Category: From the Old Server

Items imported from Manila, one of whose many bad features was a lack of categorization.

Fun for Friday: Vacuum out your PC

by philg

My desktop machine came with Intel Active Monitor software (free but it only works with Intel-brand motherboards), which issues alerts when the system or CPU get too hot.  The machine is about 16 months old and the monitor software has been complaining vociferously lately about excessive heat.  My friend Doug and I opened up the case, vacuumed out the innards, using a little canned air as an extra incentive for the dust to depart the fan blades, and the machine is now running 30-40 degrees F cooler.


Who knew that desktop PCs required maintenance?

Full post, including comments

Rich island retreat = good; Obscenely rich = ?

by philg

Just back from Martha’s Vineyard.  If you’ve flown and driven the entire East Coast you realize how unspoiled the Cape and Nantucket/MV are.  No concrete high-rises, lots of woods, cheesy tourist strip malls mostly confined to the main roads and the occasional town.  Maybe it is the coldness of the water that has kept development from ruining this area.  That doesn’t mean that Martha’s Vineyard isn’t changing, however, and those who knew it when aren’t entirely happy.


1970s:  the Vineyard was a year-round working-class town of fishermen and boatyard workers supplemented by a summer season where rich New England WASPs spent weeks or months in small simple cottages near the shore.  The place was isolated, the only access being by ferry boat from Woods Hole on the Cape Cod mainland or in little propeller airplanes from various points.  It wasn’t practical to remain in the fast lane in New York or Washington, DC and also spend weekends on the Vineyard.  Crime was non-existent.


2000s:  The corporate jet has changed everything.  KMVY has a 5500′ runway and an instrument landing system.  That plus a Gulfstream puts most of the population of the East Coast within about a one-hour flight from Martha’s Vineyard.  And all on the shareholders’ dime!


Ease of access has made the Vineyard both more and less democratic.  It is less democratic in that you better show up with $2-5 million if you want to buy a house.  It is more democratic in that anyone can buy a house now if they have enough money; you don’t have to be a WASP.  For example, Harvey Weinstein, a Jewish movie producer, was able to purchase a house in a formerly exclusive area (people did not want to sell to a Jew but eventually the siren song of a suitcase full of 100-dollar bills was irresistable).


It is also become more democratic in that poor people have arrived in large numbers.  Why?  Rich people attract poor people.  A middle class person with a vacation house will tend to keep it up by himself.  He comes out for a couple of weekends in May to turn on the water, patch up any broken screens, and cut the lawn.  Then he tinkers a bit for the rest of the summer.  This isn’t practical if your vacation house is a 10,000 square foot mansion set in 4 acres of formal gardens.  You could hire the local working class folks to maintain your garden and clean and repair your house but that would get expensive, even for a rich person.  The solution is to import serfs from the Third World.  Martha’s Vineyard is filling up with foreign workers, mostly Brazilian, sleeping 5 to a room at night and preparing the estates of the rich for July and August.


The old-timers are worried.  Violent crime is on the rise.  The children of the serfs seem to be forming gangs.  It looks as though Martha’s Vineyard is on its way to becoming more like Rio de Janeiro:  fantastically rich in spots but also not very safe when you step out of your enclave.


More:  http://www.photo.net/us/ne/cape-cod (M.V. section is about halfway down)

Full post, including comments

My first helicopter lesson

by philg

Due to a large number of fatal crashes during training, students are not allowed into a Robinson R22 2-seat helicopter, even with an instructor, until they’ve had some ground training.  If you believe that you have some special mission on this planet the grounnd training might cause you to terminate your.


Here’s what I learned about the hazards inherent in flying helicopters…


As with airplanes, the key to being safe in a helicopter is energy management.  In an airplane you have potential energy (altitude) and kinetic energy (forward speed) that can be traded off against each other to bring the airplane down gently in the event of an engine failure or ordinary landing.  The helicopter has three kinds of energy:  potential (altitude), kinetic (forward speed), and angular momentum (blade speed).


In an airplane you can make decisions about trading forms of energy very late in the day.  For example, if you pull the stick all the way back at 6000′ above the ground you will gradually slow down and eventually stall and perhaps enter a spin.  With many airplanes you could spin nearly all the way to the ground before applying forward stick and opposite rudder to get back to a normal flight condition.  All without an engine.


In a helicopter, by contrast, if the blades spin down more than 10-15% from their normal velocity, there is no way to convert potential or kinetic energy into spinning such that the helicopter will start to fly again.  If you don’t have an engine, therefore, your helicopter can very quickly become a rock.


In a turbine-powered helicopter like the Jet Rangers that are typically used for sightseeing the blades are heavy and the blades won’t slow down for several seconds after an engine failure.  The Robinson, however, is designed for super high efficiency and therefore everything is as light as possible.  After an engine failure you have no more than 1.2 seconds to take exactly the right actions or the helicopter cannot be recovered.


What if you do take all the right actions?  Suppose that you’re up at 4000′ and the engine quits.  You lower the collective pitch (lever on your left) immediately to flatten the blades and allow them to be driven by the wind through which the helicopter is now falling at 2000 feet-per-minute.  You adjust the cyclic (stick in front of you) for about 65 knots of forward speed.  You aim for a landing zone.  The good news is that you don’t need a very large one but the bad news is that the glide ratio is 2:1 instead of an airplane’s 10:1 and therefore you don’t have as large an area from which to choose.  As you get within about 50′ from the ground you pull back the cyclic to flare the helicopter and shed most of the forward speed.  Just as in an airplane this flare also arrests most of the vertical speed.  At the second to last moment you stop flaring and return the helicopter to being parallel to the ground.  Ideally at this point you are hovering 5′ or so above a soccer field and the blades are still spinning.  Finally you raise the collective as the helicopter falls, using the stored energy in the blades against the force of gravity.  You land gently on the skids.  (In practice the cyclic flare is more important than the “hovering autorotation” at the end; a lot of people walk away from helicopter engine failures if they get the cyclic flare right but can’t manage to pull the collective smoothly at the last moment.)


This all sounded good until we looked at the “deadman’s curve”.  The marketing literature for helicopters says “if the engine fails, you can autorotate down to a smooth landing.”  The owner’s manual, however, contains a little chart of flight conditions from which it is impossible to landing without at least bending the helicopter.  Unfortunately these conditions are the very ones in which nearly all helicopters seem to operate.  If you’re above 500′, for example, you’re pretty safe.  But TV station helicopters are often lower than that when filming.  Flying along at 65 knots is also good but if the camera needs the pilot to hover the helicopter slows to a crawl.


After a couple of hours of theory we went to the hangar and preflighted the helicopter.  The engine is flapping in the breeze on an R22 and therefore you can inspect a lot of linkages and lines that are hidden on most airplanes.  Most of the other critical mechanical components are open to the air or accessible via covers that you open during the inspection.


Four hours after the lesson started we were ready to fly…  but the ceiling was 900 overcast with visibility 4 miles in mist.  So we gave up and went home.

Full post, including comments

Only 3 computer companies in this decade (Oracle/PeopleSoft)

by philg

If you’ve been reading the business news you might have noticed that Oracle has been trying to buy PeopleSoft, one of its competitors in the enterprise software toolkits market, in which the German company SAP is the leader.  With either SAP, Oracle Applications (not to be confused with the Oracle Database Server), or PeopleSoft you can build a corporate accounting system without having to start from scratch.


My theory of the market for IT products…


1960s: lots of innovation, many vendors


1970: customers realize that most of their innovative smaller vendors have gone bankrupt, vow to buy only from IBM


1988ish: customers realize that the computer they bought this year from IBM was almost exactly the same as the one they bought from IBM in 1969; they begin to demand innovation


1988-2000:  lots of innovation; small companies such as Microsoft and Oracle are able to grow into big companies


2001: customers realize that most of their innovative smaller vendors have gone bankrupt and vow to buy IT from only three vendors:  Microsoft for software, Oracle for big database management software, IBM for mainframes.


2010?:  customers realize that Windows/Office 2010 is more or less the same as Windows/Office 2000 and begin to look at new products from new companies again


Currently therefore it makes a lot of sense for all the medium-sized software companies either to fold or be purchased by Microsoft, Oracle, or IBM.  When customers will only buy from one of the Big Three the business is worth a lot more to the Big Three than to anyone else.


[Of course PeopleSoft may not be sold at all.  Oracle has offered $5.1 billion, which the shareholders would be incredibly lucky to get considering that the long-run viability of the business is questionable.  Craig Conway, the CEO of PeopleSoft, however, states that “I could imagine no price nor combination of price and other conditions to recommend accepting the offer to our shareholders”.  I.e., if Oracle offered to give his shareholders a Dr. Evil-esque $100 billion he would turn it down because the acquisition would mean the end of his CEO job.  Mr. Conway earned $17.6 million last year, during which revenue and profit declined and his shareholders got creamed.]


 

Full post, including comments

Our Earth: Spinning faster, covered in filth

by philg

Back home in Boston now after enjoying the magic of big airplanes:departed Tel Aviv on Lufthansa at 0530, slammed down at Frankfurt four hours later (European airports charge a landing fee for every practice touch and go and therefore most European pilots have much less experience with landings than their American counterparts), got into a 747 at Frankfurt and climbed over scary-looking cumulus clouds that topped out at 20,000′.  Seven hours later we broke through a 5000′ cloud layer to touch down (smoothly) on 22L, exiting the runway with 2000′ to spare out of 10,000.  Would have been several months of planning and fitting extra fuel tanks and one week of flying/waiting for weather in a light airplane.  One of my hosts in Israel was a retired air traffic controller from Ben Gurion airport.  He said that it never ceased to amaze him that a 747 could get off the ground and deliver hundreds of people to the other side of the planet in a fraction of a day.


Up above the clouds it is easy to start reflecting on the state of the planet…


Flying out of Boston to Nantucket you can take a short detour over the
famous dunes of Provincetown and eastern Cape Cod.  These natural
treasures are protected by Federal law as a National Seashore.  Just
how ancient are these dunes?  They go back to just after 1600 when the
Pilgrims arrived and cut down all the trees, thus allowing the soil to
turn into pure sand and blow around.


Wales and Scotland are the “wild” portions of the United Kingdom.  The
collision of Scotland with England way back generated a collection of
mountains that have eroded into rolling hills, typically rising to
2000′ or 3000′.  From any town, trail, or road you have unobstructed
views because the island was deforested by humans many years ago,
perhaps during Roman times.  You’d expect it to look a bit like
Vermont, with pastures in the valleys and large areas of tree cover,
especially near the ridges.  Without trees, however, it looks like,
well, England.  The remotest parts of the UK are incredibly crowded by
rural and small-town American standards.  No matter how minor the road
that you’re on, there is always one car behind you and another visible
coming in the opposite direction.


The crowding seems to be irritating the people who live in the UK.
Buildings and parks are festooned with signs asking people not to do
this or that.  You are threatened with heavy fines should you park for
more than 2 hours at a motorway rest stop or park sloppily and take up
two spaces in a 500-person village’s central car park.  If you own a farm, it is very difficult to get permission from
neighbors to land your airplane in your backyard.  People even attack public airports in the UK, something that is almost impossible in the U.S. due to the fact that nearly all regulation of airports is federal.  For example, Madonna, the pop singer, bought a big estate in southern England.  She travels there by private jet to a big airport and then a turbine-powered helicopter (Mother of All Noise) to her backyard.  A few miles away is a public airport, Compton Abbas, with a short grass runway and a bunch of Brits goofing off in ultralights and Cessna-style airplanes.  Madonna has been trying to get them shut down because, after her private helicopter roars away, she wants a little more peace and quiet.


Perhaps some of the violence in Africa can be explained by overcrowding.  The Congo, for example, has about 25 people per square kilometer, roughly the same density as the U.S.  But their percentage of arable land is 3 percent versus 19 percent for the U.S.  Thus they have something like 6 times as many people per acre of farmland and, due to a lack of education and infrastructure, many fewer opportunities to survive via non-agricultural pursuits.


Let’s move on to Man’s effect on the environment…


Looking up into the UK sky one occasionally sees a blue patch.  The
air seems clean through the vertical slice that you’re seeing.  Get up
into an airplane, however, and you look through horizontal layers of
air.  It is the same brown color that strikes one when returning in an
airplane from Alaska or the Caribbean into the Continental U.S.


Israel from a small airplane looks rather like Los Angeles without the
big mountains.  One side bordered is by the sea.  Development sprawls
in all directions from Tel Aviv, mostly high-rise apartment buildings
rather than the single-family houses you see in less densely populated
L.A.  Old citrus groves surround new exurbs.  Occasional undeveloped
scraps of dry scubby land poke through the buildings.  The air, seen
sideways from a plane, is tinged brown with pollution.


Traveling out of North America, with its vast wilderness areas, one is struck by how atypical North America is.  The UK and Israel are representative of the human experience on this planet:  most people will never see even one tiny corner of the Earth in anything like its natural state.


If one is not a professional ecologist and one has grown up in North America it is tough to appreciate at a gut level that humans are able to have any significant effect on the Earth.  Our planet seems like an infinitely huge and forbidding wilderness punctuated by the occasional human settlement.  According to Understanding Earth (a very interesting book but a new edition is coming out within a year or so), our planet’s mass is 5.976×10^27 grams, i.e., much heavier even than the biggest S.U.V.  Yet we humans have managed to speed up the Earth’s rotation enough to shorten each day by 10 microseconds by impounding water behind dams in rich countries, which tend be at high latitudes.  The dams pull water away from the the equator, where it was spinning with a high linear velocity.  By conservation of angular momentum the Earth is forced to spin a little bit faster when the mass of water is pulled inwards, just as ice skaters spin faster when they pull their arms in.

Full post, including comments

The dangers of traveling in Israel

by philg

Friends who read the newspaper and watch CNN didn’t want me to come to Israel, which as far as they can tell is the world’s most dangerous country.  If this is true, someone forgot to tell the Israelis.  They gather in huge crowds at beachside restaurants.  They stroll around Tel Aviv at all hours of the day and night.  They pack the highways and shopping malls.  They meet at huge dinner parties with friends and extended family.  In short, they are sitting ducks.


When I go back to the U.S. tomorrow morning I’ll be risking getting eaten by a Mountain Lion in a Colorado suburb (it happens), being killed by a Grizzly Bear almost anywhere in the West, getting swept away by violent rivers and waves, being mugged in Cambridge by local kids who aren’t grateful for a lifetime of taxpayer support, being blown up on Amtrak or in NYC by Islamic terrorists while attempting to go to a Broadway play, being killed in a post office by an angry worker with a high-powered rifle, etc.  And then there is my first helicopter lesson on Monday morning….


Anyway the bottom line is that Israel seems to be at least as safe as most densely populated parts of the U.S. and Europe.  The obsession with violence in Israel is a foreign obsession.  The world would be a much safer place if people focussed more on reducing violence in their own backyards.

Full post, including comments

European fears about Jews confirmed

by philg

Now that I’m back in provincial Boston, one conversation from Bryce Canyon still resonates.  I got into a conversation with a political science professor who was originally from France.  How could he have foresaken a thousand years of culture and moved to the land of fast food and the strip mall?  He said, “I didn’t want my children to end up living in a Muslim dictatorship.”  How was that possible, I inquired?  “If you look at the demographic trends, the Muslims in France will grow to 30 percent of the population within 50 to 100 years.  An average French couple has less than two children.  An average North African Muslim family or Palestinian couple will have 7 or 8 children.  Through immigration and the high birth rate of Muslims already in France, it won’t be long before Muslims are the largest voting bloc.  Most citizens don’t know what they want from the government and many don’t vote at all.  A relatively small but well-organized and coherent group of voters can easily take control of a democracy.”  (See “Muslims remaking old France” from the April 10, 2003 International Herald Tribune/New York Times for more on Islamic France.)


I was reminded of some conversations from my May trip to Wales, Scotland, and northern England.  The British middle class folks with whom I’d talked were concerned about the extent to which their country is being transformed by immigrants.  “I’m not saying that I agree with them completely,” one Welshman said of the far-right anti-immigration parties in the UK, “but I can understand where they’re coming from.  I hate going to London.  All of the signs are in Arabic.  Women walk around wearing veils.  It feels like a foreign country.”


What particularly irked the British, whose standard of living is just about the lowest in the EU (the UK is slightly ahead of Spain and Portugal but almost all of its wealth is concentrated near London), is paying taxes to support “asylum seekers”, which is the EU term for illegal immigrant.  If an Afghani, for example, manages to set foot on English soil the EU law gives him a fundamental human right to remain in England at taxpayer expense: apartment in London, food, health care, etc.  In the U.S. to get political asylum he’d have to have been the head of a banned opposition party but in England he can simply claim that the local police don’t like him.  If his claim for asylum is denied he loses his rights to live at English taxpayer expense but he doesn’t get deported; he can melt away into the suburbs.  Sometimes the legal arguments that the asylum seekers use are creative.  The latest batch of Afghanis, for example, claim that they were Taliban fighters trying to kill British and American soldiers and therefore if they returned they’d face arrest by the current British and American-backed government in Afghanistan.  (see the February 16, 2003 Telegraph article “Taliban refugee still sees the UK as his enemy” for example)


Europeans seem to be suffering from an ironic turn of events:  the fears about Jews that the Europeans manufactured around the turn of the 20th century have become real, 60 years after the Europeans breathed a big sigh of relief.


As soon as Napoleon began the process of letting Jews out of their ghettos, the Europeans began to quake in fear.  Jews would have lots of kids and overwhelm the native population.  Jews would be clannish and keep to themselves rather than assimilating.  Jews would wield control over their politics.  Jews wouldn’t be patriotic.  The reality was quite different, as it transpired.  The Jews had a very low birthrate and a tendency to assimilate (German Jews were the most assimilated).  The Jews had so little influence on foreign policy that they couldn’t persuade any government to act against the pre-WWII Nazis or to bomb the death camps during WWII.  Jews served with such distinction in the German army during WWI that the Nazis had a tough time justifying the dispossession, deportation, and murder of so many decorated veterans.  The manufactured fears dominated thinking, however, to a sufficient extent that nearly every European country was happy to assist the Nazis in the extermination of all of their Jewish citizens.


Fast forward to 2003.  Each traditional European ethnic group ought to be happy, each in its own homogeneous country where everyone shares common values dating back to Roman times.  But much to their consternation the cities seem to be filling up with Muslims.  Statistical birthrate data show that European ethnic groups face a real prospect of becoming demographically irrelevant within their traditional nations. Assimilation is presumably happening but more visible and striking are the thousands of streets that have taken on a purely foreign character with signs in Arabic, Islamic schools, and big mosques.  The threat of local Islamic terrorism is sufficiently frightening that Muslims effectively control many aspects of European foreign policy (see this article on France and Iraq). Europeans don’t even hope for patriotism among their Muslim immigrants, many of whom express an open hatred of the values and structure of their host societies.  How soon, they wonder, will their guests begin to demand a traditional Islamic government and a full implementation of sharia?


So there it is.  Just as they feared, the traditional Europeans do finally appear to be threatened by a fast-growing religious and ethnic minority that constrains their foreign policy and who can’t be relied upon to support their secular governments.  It just happened later than they feared and with a different ethnic group.

Full post, including comments

Saddam Hussein: Mr. (Reasonably) Nice Guy?

by philg

Afghanistan and Iraq are in the U.S. news these days, partly because the locals are killing each other and partly because the locals are killing occupation forces (see “G.I.’s in Iraqi City Are Stalked by Faceless Enemies at Night” from today’s New York Times).  The problems in both countries seem to center around the inability of a central government to control the population.  In Afghanistan the Kabul government governs Kabul and the rest of the country is essentially independent (my summer 2002 trip report advocates splitting the place up into regions where everyone has something in common).  In Iraq there are so many problems that, in Europe at least, people were openly saying that the average Iraqi was better off under Saddam’s government.


If you flip on European TV you find that the post-invasion Iraqis have joined the Palestinians as the officially designated “most miserable people on the planet” in the media and their plight is an ever-present top story.  The British are donating money and sending care packages to help out Iraqis who are without reliable clean water and electricity.  .


Iraqis complain on TV: their neighbors are breaking into water mains, thus wrecking the water system; their neighbors are looting; Iraqis with guns who don’t like certain other Iraqis are shooting them; Iraqis love Allah and want an Islamic state; Iraqis love Allah but in a slightly different way and want a slightly different kind of Islamic state, which will necessitate the death and/or suppression of anyone who doesn’t love Allah their way; Iraqis hate Americans and Jews and want U.S. troops out of Iraq and the Jews out of Israel; etc., etc.


The executive summary seems to be the following: (1) Iraqis hate each other, they have lots of guns, and aren’t afraid to use them; (2) the U.S. and its allies deposed Saddam because he was unsuccessful in creating a quiet Swiss or Belgian-style bourgeois democracy; (3) the U.S. and its allies so far have failed to make any headway in getting Iraqis to adopt a Western bourgeois lifestyle and political outlook; (4) Saddam was able to restrict looting and killing to a handful of friends and family; (5) under U.S. occupation every Iraqi is free to get in touch with his Inner Looter and Inner Murderer.


By the standards of wealthy Western countries Saddam’s regime was harsh.  They tortured and/or killed political opponents.  They controlled the press, the mosques, and the schools.  If a town were restive they might kill its entire population or at least many hundreds of people from that town.  This would seem like gratuitous cruelty if done by the governments of Vermont, Dijon, or Bavaria.  But in the Arab world more or less every government employs the same tactics as Saddam’s Iraq.


In fairness to the defeated dare we ask whether Saddam’s regime wasn’t employing the minimum amount of violence necessary to maintain public order in Iraq?  It seems quite possible that Saddam did not enjoy terrorizing his subjects but did it because he understood the divisions within his arbitrarily drawn borders and thought keeping his subjects in fear was necessary.


It really seems to be tough to coerce people into doing following something other than their inclinations.  Death from AIDS is pretty terrifying and yet people still have sex.  Despite massive fines, automated ticket-issuing cameras, and license revocations, I didn’t see anyone in Britain obeying the 70 mph speed limit on the Motorway (I was so happy to get my Ford Mondeo out of Wales, whose principal highways bear an uncanny resemblance to a North Carolina plastic surgeon’s driveway (narrow and lined with stone walls), that I zipped along at 77 mph and was passed every minute by someone doing 90 in the fast lane).  If you’re caught with a small amount of drugs the U.S. government can take your house and your car, and put you in jail for the rest of your life, yet people still sell, buy, and use drugs (just ask George W. Bush, former coke-head).


We haven’t figured out what level of governmental coercion will result in an Iraqi society that is both orderly and submissive to a U.S. occupation or whatever American-friendly government follows. Saddam may yet go down in history as the kindest and gentlest 21st century leader of a unified and stable Iraq.


[Given the depths of poverty and lack of industry in Wales and the Northern UK it seemed odd at first that these folks would want to help out their defeated enemies before assisting unfortunates closer to home.  Or that they wouldn’t instead prefer to help the hundreds of millions of Indians who have never in their lives had clean water or electricity.  Berlin, The Downfall 1945 describes a similar phenomenon: “[German civilians] queued at Red Army field kitchens, which began to feed them on Berzarin’s orders.  The fact that there was a famine in Soviet Central Asia at that time, with families reduced to cannibalism, did not influence the new policy of attempting to win over the German people.”]

Full post, including comments

Flying in Israel

by philg

Spending a few days on Martha’s Vineyard listening to birds chirp, waves break, golfers golf, and … airplanes flying overhead at all altitudes and in all directions.  Quite a contrast from general aviation in Israel, where I did two flights last week in Cessnas.  [Snapshots at http://www.photo.net/philg/digiphotos/20030606-g3-israel/.]


Every American pilot ought to fly in Israel, if only to see just how
bad it is likely to get as the U.S. suffers from more terrorist
attacks.  Getting into a general aviation airport is very difficult.
You have to explain who you are and why you need to fly.  In 2000 and
1992 Israeli security officials lost interest as soon as they figured
out that I was a native-born U.S. citizen.  Attacks from Muslims born
in European countries, however, have turned the Israelis into
xenophobes.  If my host/pilot hadn’t been friends with the chief of security
for all airports in Israel, I wouldn’t have gotten into the parking
lot much less an airplane.


Once you’re seated in the plane the security remains just as tight.
You make a radio call to request permission to start up the engine.
You make a radio call to activate your previously filed flight plan.  Unless you’re coming in on an instrument flight plan from a foreign country, everything happens in Hebrew.  It is basically illegal for anyone without an Israeli license to operate an airplane, or even touch the flight controls without an instructor on board, under VFR within Israel.  This is partly due to the fact that the controllers aren’t accustomed to working in English but perhaps more due to the complexities of navigation.


Once in the air the entire airspace of Israel is forbidden except for
a handful of designated VFR routes and altitudes, which are not in a
standard GPS’s database.  Even though the controllers have very good
radar coverage of the entire country you make regular position
reports.  If you deviate more than one mile horizontally from any of
these routes the controllers will chastise you; keep in mind that the
State of Israel is only about 10 miles wide in the middle–if you get
off course you will be straying over the West Bank and the government
is afraid that Arabs will shoot at you.  In the good old days you
could fly down the valley of the River Jordan, land at the Jerusalem
airport, fly over Jerusalem, etc.  In 2003 all of that is closed off.
With virtually nowhere to go it will presumably be time to land soon.
If an airport closes at 5:00 pm, it is forbidden to land after that
time.  There is nothing like the pilot-controlled runway lighting that
is standard in the U.S.


Safety ought to be better in Israel than in the U.S.  The weather is
almost always clear.  In the U.S. you may depart from New Jersey in a
small airplane and arrive several hours later in Maine to completely
weather that is completely different from what it was in NJ, from what
it was in Maine when you took off and got a weather briefing, and from
what was forecast.  By contrast, the whole country of Israel is no
larger than New Jersey and the weather tends to be very similar across
the whole landscape.  In any case you take off and land at the same
airport most of the time, usually flying for less than one hour.


Mid-air collisions only constitute a few percent of the accidents in
the U.S.  Nonetheless they seem even less likely in Israel because all
airplanes are on designated routes at designated altitudes in radio
contact with and under the control of air traffic controllers.


In the U.S. an airplane operated privately has to be inspected and
recertified airworthy by a merchanic every year.  An airplane operated
commercially, either by an airline or a flight school, needs a
mechanic’s inspection every 100 hours.  In Israel an airplane has to
be inspected and certified airworthy every morning.  A mechanic walks
out onto the flight line and signs off all the machines that are going
to fly that day.


One thing that is very odd about Israeli pilots is that they are not
trained to lean (adjust the fuel-air mixture to compensate for air that is thinner due to heat or high altitude; your car does this automatically but little airplanes generally run on 1930s technology). 


They taxi full rich.  They take off full rich, even
when it is 40 degrees C (over 100 F) outside.  They cruise full rich,
unless they are over 3000′ MSL.  They really ought to all have died
from either fuel exhaustion or failure to climb when fully loaded on
very hot days.  The performance and range figures in a Pilot’s
Operating Handbook (“P.O.H.”, the owner’s manual that comes with the
airplane) are calculated by American pilots using American procedures,
which include leaning very nearly to peak exhaust gas temperatures.
Most Israeli airplanes are ancient Cessnas that don’t have fuel flow
gauges but it seems safe to estimate that Israelis are using 50
percent more fuel than would be predicted by the P.O.H.  Probably what
saves them is that the distances are so tiny; you could fly almost
anywhere in Israel from Tel Aviv using only what an American pilot
would keep as a fuel reserve.  For climb-out at a high density
altitude Americans who fly in the West learn to find a peak power
mixture setting on the ground and then richen just a bit for cooling.
Perhaps what keeps Israelis alive is the near sea level elevations of
all the airports here and the fact that the terrain isn’t very
dramatic, i.e., you never have to climb very steeply to clear a hill.


Oh yes, and the hourly rates for all of this are about double that of what it costs in the U.S.

Full post, including comments

Hitler speaks from beyond the grave

by philg

Today’s New York Times notes that a new translation of Hitler’s sequel to Mein Kampf is available (story).  The West’s conflict with the Arab nations has made Nazi-era writings and history much more relevant.  For example, one reads in the newspaper that opinion polls are showing that many Arabs regard George W. Bush as the world’s leading war criminal.  A parallel can be found in Berlin, The Downfall 1945 (Antony Beevor).  On April 14, 1945, Adolf Hitler commented on the death of Roosevelt: “At the moment when Fate has removed the greatest war criminal of all time from this earth, the turn of events in this war will be decisive.”


Hitler’s spirit is alive in 2003 in the USA as well.  Pick up some marketing literature from Mercedes for example.  Hitler named his underground command bunkers at Zossen (20 km south of Berlin) “Maybach I” and “Maybach II”.  The latest luxury car from Mercedes is called the “Maybach” (see http://www.maybachusa.com/).  It costs around $360,000 (not a problem for former American Airlines CEO Don Carty; the board of directors finally had to fire him for nearly running the company into bankruptcy and for looting the last bits of cash for himself and a few other top execs but he can console himself with a $13.5 million “supplemental pension”).  Hitler probably would have loved this car.  Although the Fuhrer is best known for his work with Porsche to bring the Volkswagen Beetle to the German people, for himself he preferred the most luxurious Mercedes cars of the day.

Full post, including comments