A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
Bernie Sanders supporters are apparently the most hostile Internet users. This map of average hostility level of an Internet comment (WIRED) shows that comments from Vermonters are, on average, the most hostile (rage travels by Prius?), while comments from the adjacent Live Free or Die citizens of New Hampshire are the least hostile.
Maybe New Hampshire needs to build a border wall to keep out angry Vermonters?
Full post, including commentsThe only thing Californians love more than expressing hatred for Donald Trump is fighting with each other. Right now opposing groups are battling it out in court over the City of Santa Monica’s plan to trash their federally-funded airport by shortening the runway from 5,000 to 3,500 feet (AOPA covered a brief victory for the pro-transportation folks, subsequently reversed).
Maybe it is time to ask cui bono? The standard business jet needs about 5,000′ of runway for operation with airline safety margins (e.g., land within 60 percent of the available runway). There are airports with runways this long pretty much all over the U.S.
The Swiss elves at Pilatus are about to certify their PC-24, an unusual jet whose textbook landing at max weight consumes 2,525′ of runway. So with Harvey Weinstein and a couple of young women in the back, the newly chopped 3,500′ runway would be comfortable for non-heroic pilots and likely legal for charter operations.
Who says that California politics don’t create jobs? Certainly there will be plenty of happy workers in Switzerland!
Full post, including commentsNot all of the crime in America in the U.S. happens in hotel rooms between old men and young women… From a WIRED article on stealing purified silicon:
Wasi Ismail Syed had endured a draining day of travel by the time he picked up his rental van at the Pensacola, Florida, airport. He’d left his West Coast home that morning in February 2009, then weathered a lengthy layover in Houston. But rather than pining for a comfy hotel bed, Syed was excited to conduct a bit of late-night business: He was meeting two strangers who called themselves Butch Cassidy and William Smith outside a nearby Walmart.
Cassidy and Smith unloaded the 5-gallon painter’s buckets that filled their truck. Syed pried open one of the buckets’ lids and peered inside. He was pleased by what he saw: a pile of rock-like chunks of a silvery metallic substance. These were fragments of polycrystalline silicon, a highly purified form of silicon that is the bedrock for semiconductor devices and solar cells. … the average price … $64 a pound.
on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama … Mitsubishi Polycrystalline Silicon America Corporation … The plant’s feedstock is metallurgical-grade silicon, which can be extracted from pulverized chunks of quartzite. In this raw form, silicon exhibits the properties that make the element so essential to the tech industry: It can both conduct and resist electricity—hence the term semiconductor—even at high temperatures. But metallurgical-grade silicon is far too tainted with flecks of iron, aluminum, and calcium to be usable in high tech products that are expected to perform flawlessly for years on end. The material must thus be chemically refined, a process that begins by mixing it with hydrogen chloride at more than 570 degrees Fahrenheit.
After having its impurities removed through multiple rounds of distillation, the resulting hazardous compound, called trichlorosilane, is pumped into a cylindrical furnace containing 7-foot-tall silicon rods shaped like tuning forks. Hydrogen is then added and the temperature is turned up to more than 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit. This causes hyper-pure crystals of silicon to leech out of the trichlorosilane and glom onto the rods. After several days the rods are thick with grayish polysilicon, which is then cut into foot-long cylinders, cleansed with acids until glittery, and packaged in thermally sealed bags for shipment.
When the vast majority of manufacturers reach the end of this process, their polysilicon is as much as 99.999999 percent pure, or “8n” in industry parlance. This means that for every 100 million silicon atoms, there is but a single atom’s worth of impurity. … What the Mitsubishi plant in Alabama produces, by contrast, is 11n polysilicon, marred by just one impure atom per every 100 billion silicon atoms. … Mitsubishi’s facility on the Theodore Industrial Canal is one of fewer than a dozen plants worldwide that produce 11n polysilicon.
The Walmart parking-lot deal went smoothly, and Syed’s buyer was impressed by the quality of the merchandise. So Syed kept doing business with “Cassidy” and “Smith”: He bought another 441 pounds of polysilicon two weeks after the initial purchase, then 1,323 pounds more in July 2009, then 2.2 tons that November, shortly after he’d moved his family and company to McKinney, Texas. As the scale of the transactions grew, Syed enlisted a freight company to pick up the polysilicon in Alabama and truck it across state lines to his customers; then he, his assistant, or his brother-in-law, Shahab Mir, would travel to Mobile, Pensacola, or Shreveport, Louisiana, to hand over the cash.
More: read WIRED
Full post, including commentsBecause there isn’t enough written about Harvey Weinstein…
“What decent men can do in response to #MeToo” (CNN) is a good example of one point of view from Plato’s Republic (see Harvey Weinstein gives Americans a teachable moment regarding Plato and the Myth of Gyges?) and, for those who think that Glaucon was right, a good example of the “fundamental attribution error.”
The author describes “male friends — good, decent men.” Plainly most men are better behaved than what has been reported about Hollywood’s most-hated person. But have her “good, decent men” been tested or tempted? What if they had the power and fame that Harvey Weinstein had? Due to their inherently superior character would they have behaved better?
[The article is also good because it is refreshing to see a young person with the courage to consider herself morally superior to old people: “Teach your elders to do better.”]
[Update: buried in the comments below is a simpler formulation of the above, from the 19th century “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.” (Lord Acton)]
Related:
My moderately deplorable friends have been sending me private messages with their candidates for American Victim of the Week. Here are a couple of the most plausible…
“George H.W. Bush Apologizes After Actress Says He Sexually Assaulted Her” (Huffington Post) concerns Heather Lind, 31 years old at the time (2014) she was assaulted by a wheelchair-bound 90-year-old accompanied by his 89-year-old wife.
Jenn Sterger, whose Wikipedia page says “Sterger has posed in Maxim and Playboy magazines … Sterger was featured on the E!: Entertainment Television show Byte Me: 20 Hottest Women of the Web … In 2009, Sterger had her breast implants removed, stating that they had served their purpose for her career, and that she was tired of being stereotyped,” is the second candidate. Fox News says “The former Playboy model wrote a scathing Twitter post lampooning the sports network and claiming she was subject to inappropriate behavior by ESPN employees.” It seems that she was imprisoned in a strip club (“had to watch”) and unable either to (1) turn around in the parking lot, or (2) walk out of the building once she realized that she had entered a den of sin. (Like the married man ratted out by Find Friends on his iPhone who said that he thought that “Pure Platinum” was a club for precious metal futures traders and then wandered around for 3 hours trying to get insight into why platinum was now cheaper than gold.)
Readers: Who are your candidates for the American Victim of the Week?
Full post, including comments“America’s affordable-housing stock dropped by 60 percent from 2010 to 2016” (Washington Post) is kind of interesting on its face:
The number of apartments deemed affordable for very low-income families across the United States fell by more than 60 percent between 2010 and 2016, according to a new report by Freddie Mac.
At first financing, 11 percent of nearly 100,000 rental units nationwide were deemed affordable for very low-income households. By the second financing, when the units were refinanced or sold, rents had increased so much that just 4 percent of the same units were categorized as affordable.
… affordable housing without a government subsidy is becoming extinct.
The study defined “very low income” as households making less than 50 percent of the area median income, and “affordable” rent as costing less than 30 percent of household income.
During the period in which the U.S. was a market economy this never happened, did it? People who were poor found crummy places to live. If poor Americans couldn’t could afford the rent on a crummy place then the landlord would have to reduce the rent.
Can we blame income inequality? Supposedly it was higher 100 years ago and poor people were able to afford crummy houses back then.
Can we blame rich people stealing all of society’s wealth? Again, wealth inequality was very high 100 years ago. In any case, a rich person may cause us to become sick with envy but he or she doesn’t usually occupy 50 apartments at a time. So it doesn’t make sense to blame rich people for reducing the housing supply, does it?
How about population growth? We’re stuffed with 325 million people now, with planeloads of immigrants arriving every day, and immigrants choosing to have lots of children once they’re settled here. (“Foreign-born Americans and their descendants have been the main driver of U.S. population growth, as well as of national racial and ethnic change, since passage of the 1965 law that rewrote national immigration policy. They also will be the central force in U.S. population growth and change over the next 50 years.” (Pew)) But we still have land on which we can build apartment buildings and, in a lot of cities, we can also build higher.
Finally there is government, which promises to pay for housing if a low-income resident of the U.S. can’t afford it (“means-tested public housing”). That’s a change compared to 100 years ago. Landlords can insist on rents higher than poor people can pay because they know that the government will pay. (“As a former affordable housing underwriter, I’d say that affordable housing is 1% altruism, 99% profit..” (Wall Street Oasis))
I’m wondering if the most likely answer is a change in the definition of “housing.” Americans live in roughly twice as many square feet per person compared to the 1950s. So the standard low-income unit today might be larger than the standard high-income unit circa 1950.
Could it be selective click-bait journalism? They picked 2010 as the base year because the economy was still sluggish after the Collapse of 2008 and therefore cheap housing was unusually cheap? 2016 is therefore less affordable than 2010, but not that different in affordability compared to 20 or 30 years ago?
Could it be that low-income Americans circa 1900 could afford housing, but it was so cramped that it didn’t meet our modern definition of “housing”?
What about blaming/crediting Malthus? On a planet populated by nearly 8 billion people, not everyone can expect to have his or her own room? (world population was roughly 1.6 billion in 1900) Evidence for a housing “shortage” being inherent given current population levels sharing only a single Earth is that newspapers in England are running the same stories, e.g., “Housing crisis threatens a million families with eviction by 2020” (Guardian): “Shelter says that in 83% of areas of England, people in the private rented sector now face a substantial monthly shortfall between the housing benefit they receive and the cheapest rents, and that this will rise as austerity bites and the lack of properties tilts the balance more in favour of landlords.” The situation seems to be similar throughout Europe, unless someone wants to live in a barn on a farm that is 50 miles from the nearest job: “Wild Rent Hikes Are Leaving Europe’s Cities Totally Unaffordable” (Vice)
Full post, including commentsThe monster trade show for business jets, “NBAA” to most people (officially “NBAA-BACE”; NBAA is the name of the organization), recently concluded in Las Vegas. I was there, trick-or-treating the 1,100 exhibitor booths for items likely to delight the kids. (my photos)
Drones keep getting better while human pilots keep making mistakes. The only company that seems to be trying to bridge these two worlds of smart computers and dumb humans is the French company Dassault, which is trying to build an “autonomous co-pilot” (Flight Global). The most serious drone effort at the show was Insitu, a Boeing subsidiary. For about $1 million a border patrol post could get the ground equipment and three drones with basic cameras.
The F.A.A. was there at the show and seemed fully engaged in fighting the last war (e.g., avionics certification) rather than addressing the principal hazard: drone v. conventional aircraft collisions (a recent one in Canada; a turboprop rather than a turbojet and hence less likely to suffer an engine failure after a collision).
Although vendors of new aircraft were there, most of the show is about maintaining and operating existing planes. Honeywell’s forecast says that “stiff competition from the used-jet market, will restrain new aircraft deliveries.” What the vendors of new aircraft have going for them is the continuing decline in the skill level of the Americans willing to turn wrenches. Everyone involved in maintenance whom we talked to said that Americans coming to classes get less intelligent and less diligent every year. In theory a 20- or even 40-year-old plane can do every mission that a typical new airplane can, but in practice there are fewer and fewer shops with the capacity to keep an old plane airworthy. “In the 1970s if you needed an aircraft to operate reliably in Africa or Latin America you would have to send a new one,” said one expert, “because they didn’t have the supply chain and technical capabilities to ensure a high dispatch rate on an old plane. The U.S. is the new Africa.”
As in 2015 (my report), in-flight Internet connectivity was a big story. ViaSat, which enables the magic of JetBlue’s FlyFi, was there showing off their improved coverage. Due to more satellites being launched, it should be possible to get JetBlue-style connectivity all the way across the North Atlantic right now and, within a few years, nearly worldwide (you’ll need Iridium for the poles, though). Land-based systems aren’t necessarily finished, however. SmartSky is a startup building its own system of 4G LTE towers across North America ($250 million in funding). Planes above 10,000′ should be able to get high-speed data service for cheaper rates than offered by the satellite operators, though if you’ve been complaining about Verizon’s rates you might not like SmartSky’s “basic” subscription at $2,500 per month for 5 GB data. Note that Gogo already uses some ground-based towers. New Zealand-based Tracplus was there at the opposite end of the rate spectrum. For less than $100 per month they will send position reports and arbitrary text messages out of an aircraft via the cell network or, if unavailable, via Iridium.
As in 2015, the show was festooned with banners quoting famous people opposed to privatization of the U.S. Air Traffic Control system. Ownership of the right to authorize flight through clouds and flight above 18,000′ is hugely valuable. There is no way to operate a jet-powered aircraft efficiently without an ATC clearance to climb above 18,000′. Any organization that can get hold of this right should be able to exclude competition, extract trillions of dollars in profits over the years, etc. The labor union representing air traffic controllers and the airlines are passionate about capturing control over this currently-public resource and, as with most crony capitalist situations, it seems inevitable that they will get it one day. The issue is complex and the opposition is diffuse.
[That this grab for privatization won’t go away calls into question the assumption that rich people control American politics. The truly rich don’t work as air traffic controllers and don’t fly on airlines. Why would they want the ATC union and airlines setting prices for them to operate their Gulfstream G450s?]
Government regulation continues to help the big get bigger. A charter operator said that he couldn’t imagine being competitive with fewer than 30 jets over which to spread the cost of complying with the latest regulations and data submission requirements. One new task is submitting literally thousands of data points regarding usage every month. This pins down a human at a web browser for days. Complying with regulations around supplying fuel is also becoming more challenging, thus leading to consolidation in the FBO market. Signature, a division of BBA Aviation plc, for example, has more than 200 locations. (see my photos for a selfie with the president and COO of this multi-billion dollar enterprise)
Regulation and government involvement keeps competition to a minimum. The same charter operator says that he thinks his will be the last company in his region to be approved for a certificate. U.S. airports are typically owned by cities or counties. Thus the existing FBOs can and do invest in lobbying politicians in order to prevent new FBOs from being established (we heard a story of more than $2 million spent on lobbying in order to obstruct a competitor, which had been approved by the airport management).
Stratos flew its prototype single-engine jet to KLAS and then taxied it down the street into the convention center. This design uses one of the engines from an Embraer Phenom 300 to power a plane up to FL410 and a 400-knot cruise speed. The design team is small and candid. They admit that controlling interior noise is a big challenge, though made somewhat easier by having all of the pieces that make noise in a separate space frame attached at the back of the cabin. If they get $200 million in financing (who wants to write the first check?), they hope to achieve FAA certification within 3-4 years.
Unlike in 2015, ICON was not there. I talked to a guy who went through ICON’s amphibious seaplane training in California and he spoke highly of the program and also the aircraft. Right now the company’s site says that they have delivered 19 out of 1800 aircraft ordered and that they started in July 2015. At this rate it will take them only a little over 200 years to work through the order book!
Aerion had a beautiful booth and an inspiring model of a supersonic vehicle for global douchebags who need to make it from TED to Davos and back to Aspen. Back in 2015 they were talking about a first flight in 2019 and certification in 2021. Now the plane will fly in 2023 and deliveries will happen in 2025. Progress since the last show: a partnership with GE to try to adapt and existing GE turbojet engine for supersonic flight. Aerion’s chairman is Robert Bass and the company doesn’t seem to be looking for financing.
XTIAircraft, by contrast, had big video screens soliciting investors. They had brought a mock-up of their TriFan 600 concept and were promising the world: three ducted fans; single-pilot IFR, advanced avionics, carbon fiber and epoxy structure, sliding door conceals third fan for forward flight, hybrid electric propulsion. There is a Cirrus-style airframe parachute. This $6.5 million VTOL machine will take six people “as high above weather, and as far as traditional business jets” (then the brochure says 660 statute mile range and 29,000′ ceiling, so this would be like a regular business jet after an engine failure and a fuel leak?). The chief engineer is George Bye, who is also promising electric airplanes with 4X the range that anyone else can deliver (while using the same Samsung batteries!). Power comes from a Honeywell HTS900 helicopter turboshaft engine, an evolution of a 1960 Lycoming design. Unlike a helicopter, in which there is one driveshaft that can fail, the TriFan 600 will have three driveshafts that are potential failure points.
Mitsubishi was there to remind people what real commitment to customers looks like. The last MU-2 was built 31 years ago. Owners rave about Mitsubishi and, in surveys, their support is rated far above any other turbine aircraft manufacturer, including Gulfstream, et al. Mitsubishi’s latest retrofit improvement is stronger acrylic windows. Costs for precision manufacturing in Japan should be lower than in Europe or the U.S. Why can’t Mitsubishi come back into the G.A. market?
Jetpedic was there with a comfortable foam mattress system ($6000+ and about 50 lbs.) to spread across two seats. For relaxing back on the ground, all of the major manufacturers of massage chairs were at the show. The folks from New Hampshire-based Infinity told me that everything is made in China now, even if the brand name is Japanese.
For those who missed high school chemistry, Rhode Island-based Tanury was running a six-bath electroplating demonstration at the show. If you’ve ever wanted to live a gold-plated lifestyle, this was inspiring.
To a first approximation, the farther that people in this industry get from actually flying or producing airframes, the more money they make and the less risk that they take. Walking the trade show floor is an education in just how many enterprises are involved every time an aircraft departs. There are companies making money planning flights, training crew, finding crew, pumping fuel, tracking maintenance, making components that wear out, overhauling parts, etc.
Speaking of money, at the 2015 show an attendee commented “Wherever jets are parked there will be [family court plaintiffs].” My badge sparked some conversations about Real World Divorce, and it turned out that attendees’ experiences tracked the prevailing family law in their respective jurisdictions. An attendee who had money and lived in a jurisdiction where divorce and/or collecting child support was lucrative was unlikely to be married to a first spouse. Europeans (except the British), Texans, and Nevadans tended to be married; Californians with money could not stay married, indicating a full transition to serial polygamy for high-income men. As in 2015, the harshest attitudes were from new (female) partners who referred to plaintiff women with terms such as “gold digger,” “greedy cunt,” “lazy bitch” (for women whose alimony and/or child support profits enabled them to retire from the workforce and/or work only part-time), etc. Do they say this in front of the stepchildren? “There is one rule in our house for the steps. They are not to mention their whore of a mother for any reason or at any time. That keeps conversations civil.”
Regarding the alternative of earning money via a W-2 job… there was a lot of talk about the challenge of recruiting and retaining qualified personnel. The airlines are ferocious competitors for pilots and mechanics. The market is global so that U.S. general aviation companies now face competition from foreign airlines as well, i.e., when airlines in China, India, and the Middle East expand the result is a tougher market for U.S. employers.
Aviation regulation tends to be nonpartisan. However, show attendees were generally happy to see Donald Trump in the White House. “It is almost impossible to operate a medium-sized business in the U.S.,” said one attendee. “I’m not sure Trump will make this easier, but Hillary was trying to make it a lot worse.”
Bottom line: Traditional aviation is progressing, but so slowly that if progress in the drone world continues at the current rate there will be massive unemployment and parked legacy aircraft.
Related:
My Facebook friends are outraged that Donald Trump purportedly stumbled over the names of a U.S. soldier killed in our war against an Islamic group in Niger (example: BBC). Let’s consider the challenge presented to our 71-year-old president/dictator (depending on one’s Facebook friend set). The soldier’s first name was “La David” and his widow’s name is “Myeshia”.
Even if somehow a person of Donald Trump’s age and experience could have been selected as Prime Minister under a parliamentary system, this couldn’t have happened in Germany. From the Wikipedia page on naming laws:
Names have to be approved by the local registration office, called Standesamt, which generally consults a list of first names and foreign embassies for foreign names. The name has to indicate gender [!], it cannot be a last name or a product, and it cannot negatively affect the child. If the name submitted is denied, it can be appealed; otherwise a new name has to be submitted. A fee is charged for each submission.
I learned about this in 1993 on a trip to New Zealand. The hippies running the tour company gave as one reason for emigrating that they couldn’t name their (male) child the German word for “Ruby.”
[Denmark has a similar law:
Under the Law on Personal Names, first names are picked from a list of approved names (18,000 female names and 15,000 male names as of Jan 1st 2016). One can also apply to Ankestyrelsen for approval of new names, e.g. common first names from other countries. Names must indicate gender [!], cannot have surname character, and must follow Danish orthography (e.g. Cammmilla with three m’s is not allowed).
]
To avoid future embarrassment and Facebook firestorms, what if Donald Trump were to ask Congress to adopt a German-style naming law? On the one hand, this could be considered family law, in which case the American tradition is for it to be different in every state. On the other hand, Congress can say that names are important in interstate commerce and thereby avoid Constitutional challenges.
[Separately, I have learned that one way to further outrage already-outraged Facebook users is to respond to their demands that Trump apologize for this phone call with “If the president of the U.S. is going to be giving apologies, why not ask him to begin by apologizing for starting the Iraq War, fighting in Vietnam, and opposing the Soviet efforts to govern Afghanistan?”]
Full post, including commentsFor Pilatus PC-12 operators, the exciting news at NBAA was mostly at the Garmin booth. Usually these folks are tight-lipped about certification plans for specific aircraft, but apparently the marketing folks failed to fully brief the booth guys (nearly all appeared to identify as men). They said that they expected PC-12 certification for the new autopilot and displays within 18 months. Thus for $200,000 an older PC-12 could shed its $17,000-per-year Bendix/King (Honeywell) warranty and cathode ray tube displays in favor of a thoroughly modern panel. Bendix/King simply had no response to this competition. There are roughly 700 PC-12s out there stuffed with Bendix/King (Honeywell) avionics designs from the late 1980s/early 1990s. Boxes critical to flight safety are failing multiple times per year in an airplane that can hold 11 people. Honeywell folks at the show, asked if they were going to provide owners of their product with an upgrade path to something modern, simply said “we’re thinking about it.”
If the avionics in a legacy PC-12 are getting tougher to maintain every year, the rest of the airframe may be getting easier. Pilatus is working on a maintenance interval extension (currently at 150 hours). The company also redesigned the wing de-ice timer to use solid-state relays and also not to start inflating the rubber boots for 20 seconds. This gives the pilot time to check the outside temperature and, if below -40C, turn the boots back off (they’ll crack if operated in super cold high altitude air, a $30,000+ mistake). This being the aviation industry, nobody at the operator’s meeting raised his or her hand to ask “Why isn’t a $5 million airplane smart enough to display a ‘too cold for boots’ warning and then inhibit them unless the pilot confirms with an additional switch input that it is an emergency where the boots might help?”
In my Pilatus News from the 2015 NBAA I noted that GE and Cessna were working on a PC-12 competitor. The Cessna Denali seems to be coming along, but hasn’t flown. So far Pratt hasn’t made any commitments to matching the technology in the new GE turboprop engine, including the FADEC. Pilatus is concentrating on getting its PC-24 jet out the door. So the Cessna Denali could be a home run in this market if it ends up substantially outperforming the existing PC-12 (not significantly improved since 2005 when the PC-12/47 model was introduced (the Honeywell panel introduced for the NG model in 2008 is not universally regarded as an “improvement”; the Cessna will have the Garmin G3000 that everyone wants)).
The Pilatus operator’s meeting was dominated by “government regulation giveth and government regulation taketh away.” The European bureaucrats, after about 20 years, finally approved all-weather charter operations in single-engine turboprops such as the PC-12 (now that 1,500 PC-12s have been built and some have accumulated more than 30,000 flight hours!). On the other hand, after more than 20 years of peace, the U.S. FAA bureaucrats decided to wage war on charter operations in the PC-12, citing FAR 135.163:
No person may operate an aircraft under IFR, carrying passengers, unless it has
(f) For a single-engine aircraft:
(1) Two independent electrical power generating sources each of which is able to supply all probable combinations of continuous inflight electrical loads for required instruments and equipment; or
(2) In addition to the primary electrical power generating source, a standby battery or an alternate source of electric power that is capable of supplying 150% of the electrical loads of all required instruments and equipment necessary for safe emergency operation of the aircraft for at least one hour;
The older PC-12s have a “GEN2” belt-driven alternator (115 amps at 28 volts) that is certainly adequate for getting back on the ground in the event that the main GEN1 (300 amps) fails. They also have a main battery and an emergency battery system for the essential instruments. Somehow various local offices decided that the unchanged airplane did not comply with the unchanged regulation. Three operators were shut down while planes in other regions were still running. After a year of paperwork submissions to various FAA offices, Pilatus and the General Aviation Manufacturers Association went as supplicants to the FAA headquarters and somehow got this sorted out.
The Harvey Weinstein story had broken a week before NBAA and Bill Cosby is known as a Pilatus PC-12 owner (N712BC gets him and his family in and out of the 3200′ runway at Turners Falls). The big fight in California over the Santa Monica airport also had been in the news. Finally there were celebrations of general aviation’s contributions to disaster relief, including bizjets going in and out of hurricane-struck Puerto Rico. These items were put together: “Bill Cosby could send his PC-12 into Santa Monica to rescue all of the women who said ‘no’ to Harvey Weinstein,” which generated a response “There would probably be a couple of seats empty.” (the executive configuration PC-12 holds 6-8 passengers in the back)
Pilatus is a private company, but Switzerland apparently requires some public-company-style disclosures of big private companies (this makes sense under Econ 101; markets function with textbook efficiency only when participants have a lot of information). We learned that the company has revenues of about 900 million Swiss francs (worth slightly more than one USD) and profits before R&D and interest of about 200 million francs (down closer to 100 million after R&D expenses, presumably mostly associated with the PC-24 jet). The company was profitable even through the ugly 2008-2010 years.
The PC-24 jet remains on track for certification later this year and delivery of the first plane (on December 31 at 11:58 pm?) to New Hampshire-based PlaneSense, the world’s most experienced Pilatus PC-12 operator. It will cost about $10 million for this eight-passenger plane (10 pax in airline config, plus 2 pilots in front), but the company has taken 83 orders and won’t accept more until at least some are out in the wild.
Full post, including commentsNearly every chapter of Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans seems to provide good arguments for simply eliminating the U.S. Navy and redirecting nearly $400 billion per year (Wikipedia) into something other than World War I-style surface ships.
The author explains that the German U-boat innovations would likely have been sufficient to win the World War II Atlantic battle but for the Allies cracking German codes (i.e., we beat them due to an achievement that would no longer be feasible). He also notes that
There was a final bloody spurt of combat in the deep southern reaches of the Atlantic Ocean as the twentieth century moved to a close: the Falklands War. In the spring of 1982, over the course of ten weeks, Great Britain and Argentina fought a short, sharp war that cost a thousand lives, sank sixteen ships, and saw more than a hundred aircraft destroyed. … The war has been studied by naval strategists and historians and provides a good example of the vulnerability of surface ships to air attack in the era of cruise missiles.
Isn’t the threat from the air far worse today than it was in 1982? Enemy drone #1 can open the door to the bridge. Enemy drone #2 can come through the doorway and kill everyone standing on the bridge. Enemy drone #3 can come through the doorway and start driving the ship onto some rocks. Now a $5 billion ship has been destroyed by three $10,000 drones?
Assuming that we want to keep spending as much on our military as we do currently, wouldn’t we be more secure after spending $400 billion per year on drones than on ships?
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