Category: Travel Stories

Mostly these are written for friends and family.

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.

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Weekend in Gettysburg

by philg

Richard and I flew down to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania over the weekend to visit his brother, a professor at Gettysburg College.


On the way down we stopped at the Kingston-Ulster airport and were picked up by Richard’s friend Annie, a flying kinetic whirl of activity whose mass could only be characterized by a probability distribution.  We drove a few miles to Bard College’s new auditorium, designed by Frank Gehry.  From the air this had seemed like a misshapen metal-clad lump.  From the ground it still looked misshapen but not ugly.  It cost $60 million to build.  Running a not-for-profit college would seem to be a very good way to accumulate cash.  Even after spending $60 mil the school had enough money left over to pay lots of security guards.  A performance was in progress in the small theater and every door was locked and guarded.  Annie was not be deterred.  We walked around the back and walked in the stage door with the members of the Charles Mingus Orchestra, unchallenged past the security guard who was reading a book.  Lesson:  never hire a hippie college kid to work security.  The main theater did not impress but the backstage was amazingly huge and intricate.


While the local swells attended a play the students played Frisbee and sang folk music in front of the Student Center.  Posters advertised a show of “Palestinian Art; Four Decades of Response to Oppression” (with the world’s fastest-growing population (5% per year) and most of their money being siphoned off by kleptocratic rulers perhaps the Palestinians are now going to support themselves via indigenous arts and crafts).  We walked past the booths selling tie-dyed clothing and through the campus until we arrived at a mansion on the Hudson River, complete with formal garden.


After a late lunch in Rhinebeck we got back into the DA40, bound for Gettysburg.  We flew up a beautiful river valley that crammed together an enormous open-plan new prison, an enormous fortress-like old prison, a golf course, and a scattering of McMansions around the fairways.  We followed a ridge of uplifted hills, cut through by rivers and highways, then climbed to a more efficient altitude of 6500′.  We passed near Harrisburg and over the Three Mile Island nuclear power plants (two cooling towers dead; two blowing steam) before landing at the Gettysburg Airport.  This airport is right next to a mobile home park in which you could buy a nice trailer for $20,000 then rent a hangar for $200 per month.  All the convenience of an airpark without the expense!


The Gettysburg battlefield park is one of the best-preserved and most interesting among those in the U.S.  This was the pivotal battle of the War of Northern Aggression (know to the victors as the “American Civil War”).  The Southern armies under General Robert E. Lee had come to bring the fight into the North and were briefly in a position to reach the big cities of the Northeast.  After the South went home on July 4, 1863, the outcome was inevitable.  This was the first time that artillery, the rifle, and the digging of trenches came together to give the defense a huge advantage.  The Civil War was thus the first modern war in terms of tactics, in terms of press coverage (photographers were embedded with the troops), and in terms of the total mobilization of industrial civilian economies.  The offense did not gain the upper hand until Hitler’s air power, tank columns, and mechanized infantry conquered Europe in the 1930s and 40s (we’re still in the “offense wins” epoch of war, apparently, if the invasion of Iraq can be considered typical).


[To see what an improvement in political leadership can be achieved via professional speechwriters and Microsoft PowerPoint, check out the Gettysburg Address (original and improved).]


Being a professor at Gettysburg College seemed like a lot of fun.  First of all, even on a professor’s salary you can afford a large newish house on several acres of land, typically part of a recently subdivided farm (subdividing farms is to this decade what day trading was to the 1990s).  Now that you’ve got the big house you can start throwing parties for your colleagues.  Most of them will show up because there isn’t much else to do in Gettysburg.  Thus your life consists of going from one party to another, mixing with academics from every area of inquiry.


[Why doesn’t this happen at MIT?  First, the young fun people who work at MIT can’t afford to live anywhere near the school unless they want to cram themselves into a studio or 1-bedroom apartment, not suitable for parties.  Second there are all kinds of social and entertainment opportunities in a big city like Boston.  Third, there are too many professors in one’s own department to get to know and therefore one is unlikely to be coerced by circumstance into socializing with people from other fields (the EECS department at MIT has more than 150 faculty).]


Having soaked up the scenery and the smell of the apple blossoms it was time to depart this morning.  We were greeted by a dreary mist, clouds hanging on the hills, and a steady rain.  Flight Service said that the warm front was coming through sooner than expected but that the weather was clear to the northeast.  Richard and I departed under instrument flight rules (IFR).  This is a bit tricky at an airport with no control tower and no radio repeater for the air traffic controllers (ATC).  You need to take off and gain altitude before you can talk to ATC but it isn’t safe, prudent, or legal to climb into the clouds unless you’ve already talked to ATC.  We picked up our clearance with a cell phone call to Washington Center from the airplane as we sat on the ground in Gettysburg.  They cleared out the airspace north of Gettysburg for 10 minutes, giving us enough time to depart (if we’d had a problem taking off we would have called them back to cancel).


Despite a headwind, we were on the ground in Boston 2.75 hours later.  We had climbed up to 5500′ and never entered the clouds.

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