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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?”]

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For 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.

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Nearly 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?

Related:

• see the comments on Why our navy keeps running into commercial ships

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Could we right one of our foreign policy wrongs and give Hawaii back to the natives?

From Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans:

The advent of coal-powered ships in the 1860s changed how the United States interacted with its Pacific domain. Coal ships were faster and more reliable than their sail-powered counterparts, but coal is heavy and exhaustible. Ships could not carry an unlimited amount of coal without sinking into the briny deep. They needed dedicated coaling stations at regular intervals in order to maintain their impressive speed. Fortunately, the Pacific for all of its vastness was dotted with islands perfectly situated to serve as coaling stations. It was this impulse that drove the U.S. annexation of Hawaii in 1898, with the beautiful port of Pearl Harbor serving as the fulcrum for its Pacific presence.

If we grabbed it because it was needed for refueling, why not give it back now? A Chinese container ship doesn’t need to refuel when crossing the Pacific, does it? Certainly the big Airbus and Boeing planes that cross the Pacific need not stop in Hawaii.

Plainly our annexation of Hawaii was expedient at the time, but it is no longer necessary. Is there any way to claim that this annexation was somehow legitimate and should be continued?

Related:

• Hawaii and immigration (they’d have been better off without white people?)

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While on that cruise with mom I missed a big story about two of my favorite topics: aviation and corporate looting.

GE is one of the world’s leading manufacturers of business jet engines (product line). Recently the company decided that it shouldn’t operate business jets: “GE to shut down corporate jet fleet in cost-cutting move”

Related:

• Now I get to pay some of GE’;s bills
• GE spouses in Connecticut should file their divorce lawsuits now?
• Stocks for the long run: GE since 2001

 

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One of my favorite parts of Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans:

Any U.S. Navy sailor who has gone above the Arctic Circle is awarded a certificate as a Blue Nose sailor. But very few even of the limited number of Blue Nose sailors have done the most challenging maneuver of all: breaking through the icepack itself in a submarine and bursting to the surface at the North Pole.

Each U.S. Navy submarine that has performed this feat recognizes the significant danger imposed on the boat by the dangling ice keels, large tongues of ice hanging down from the ice pack itself. Avoiding these is crucial, as is understanding the precise thickness of the ice pack at the proposed point of surfacing.

The entire maneuver is controlled carefully by the submarine’s captain himself and uses a detailed checklist with two-man control over each step of the standard operating procedure or SOP. Sonar— a pinging of sound through the water that measures distance by listening to the reverberation back— is used to find a flat spot, and the delicate controls of the submarine are used to maneuver the boat just below the surface of the ice. Throughout most of the cold war, most of our boats had hardened sails (the towerlike structure on the top of the boat) for this operation, but even given the hardening, it remains imperative to lower all masts and antennae while situating the boat below just the right patch of “clean” and hopefully thin ice. To make a cheap pun, finding the thin ice feels like “walking on thin ice” above— you know that a wrong step could be disastrous.

Once the thinnest ice patch is located and the ship is positioned beneath it, air is then blown into the ballast tanks, creating the reserve buoyancy and the essential upward thrusting energy needed to break through the ice. Like most submerged operations, this one is quiet and nearly silent throughout most of the boat. But in the conning space— the underwater part of the submarine where all maneuvering is conducted while the boat is submerged— and of course in sonar control, the crunching sound of the ice on the hull is discernible— a low, grinding, pulsing sound until the final breaking of the ice layer.

Once the boat has broken through, the crew can ascend the tower and carefully open the clamshells on the sail of the submarine and check the full status of the hull of the boat as it hangs just through the ice on the surface. Sailors wearing special cold weather exposure suits are initially tethered to the boat as the hull above the ice is checked for damage. Eventually, the goal is to get every one of the hundred or so sailors over the side to walk on the ice, snap pictures, and safely avoid polar bears— which amble right up to the hull. There are many places in the

Separately, it seems that not everyone got the global warming memo. The author says that we need to build a lot more icebreakers (the Russians and Chinese are building them!) and we can do this for only $1 billion per ship. At the same time he says that “By 2040 there will be an open passage for essentially twelve months of the year, and another decade later there will no longer be ice over the North Pole.” Given that it takes the U.S. military 10 or 15 years to get a new ship designed and ready, won’t these icebreakers be mothballed just a few years after completion? Until the icebreakers are built, the retired admiral suggests that we cooperate with the Russians… (he didn’t get the memo from Hillary about what a bad idea this is?)

It is worth noting in this regard how fundamental the Arctic is to Russia. Fully 20 percent of Russia’s population lives within the Arctic Circle, as opposed to essentially zero Americans and really only a handful of Canadians. The Russians, by the way, fully self-identify as an Arctic nation in ways that certainly transcend the feelings of any other sovereign state with the possible exception of Canada. They have just launched the largest and most powerful nuclear icebreaker in the world, the Arktika— 567 feet long, 33,000 tons, 80,000 shaft horse power, and capable of breaking through up to ten feet of ice. Strangely, for a region that is essentially devoid of human settlement, the Arctic is today the fastest-growing region in the world— each of the Arctic nations is actively pushing for the opening of settlements, increasing military activity, expanding resource exploitations, and generally staking claims with humans in the High North.

More: read Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans.

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Hard Eight BBQ near DFW tomorrow (Saturday) for lunch? (Coppell location) Or meet at the State Fair in Dallas in the evening? Email if interested!

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Harvey Weinstein is the gift that keeps on giving for this blog. Reactions to his escapades are almost as rich a source of material as that provided by the Google heretic.

A few days ago, for example, I posted “Hollywood book idea: I went to this married guy’s hotel room and then…”

The cited article is by Léa Seydoux, an actress, who implies that 100 percent of the women ultimately cast by an unnamed director she “really liked and respected” had traded sex for career advancement: “He has slept with all of the actresses he filmed.”

Ms. Seydoux says that she herself was planning to attend a non-work encounter with Mr. Weinstein in the privacy of his “hotel room”:

This was never going to be about work. He had other intentions – I could see that very clearly. … He invited me to come to his hotel room for a drink. We went up together.

The Outraged-by-Harvey Club seems unhappy with a story that begins “I went to this married guy’s hotel room in order to do something other than work.”

Here’s a comment from Neal on my post:

George A: We’re using the phrase “hotel room” in this thread, but I don’t think the image it conjures for us plebeians corresponds to the kind of suite Harvey Weinstein actually inhabited. It seems unlikely someone like Harvey Weinstein would invite an unknown extra (male or female) to a one on one. Thus, the invitation is probably to a social event in the suite’s living or dining rooms. Of course, in the scenario you don’t know this for sure.

And one from a (female) Facebooker on a friend’s posting of the Léa Seydoux article (how I found out about it):

Could you also mansplain how you would deserve to be harassed if you went to a business meeting at a hotel suite? Maybe you could mansplain how all hotels which have suites for conducting business are doing it wrong? Waiting to hear this information from a man, because of course no women could possibly know anything.

Let’s ignore for the moment that Ms. Seydoux made it explicit that her meeting in the hotel room/suite was to be an extracurricular encounter.

I’m wondering if the Harvey brouhaha is going to be liberating for people married to those who defend the shrinking female violets of Hollywood. Consider the person who is married to someone who explains the interactions between Harvey and the aspiring starlets in the above manner. He or she can fly out to a work conference, call up the spouse and say “Sweetheart, there was no good place to meet in the lobby or a breakout room so I am going up to hang out alone with an [opposite sex] executive from another company in [his/her] hotel room for a few hours. Hope you’re enjoying watching Planes with the kids for the 75th time.”

To cement Harvey Weinstein’s place in the pantheon of villainy it has become necessary to designate hotel rooms as places for opposite-sex married-to-other-people strangers to hold innocent 1-on-1 meetings. Can that designation now be used by ordinary folks who want to spice up their business trips?

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Puerto Ricans are having a rough time, but it has been a month since Hurricane Maria hit and, in between the tears, maybe we can think unsentimentally about the future.

As noted in Can Puerto Rico be a laboratory for the future of the rest of the U.S.? (2015), Puerto Rico already had the lowest labor force participation rate in the U.S.:

The federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour is 77% of the median wage (comparable to a $13 per hour minimum wage in May 2014 (BLS data showing median hourly wage of $17.09 nationwide)). In other words, it is illegal for companies to hire a large percentage of Puerto Ricans at what would be a market-clearing wage for their particular skills. The result is that labor force participation in Puerto Rico is 43 percent [compare to a national average of about 63 percent at the time] …

In the short run maybe there is some extra demand for labor created by government and non-profit organizations pouring into the territory. But in the long run, now that employers are reminded of the hurricane risk, should we expect less capital investment in the island and therefore less demand for labor at the Federal minimum wage or higher?

Presumably a reduction in the Federal minimum wage is politically impossible. What politician is going to tell voters “Due to your mediocre skills and education, a lot of you aren’t worth too much to employers“?

So should part of the hurricane clean-up and rebuilding effort include planning neighborhoods and cities for a future in which few people work? (The standard American development pattern is horrible for this. Suburbia was designed for people who are going to commute into and gather quasi-socially at a workplace. They’ll be mostly alone at home when they’re home, but they’ll be home and not asleep for only a few hours per day.)

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“Tech’s Troubling New Trend: Diversity Is in Your Head” (nytimes) complains about the lack of dark-skinned employees in “leadership roles” at technology companies. It becomes interesting when viewed alongside this page showing portraits of the executives who manage the New York Times.

Comments on this article can be interesting, e.g.,

After 20 years in one field I decided change careers and go into tech. I enrolled at my local university and learned multiple programming languages. I’ve taught entry level classes and volunteered at conferences, including a diversity conference. This is what I have to say about diversity in tech: diversity ends at 40. I can’t get an interview, let alone a job. But those in theirs 20s that I taught? Yeah, they have jobs. Tech is not interested in diversity except to tick off boxes.

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