Category: Flying

Stories about flying planes and helicopters, discussions of technique and teaching.

Overheard at Oshkosh

by philg

Some choice conversations overheard at Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture), with gratuitous photos mixed in as separators.

F/A 18 pilot: I’ve met 120 of the 30 people who flew in the first Top Gun movie. Any reference to that movie was a finable offense, but sometimes it was worth the $10. I expected to hate the new movie, but it wasn’t that bad.

  • Mechanic/pilot: I’m proud that both of my kids never had transgender surgery and aren’t addicted to opiates.
  • Jet owner/pilot: how old are they?
  • Mechanic/pilot: my son is 21 and my daughter is 23
  • Jet owner/pilot: did you manage to keep her off the pole?

Mechanic: my mother could have sucked the self-esteem out of a diamond.

Below: “We’re going on vacation in my private Boeing airplane.”

  • Pilot A: “Do you have kids?”
  • 36-year-old Pilot B: “no”
  • Pilot A: “you’ve gotta bank some sperm because ChatGPT programmed by the LGBTQ is going to tell the Boston Dynamics robot dog to bite your balls off.”

Below: the diabetes folks sell Pepsi and Mountain Dew:

  • “Do they have women’s chess?”
  • “Yes”
  • “doesn’t that prove right the guys who say women aren’t good at science?”

“Who came up with the idea of putting high-speed internet everywhere? Now nobody has to drive into these sh*thole cities where nobody gets arrested.”

62-year-old to 35-year-old: “don’t get married. Domestic partnership. Keep them on their toes.”

Below, the NGPA had booths in both a regular show hangar and in a special “WomenVenture” hangar (the latter equipped with blessed air conditioning):

(I texted the above to my pilot friends who happen to be gay; note the rare use of the rainbow flag by people who are authentically gay!)

On the subject of heterosexual interactions, one pilot suggested creating fake contraceptive patches that family court profiteers could wear and collecting 2 percent of the child support revenue. Another pilot responded by noting that a vasectomy would be a defense against this scheme. The first pilot pointed out that vasectomy carried an increased risk of prostate cancer.

Below: a Beechcraft Denali, not to be confused with the Pilatus PC-12 across from which it was parked, that had flown in. It will be at least 7 million Bidies when it finally limps out of the certification process in 2024 or 2025 (the planned cost back in 2016 was $4 million).

A jet owner who owns multiple properties in desirable off-the-beaten-track locations: “Starlink revolutionized vacation home rentals. I don’t even bother trying to find local Internet because it never works as well. There is no way to AirBnB a property if it doesn’t have Internet and Starlink opens up a lot of locations that weren’t previously viable.”

Below, a twin-engine seaplane made from a kit (Seawind). The second engine can be deployed into the water after landing to facilitate docking.

  • Pilot 1, to the bag check lady at an entrance gate: “What are you looking for?”
  • Bag check lady: “drugs, weapons.”
  • Pilot 2: “I smoked up all of my crack last night with Hunter Biden.”

Below: a privately owned MiG-29:

HondaJet pilot regarding the rudders: “there is a delay of two seconds after weight on wheels. Then the aircraft suddenly develops a turning tendency if pedals aren’t centered. The steering is as sensitive as a clitoris, but you don’t usually operate a clitoris with your feet.” There is a mode where the nose wheel can be set to free castor. Shouldn’t it be in that mode automatically after landing and until you’re down to some speed where the rudder is no longer effective? “I have a long list of ideas that would make the plane better”

Below: C-47 (DC-3), which cost $110,000 in 1943 and flew to support the Normandy invasion on D-Day:

If Magpie, an electric airplane company in which most of the trip is powered via aerial robot tugs, isn’t crazy enough for you… Aerial refueling for bizjets. “The Garmin software would line everything up and then all of these 1,000-mile light jets could go coast to coast.”

Below: one of the KidVenture stations where kids can learn a variety of practical skills.

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How much does aviation add to real estate values in vacation destinations?

by philg

Happy National Aviation Day!

I’m celebrating on Mount Desert Island, home to Acadia National Park, having arrived here via ghetto-class Cirrus SR20. I’m staying in a neighborhood of oceanfront houses that were worth $2-4 million pre-coronapanic. This evening, about 30 folks gathered for dinner two houses over. Everyone who wasn’t a full-timer had arrived by air, either private or scheduled, to the BHB airport. The lockdowns and Internet (lucky to get 80 Mbits down and 10 Mbits up here) added a lot of value to these houses, but I think that aviation is responsible for much of the value.

I can’t find any economic analysis of how much out-of-the-way vacation spots have increased in value now that they’re accessible by air. These places were worthless before the railroads. Bar Harbor became conveniently accessible via rail, it seems, in 1902 (Wikipedia). The place took a hit from the invention of modern air conditioning by pioneering female engineer Wilma Carrier ( A/C made staying in New York City or Washington, D.C. more tolerable) and then got a boost from improvements in aviation. The overnight sleeper trains from NYC might have been as comfortable as today’s Cape Air flights, but coming to Bar Harbor from Alabama (we met some folks at a restaurant who vacation in Acadia every year) was impractical.

[If we’re climate change alarmists, which I hope that we all are, we can also look at the benefits to Bar Harbor, Maine from CO2 emitted by aviation. Maine isn’t a pleasant place to swim yet, but if Greta Thunberg is correct this could be the next Miami Beach.]

Some over-sharpened iPhone pictures from a carriage road in Acadia:

View from my friend’s back yard:

Cars and Coffee at the Seal Cove Auto Museum:

The big hotel in downtown Bar Harbor:

The only rainbow flag that I could find downtown (note the lack of trans-enhancement):

What it has looked like most of this summer:

Climate change has brought a wet/cold summer to Vermont, Maine, and Quebec.

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Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at SFO: the country’s best airport terminal for gay people…

by philg

… and also the best airport terminal for straight people. The Harvey Milk Terminal began to open in 2019, but construction was paused for coronapanic and the $2.4 billion building is scheduled for completion in “late 2024”.

I visited at 10 pm on a Wednesday evening and the terminal benefitted by being only about 20 percent full. Due to the high ceilings, the claustrophobic Fall of Saigon feeling should be avoided even at 100 percent. The architects and planners put some effort into making the airport quiet and seem to have succeeded in the carpeted gate areas.

What if you’re stuck for a while and need WiFi and a desk? The free WiFi is available without an annoying advertisement or an acceptance of terms process:

How about the work surface?

(Nit: It’s been only a few years, but the power outlets (“loose like wizard sleeve”) and USB-A jacks (loose and/or broken) haven’t aged well.)

What if you want to lounge instead?

What if you want to play?

There are a lot of restaurants, but maybe not enough to deal with a capacity crowd:

What if you want to teach the kids about Harvey Milk? Certainly, the airport is more forthcoming than ChatGPT. If you ask, based on the Wikipedia article, “Was there anything wrong about Harvey Milk having a relationship with a 17-year-old boy?” ChatGPT says “This content may violate our content policy”:

The airport features larger-than-life images on the walls from which teenage boys are absent:

(Regarding Scott Smith, Wikipedia notes “18 years his junior” while the caption at the airport is silent on the age difference between Messrs. Milk and Smith.)

If you’d like to sip coffee while studying the exhibits…

Need a gender-neutral restroom after the coffee?

Thirsty again after learning about the importance of Harvey Milk? There are water-refill islands:

One proposal was to rename the entire airport “Harvey Milk International” (USA Today), but that was rejected. For now, therefore, it is only the magnificently designed Terminal 1 that bears the hero-to-almost-all-Californians’ name:

(Why not a hero to all Californians, full stop? See “Temecula school board president calls Harvey Milk a pedophile, sparks outcry” (June 5, 2023; even Governor French Laundry cannot eliminate hate in California).)

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Bring-the-dog airline: JSX

by philg

This is a review of the semi-private startup airline, JSX, based on experiencing a flight from Burbank to Oakland. The company, founded by JetBlue alumni, flies the 50-seat Embraer 145 regional jet in a 30-seat configuration on the following network:

Passengers are asked to show up 20 minutes in advance of the flight. Anything bigger than a briefcase must be checked (is it luxury to hoist your own luggage over your head and then have the bag encroach on your headroom and sightlines?). Security consists of a quick walk through a metal detector. Loading and unloading takes only a few minutes because the plane isn’t jammed to its capacity (see Two-thirds full airline idea). The “terminal” on either end either is an FBO or is like an FBO. If you’re averse to crowds and lines, this is the way to travel!

The flight attendant on my BUR-OAK trip was warm and enthusiastic about her job. The fare was about 50 percent higher than what Southwest wanted for the same route. Everything ran on time. Bringing a full-size dog entails buying a second ticket. In-flight Internet is via Starlink (#thanksElon) and requires no gymnastics to connect to. A wide variety of drinks and snacks are included, including wine and beer (nobody asked for Bud Light):

The only area where JSX suffers compared to an oligopoly airline is that the Embraer E145 isn’t as quiet inside as, for example, an Airbus A320. Bring the noise-canceling headphones.

A few photos from Burbank:

At Oakland:

This is a great addition to the American commercial airline system. I wish they flew PBI/BED, PBI/HPN, and PBI/IAD (West Palm Beach to Boston/NY/DC). And, as they grow, I hope that they eventually transition to the whisper-quiet geared turbofan-powered Airbus A220 (an evolved Bombardier CRJ). Quiet = luxurious!

For the Uber ride at the end, “they” is the pronoun that Uber chooses for a driver named “Mohamed”:

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Prediction: The -G7 Cirrus comes out in 2024

by philg

At Oshkosh, Garmin showed off their retrofit panel for the ancient Cirrus SR2x aircraft (-G1 and -G2, made from 1999 through 2008).

The G500TXi PFD and MFD screens are smallish (10 inches) and low resolution (1280×768; makes it tough to read an approach plate without pinching and zooming, not ideal workload additions when you’re trying to fly an airplane). The Garmin 750/650 nav/coms in the pedestal are getting long in the tooth at this point (introduced in 2011).

What’s interesting about the panel, then? The GFC 500 autopilot includes Electronic Stability and Protection that fights against unusual attitudes even when the autopilot is nominally off. The -G6 G1000-equipped SR2x airplanes include a GFC 700 autopilot that also has this important safety feature, so ESP is not a big advantage for the retrofit. The retrofit panel is all-touch all-the-time, which is great in a ground demonstration and not to great in turbulence. By combining the three backup steam gauges into a single Garmin GI 275, the autopilot control head can move to where those steam gauges used to be. With remote transponder and audio panels, the pedestal can be devoted to the 750/650 instead of two hard-to-read 650s.

Here’s where the retrofit truly shines:

The $1.2 million -G6 Cirrus doesn’t have this button. If the engine quits , it is the panicked pilot’s job to pitch for best glide airspeed, figure out which airports are within glide range, edit that airport list based on terrain and weather, pick the best airport, pick the best runway at that airport, fly down to the airport, get lined up on a reasonable final approach (vertically and laterally) for a runway, and then land. If the pilot makes a mistake at any point, it is time to pull the parachute, which will seriously injure the aircraft and may seriously injure the occupants (it’s designed to save your life, not your back).

Since 2022, however, the pilot of a boned-out $200,000 Cirrus that has been injected with $100,000 of Garmin (that was the pre-Biden price; maybe it is 130,000 Bidies now?) can have the calm, cool, and collected Garmin software do all of the above for him/her/zir/them except for the final two miles of gliding and the heroic flare. (See the video below; it is unclear what happens if there is a massive amount of extra altitude available. The pilot might have to do some descending 360-degree turns. On the other hand, maybe SmartGlide will turn into SmarterGlide in a later software release.)

Because this situation can’t last forever, my prediction is that the 2024 Cirrus SR22 and SR20 will be -G7 models and will offer at least Smart Glide and touch screen.

Related… an advertising video from Garmin.

Also related… what about Brand A? Avidyne brought their announced-in-2021 Vantage retrofit to EAA AirVenture. It still isn’t certified. The Avidyne autopilot lacks ESP. The Avidyne system lacks anything like SmartGlide.

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Climate resilience and Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture)

by philg

Attendance at “Oshkosh” (technically, EAA AirVenture) seemed lighter than in 2021 and 2022, possibly due to the weather being about 10 degrees F hotter and the first couple of days being marred by poor air quality courtesy of our Canadian neighbors. (EAA says that attendance was actually a record, contradicting our lived experience.) The EAA Lifetime Member “Oasis” was nothing of the sort, due to A/C that couldn’t cool the place down below 80 degrees. The typical GA plane, warbird, or vintage/antique lacks A/C and, therefore, people had trouble getting motivated to do intra-event flying.

Given that people have less tolerance for discomfort every year (central and mini-split A/C having grown in popularity) and that we’re assured by the New York Times and CNN that Planet Earth is going Full Venus, I wonder if it wouldn’t make sense to move the fly-in to early June. The public schools in Oshkosh get out on May 31, 2024, thus freeing up the no-A/C school buses that are essential to the EAA event. Why not fire up EAA AirVenture on June 10, 2024? Here are the weather averages by month:

June is 5 degrees cooler than July (though records for June 10 include some 90-degree days in various years; record temp for June 10 is 94). Given the higher heat in July, one might imagine that it is also the peak time for thunderstorms, hail, and tornadoes. Here’s a warning that we got:

OSHALERT 7/27: NWS issued Severe Thunderstorm WATCH for KOSH until 11pm. Could bring 1-2″ hail, 70mph winds, heavy rain, isolated tornado.

When basic new airplanes cost about the same as Corvettes and thousands were produced annually, perhaps a mass casualty hail event at KOSH wouldn’t have been so bad. But now that new piston four-seaters can be over $1 million and parts can take months to obtain, the risk of losing 10,000 planes has to be given more weight. From my web searches, it looks like June is actually a higher risk month for tornadoes and severe thunderstorms than July.

If the event can’t be moved, perhaps it can be made more comfortable. EAA has over $44 million/year in revenue (see Form 990; note that this was down to just $18 million in 2020, AirVenture having been canceled due to lockdowns). How about spending some of that $44 million on A/C for the four vendor hangars and also on some air-conditioned lunch venues scattered around the grounds? While EAA is at it, build some additional permanent running-water bathrooms around the show grounds and bathhouses (not Florida-style, necessarily) in campgrounds. Porta-potties and trailers don’t make for a luxurious experience. EAA is constantly harping on how they want to get more people who identify as “women” to show up. How many women want to use an outhouse for 7 days? And women with kids? Imagine the mom below trying to manage and clean up her 3 young kids in porta-potties:

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Department of Old Guys can Fly: nonstop cross-country at 1,100 lbs gross weight

by philg

Hiding from the heat at the EAA Aviation Museum this week, we noticed an exhibit about a guy who designed and built a small plane then flew it nonstop across the U.S. at a takeoff weight of less than 500 kg. The punchline? Arnold Egneter was 82 years old on the day of the flight.

A Smithsonian article about the achievement says that the airplane had “a crude autopilot”.

EAA keeps saying that their mission is to inspire young people, but if you look at the ages of the airshow performers, the round-the-world and over-the-poles pilots, and achievers such as Ebneter, maybe what EAA is actually doing is inspiring the elderly!

(Separately, if Joe Biden fails to win reelection (the horror!), perhaps he will design, build, and fly his own airplane across the U.S. at age 82!)

Speaking of old age and Oshkosh… here’s the jam that we found in the fridge in the $4400/week $420,000 (Zestimate) house that friends rented:

It’s free of toxic added sugar and expired less than 10 years ago (September 2014). Can “EAA week” pay for the homeowner’s expenses? Zillow shows that property taxes were $6,000/year in pre-Biden money (latest data available are from 2019).

Related:

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Oshkosh to San Francisco Tent Truck

by philg

Loyal readers may remember the Bloomberg Abortion Care Bus. This post explores the question of whether it would make sense to transport almost-new tents from EAA AirVenture (“Oshkosh”) to San Francisco.

When perhaps 50,000 overnight visitors converge on a town with a population of 66,000 and just a handful of hotels, many tents are pitched. The return journey is usually via light airplane or commercial airline and, therefore, tents are often discarded after a week of use. What about delivering these tents to the vulnerable sidewalk-dwellers of San Francisco and surrounding communities? A truck that gets loaded up starting on Thursday morning and that departs AirVenture on Sunday night.

Here’s a typical “let’s take a vacation in my private Boeing” situation:

Here’s a pilot who won’t have any space for souvenirs in the 1940 Funk unless he loses the tent:

The weather was forecast mostly peaceful and thunderstorm-free for the entire week. What was the actual weather above our Walmart tent this morning?

If the tent truck is a good idea, which California billionaire who expresses passion for housing the unhoused should it be named after? My vote: the Benioff Tent Truck (see, for example, https://cvp.ucsf.edu/programs/benioff-homelessness-and-housing-initiative ).

Labor Day stop for the truck: Burning Man! Speaking of that, Tumbleweed gave a great talk at OSH about her experience running the temporary airport at Burning Man. The airport now has a contract tower staffed by Oshkosh veterans.

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Remembering Ed Fredkin

by philg

The New York Times published a thoughtful obituary for Ed Fredkin, an early MIT computer scientist.

I met Ed when I was an undergraduate at MIT (during the last Ice Age). He is quoted in the NYT as optimistic about artificial intelligence:

“It requires a combination of engineering and science, and we already have the engineering,” he Fredkin said in a 1977 interview with The New York Times. “In order to produce a machine that thinks better than man, we don’t have to understand everything about man. We still don’t understand feathers, but we can fly.”

When I talked to him, circa 1980, the VAX 11/780 with 8 MB of RAM was the realistic dream computer (about $500,000). I took the position that AI research was pointless because computers would need to be 1,000 times more powerful before they could do anything resembling human intelligence. Ed thought that a VAX might have sufficient power to serve as a full-blown AI if someone discovered the secret to AI. “Computers and AI research should be licensed,” he said, “because a kid in Brazil might discover a way to build an artificial intelligence and would be able to predict the stock market and quickly become the richest and most powerful person on the planet.”

[The VAX could process approximately 1 million instructions per second and, as noted above, held 8 MB of RAM. I asked ChatGPT to compare a modern NVIDIA GPU:

For example, a GPU from the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series, like the RTX 3080 released in 2020, is capable of up to 30 teraflops of computing power in single-precision operations. That is 30 trillion floating-point operations per second.

So if you were to compare a VAX 11/780’s 1 MIPS (million instructions per second) to an RTX 3080’s 30 teraflops (trillion floating-point operations per second), the modern GPU is many orders of magnitude more powerful. It’s important to remember that the types of operations and workloads are quite different, and it’s not quite as simple as comparing these numbers directly. But it gives you an idea of the vast increase in computational power over the past few decades.

Also note that GPUs and CPUs have very different architectures and are optimized for different types of tasks. A GPU is designed for high-throughput parallel processing, which is used heavily in graphics rendering and scientific computing, among other things. A CPU (like the VAX 11/780) is optimized for a wide range of tasks and typically excels in tasks requiring complex logic and low latency.

Those final qualifiers remind me a little bit of ChatGPT’s efforts to avoid direct comparisons between soccer players identifying as “men” and soccer players identifying as “women”. If we accept that an NVIDIA card is the minimum for intelligence, it looks as though Fredkin and I were both wrong. The NVIDIA card has roughly 1000X the RAM, but perhaps 1 million times the computing performance. What about NVIDIA’s DGX H100, a purpose-built AI machine selling for about the same nominal price today as the VAX 11/780? That is spec’d at 32 petaFLOPs or about 32 billion times as many operations as the old VAX.]

I had dropped out of high school and he out of college, so Ed used to remind me that he was one degree ahead.

“White heterosexual man flying airplane” is apparently a dog-bites-man story, so the NYT fails to mention Fredkin’s aviation activities after the Air Force. He was a champion glider pilot and, at various times, he owned at least the following aircraft: Beechcraft Baron (twin piston), Piper Malibu, Cessna Citation Jet. “The faster the plane that you own, the more hours you’ll fly every year,” he pointed out. Readers may recall that the single-engine pressurized-to-FL250 Malibu plus a letter from God promising engine reliability is my dream family airplane. Fredkin purchased one of the first Lycoming-powered Malibus, a purported solution to the engine problems experienced by owners of the earlier Continental-powered models. Fredkin’s airplane caught fire on the ferry trip from the Piper factory to Boston.

One of the things that Ed did with his planes was fly back and forth to Pittsburgh where he was an executive at a company making an early personal computer, the Three Rivers PERQ (1979).

The obit fails to mention one of Fredkin’s greatest business coups: acquiring a $100 million (in pre-pre-Biden 1982 money) TV station in Boston for less than $10 million. The FCC was stripping RKO of some licenses because it failed “to disclose that its parent, the General Tire and Rubber Company, was under investigation for foreign bribery and for illegal domestic political contributions.” (NYT 1982) Via some deft maneuvering, including bringing in a Black partner who persuaded the FCC officials appointed by Jimmy Carter that the new station would offer specialized programming for inner-city Black viewers, Fredkin managed to get the license for Channel 7. RKO demanded a substantial payment for its physical infrastructure, however, including studios and transmitters. Ed cut a deal with WGBH, the local public TV station, in which WNEV-TV, a CBS affiliate, would share facilities in exchange for a fat annual rent. Ed used this deal as leverage to negotiate a ridiculously low price with RKO. To avoid embarrassment, however, RKO asked if they could leave about $15 million in the station’s checking account and then have the purchase price be announced as $22 million (71 million Bidies adjusted via CPI) for the physical assets. The deal went through and Channel 7 never had to crowd in with WGBH.

[The Carter-appointed FCC bureaucrats felt so good about the Black-oriented programming that they’d discussed with the WNEV-TV partner that they neglected to secure any contractual commitments for this programming to be developed. Channel 7 ended up delivering conventional CBS content.]

A 1970s portrait:

A 1981 report from Fredkin and Tommaso Toffoli:

Related:

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Meeting at Oshkosh

by philg

Who’s going to Oshkosh (EAA AirVenture) and would like to meet up? Email philg@mit.edu if you want to get together. Perhaps Tuesday at Chick-fil-A around 11 am? Or we can pick a talk that we all want to attend. I haven’t researched the presentations yet. Folks who have suggestions for important presentations can post them here.

Bad news for those who’ve chosen to leave the safety of Florida’s smoke-free air, ubiquitous A/C, and almost-invulnerable power grid in order to attend this one-week outdoor event: the New York Times says that it is typically unsafe to go outside. See “Is It Safe to Go Outside? How to Navigate This Cruel Summer.” Climate change has come for EAA. Just a few days ago, the hottest day was forecast to inflict a high temp of 94 degrees on aviation enthusiasts. Currently, however, the forecast is for 97 degrees on Thursday:

Maybe we will have to escape to The Sweet Lair in Menasha for air conditioning, board games, and food.

We’re going to be reading the VFR arrival procedures carefully…

… while driving our rental car up from Chicago/Milwaukee (I need to be in Los Angeles for business immediately after). We’re staying at the Sleepy Hollow campground across from the Deplorable SOS Brothers with their beer and bikini-clad bartenders. I’ve packed a full library of works by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Andrea Dworkin, and Catharine A. MacKinnon to present to the Brothers in hopes that they will change their ways.

Related:

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