. But why would a Pratt executive travel around in a machine powered by an Allison (now Rolls-Royce) engine?

The arrival of the helicopter is handled accurately, with the pilot apparently doing a high recon before the off-airport landing. (Assess the following from 500′ above the ground: Wind, Wires, Way In, and Way Out; Shape, Size, Slope, and Surface)

A few points beyond the helicopter-only comments…

The movie, set in 1970, makes only a few concessions to 21st century social justice. No character is a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. All of the Black characters are noble and exemplars of stable married life. Most of the white characters are deeply flawed and are either unmarried or divorced and remarried. The richer the white person, the worse he or she behaves (“he or she” because there were only two genders in the movie’s 1970). In fact, Paul Giamatti’s crusty teacher is too crusty for credibility. If he regularly gave a lot of mediocre students failing grades, the school would have axed him (or simply adjusted the grades he handed out). A private school teacher doesn’t have the union protection to do whatever he/she/ze/they wants as a public school teacher would. But it is still fun to watch him!

Readers: Who else saw this movie? What did you think? I wouldn’t say it is one of Payne’s best, but it is still better than 98 percent of what’s streaming today!

(We likely lost at least one great movie to California family law offering plaintiffs the chance to win a lifetime of ease following a brief sexual encounter. After three years of marriage, 34-year-old Sandra Oh sued Alexander Payne for divorce (Fox) and alimony (“spousal support”). The litigation to determine the profitability of her three-year marriage lasted for two-thirds the length of the marriage. The result was a gap in Payne’s filmography between 2004 and 2011. What did Sandra Oh do with the cash? Today she expresses her hopes for continued Hamas rule in Gaza (Variety), but it is unclear whether she’s donating funds to help the Palestinians liberate Al-Quds.)

If you’re interested in a possible route out of “more migrants; no more land” reducing living standards, check out Downsizing.

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Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 3 (They Built the Wall in Texas)

May 12, 2024January 6, 2025 by philg

Our story picks up again on an April Saturday morning in Tucson. When checked the previous night, the forecast weather beyond El Paso was a combination of ugly and iffy. Despite the weather forecast and having flown 5 hours (collective-cracked time, so closer to 6 hours of rotor-spinning time), we were at the airport a little after 7:00 am.

After weight gained via the previous night’s Sonoran hot dogs it would have been nice to steal this civilian Blackhawk with which we shared the ramp (they were dropping supplies into the forest for powerline construction):

Here’s Interstate 10 climbing over some of the hills in southern New Mexico. It is possible to do the trip at 5,500′, the highest elevation that we must fly in order to bring a helicopter from coast to coast along I-10:

We stopped for the bathroom and found some porn for pilots:

Due to a slight headwind, we couldn’t make it to El Paso on one tank. We stopped in Las Cruces for fuel and on-airport bbq:

Once we arrived in El Paso, just after noon and having flown only three hours from Tucson, we discovered that the forecast wall of bad weather in Texas was, in fact, impenetrable by prospective helicopter migrants. My copilot wanted to press on, pointing out that conditions weren’t so bad at various airports to the northeast, e.g., 1200′ ceilings were available in Carlsbad (elevation 3295′). I reminded him that we’d have to climb above 8,000′ to clear the mountains between El Paso and Carlsbad and that the 1200′ ceiling wasn’t going to follow the terrain. It hadn’t occurred to him that airports tend to be built at the lowest elevations in a region, not on hilltops or mountaintops. (He had more than 500 hours of airplane time and nearly 200 hours of helicopter time so I can’t explain this gap in knowledge.)

Million Air KELP is a favorite spot for military instructors and students. It’s also a great place to make sure that you don’t get sunburned when transferring from your pavement-melting SUV into your Greta Thunberg-approved Gulfstream:

We headed downtown:

More about El Paso in our next thrilling installment… Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 4 (El Paso Interlude)

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Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 2 (Davis-Monthan boneyard)

May 10, 2024January 6, 2025 by philg

Follow-up to Helicopter from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts, Part 1…

We actually did this before landing in Tucson and enjoying Sonoran hot dogs at “EGC”… an orbit of Davis–Monthan Air Force Base. The military wasn’t doing any flying at 5 pm on a Friday afternoon, so I figured that the tower controller would either tell us to stay out or invite us to come in and do whatever we wanted. Instead, the controller approved one orbit of the famous boneyard. Why not two orbits? I should have summoned the courage to ask!

Here’s the part of the base that supports actively flying aircraft:

And then your choice of aircraft for any size family:

Note the A-10 Warthogs at bottom right if there is any need for domestic violence.

Here’s your fearful narrator enjoying the scene:

(Note the T-shirt from this year’s Sun ‘n Fun)

If you believe in “Peace, the old-fashioned way”… the B-1 bomber (sad about the reflection; it would have been better to land and take the door off and then take off again and yet better if Robinson would add a sliding photo window to the piston-powered machines that are now up to $750,000):