The Coast Guard helicopter pilot lifestyle

by philg

Into the Storm: Two Ships, a Deadly Hurricane, and an Epic Battle for Survival by Tristram Korten offers us a window into an unusual lifestyle.

Ben Cournia, aviation survival technician (“rescue swimmer”), flight mechanic Joshua Andrews, and pilots Rick Post and Dave McCarthy show up to mosquito-infested Great Inagua Island (Bahamas) in September 2015 to be ready with a MH-60 Jayhawk in case undocumented importers need to be followed or people need to be pulled off ships or out of the water. They work two weeks on and two weeks off.

Here’s the machine, parked on the ramp in Portland, Maine in fall 2020 (see Maine/NH coast video)

This won’t be a story about diversity being our strength:

The four men made up a pretty good snapshot of the Coast Guard in terms of demographics (the service is overwhelmingly white) and disposition.

If there’s no racial diversity, maybe there is gender ID diversity?

Today there are 360 rescue swimmers spread out among twenty-six Coast Guard air stations. Three of them are women.

It also won’t be a story about the depredations of climate change. The deadliest hurricane season on record was almost 250 years ago:

Three back-to-back hurricanes in October 1780 killed tens of thousands of people and sank dozens of ships throughout the Caribbean and United States. The storms severely weakened the British Navy as it fought the American revolutionaries. The first storm struck Jamaica and then tore through Cuba, sinking British warships and collapsing whole towns, killing an estimated 3,000 people, half of them sailors. The second storm sped from Barbados to Bermuda, claiming roughly 4,300 lives. On the island of St. Vincent, a twenty-foot storm surge washed villages out to sea. On St. Lucia, the storm killed 6,000 people. About 9,000 more died in Martinique. Fifteen Dutch ships sank off Grenada. All told, this was the deadliest storm on record in the Western Hemisphere. Incredibly, another storm picked up within days and ripped through the region, smashing sixty-four Spanish warships sailing to take back the Florida panhandle from the British. Nearly 2,000 men died.

The Coast Guard was an early adopter of the helicopter, despite having missed out on Hanna Reitsch’s pioneering flights:

As soon as Coast Guard brass saw the public flight of Russian-born Igor Sikorsky’s prototype in 1940, they put in an order. In 1944, the Coast Guard conducted the first helicopter landings on a ship. The service’s first helicopter pilot, Frank Erickson, conducted the first helo rescue mission later that same year. Erickson and the Coast Guard’s helicopter detachment were stationed at the Sikorsky Aircraft plant in Connecticut to get trained by and work with the famed helicopter designer. Erickson collaborated with Sikorsky to develop power hoists for helicopter rescue missions and pioneered the idea of using stretchers to evacuate the injured.

Let’s leave the El Faro story and look at another ship, the Minouche. This one was also old (35 years), but not because of American protectionism. The Minouche went back and forth to Haiti with low-value cargo. She had a crew of 11 Haitians and a Filipino captain, Renelo Gelera. They didn’t make any obvious mistakes, according to the author, but Hurricane Joaquin still snuck up on them and sunk their ship from a distance of more than 100 miles (moderate winds, big waves, and an old engine that couldn’t be restarted after an automatic shutdown when the screw lifted out of the water).

The eye was now about one hundred miles north of Great Inagua. Tropical storm–force winds easily stretched over the rescue site. McCarthy mustered the helicopter and ground crews in the big hangar for a briefing. He explained the mission: cargo ship down, forty miles southeast, crew abandoning ship. He ran down a list of known risks. The main one, of course, was the weather—driving rain, high winds, extensive cloud cover. Then he asked if anyone had reservations. Silence. They may have assessed themselves as ready, but the truth was, this was virgin territory for the helicopter crew. None had flown in conditions this extreme before, except maybe Cournia during his tour in Alaska, much less conducted a search and rescue operation in a hurricane—at night. Most civilian helicopters won’t take off in 20-knot winds. The MH-60 has a wind limitation of 60 knots off the nose and 45 from any other direction for takeoff. The Coasties were heading out in 35-to-40-knot winds with gusts up to 60.

(Tech correction: 20 knots was our wind limit for doing sightseeing tours over Boston in the Robinson R44. A good practical limit for lessons at the flight school was 30 knots (not for a beginner student, though). I remember a successful photo mission with winds of 35 knots. We landed with surface winds gusting to about 30 knots on the last leg of the helicopter trip from Los Angeles to Maskachusetts. There is no wind limitation for the R44, but I would say that you’d need a good reason to operate with surface winds over 30 knots if there were any nearby hills (a formula for turbulence). The Jayhawk is 10X heavier than an R44 and should be much more stable.)

Not to spoil the suspense, but Ben Cournia was able to get the sailors out of their life raft and into the basket for hoisting. He was in the water for hours. The first trip to the stricken vessel involved about four hours of hovering over the raft. The second trip involves some ugliness and a save by a technology:

Post, who couldn’t see anything out the windshield, was flying almost entirely by his instrument panel. His altitude was good, but his hover bar showed him moving even though he felt as if the aircraft was stationary. His mind couldn’t reconcile how his body felt with what the instruments said. This was a dangerous sensation for a pilot. Vertigo could set in and the pilot could think up was down, and try to fly accordingly. He needed to reestablish some frame of reference. Post alerted his crewmates that he was having trouble staying oriented. He hit the “auto depart” button, which takes control of the Jayhawk and lifts it three hundred feet in the air, then reestablishes an even longitudinal hover. It’s a reset, a way for the pilot to start over and try again. From there, Post knew which way was up.

I’m not sure what the author means by a “hover bar” instrument and I haven’t heard of an “auto depart” button, though I know that the various versions of the Blackhawk have some advanced automation, e.g., to approach to a point in space or fly a predefined search pattern.

After some instability combined with a big wave grabbing the basket, the winch cable gets damaged and they return to base to check out a second helicopter and make a third visit to the life raft. There was a whole second crew available to fly that second helicopter, so I don’t understand why the exhausted first crew went out yet again (“you have to go out, but you don’t have to come back” surely doesn’t mean that one crew relaxes in the ready room while the first crew goes out three times, does it?). Obviously there was some learning that had happened on the first two trips, but a member of the first crew could have gone out with the fresh/rested second crew as an advisor.

Just when you think that the weather and waves are bad, Katherine Clerk Maxwell’s equations zap you:

As the basket was hoisted, Cournia hung on to minimize swing, and as he was lifted out of the water he felt a sudden jolt pass through his entire body. It was so strong that it locked his arms in a spasm of convulsed muscle. He tried to free his grip but couldn’t. Eventually the jolt passed and Cournia was able to drop back into the water. A special static discharge cable—which had been attached to the basket to siphon excess electricity generated by the helicopter’s blades cutting through the air—had somehow ripped off, and a current of electricity had passed from the helicopter’s metal frame down the cable to the basket. This meant Cournia had to be extra careful to make sure the basket was in contact with the water whenever he touched it, in order to provide a ground for the electricity.

In case you were wondering, I love Into the Storm: Two Ships, a Deadly Hurricane, and an Epic Battle for Survival almost as much as I love the Coast Guard (and who doesn’t love the Coast Guard?). Just don’t start reading it before bedtime because it’s tough to put down.

Related:

  • the book will inspire you to carry a PLB or EPIRB even if you’re just heading out to the grocery store!
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Is everyone in the U.K. and Bangladesh now entitled to asylum in the U.S.?

by philg

Politicians from both parties say that they want to “control” the U.S. border, but nobody ever proposes changing U.S. law to eliminate the right to claim asylum. There are minor differences between politicians, e.g., “Biden administration reverses Trump-era asylum policies” (Politico, 2021), in which Joe Biden opened the door to people who claimed to have been a victim of domestic violence 10,000 miles away (good luck disproving one of those contentions!). But nobody has been willing to say “The world is too big, too crowded, and too connected for us to continue to offer this” or “We are shutting down asylum because it is impossible to build a cohesive society among people who have nothing in common other than they didn’t like where they used to live.”

Given the recent unrest in the U.K. and Bangladesh, I’m wondering if 100 percent of those countries’ populations could show up in the U.S. and claim asylum. Their fear of violence would certainly seem credible based on video clips. For example, “UK riots live: arrests pass 400 as police prepare for further riots; man in serious condition after suspected hate crime” (Guardian):

Wes Streeting told PA he condemned the “mindless thuggery” seen in the rioting and said that the government “will not tolerate” the continuation of violence that has spread through towns and cities across England over the last week.

Kenya and the United Arab Emirates have also warned their citizens in the UK to steer clear of the violent protests in England.

In an advisory issued on Tuesday, Kenya’s high commission in London said it was closely monitoring the unrest which it said was “primarily driven by far right and anti immigrant groups”

It added: “The violence has flared up across various towns and cities in the United Kingdom. Kenyans residing in or travelling to the United Kingdom are urged to stay away from the protest areas and should remain vigilant.

“Furthermore, the [UAE ministry of foreign affairs] warns UAE nationals against visiting areas witnessing riots and protests and to avoid crowded areas. UAE citizens must adhere to the warnings issued by the UAE Embassy in London and comply with all safety instructions.

The U.K. is now considered too violent by Nigerian, Malaysian, Indonesian, Indian, and Australian standards (CNBC). Why aren’t these determinations sufficient to support an asylum claim here in the U.S.?

(What I find most surprising about the U.K. discord is the arrogance of the London-based elites. A typical outcome of a multi-ethic multi-religious society is civil war. Recent examples include Lebanon, Rwanda, Sudan, and various Eastern European countries. Why did the folks who set up the current UK imagine that it would be different if they set up a multi-ethnic multi-religious society in the British Isles?)

From the Daily Mail, for example:

The U.K. Prime Minister has threatened to imprison anyone who expresses ideas contrary to the government’s point of view on the merits of low-skill immigration (Independent; “Anyone who stokes this violence, whether on the internet or in person, can be prosecuted and face prison.” (“stokes this violence” to be interpreted by the government, of course!)). The civil unrest is geographically widespread within the U.K. (NYT):

Bangladesh, 2021: “Bangladesh’s Hindus living in fear following mob attacks” (BBC). If their fear was “credible” (and the BBC certainly seemed to think so) then perhaps Bangladeshi Hindus were entitled to US/UK asylum no later than 2021. The U.S. government now says that Bangladesh is too dangerous for anyone, regardless of religious affiliation: “US urges its citizens not to travel to Bangladesh” (Deccan Herald, August 6, 2024).

Bangladesh has a population of 175 million. The U.K. has a population of around 70 million, so that’s roughly 245 million people who gained the right (under our asylum laws) to become U.S. residents/citizens in just the past week.

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Why you’re likely safer on a Panamanian- or Liberian-flagged ship than an American ship

by philg

A maritime safety lecture from Into the Storm: Two Ships, a Deadly Hurricane, and an Epic Battle for Survival by Tristram Korten…

SS El Faro’s hull, a towering wall of blue-painted steel, loomed over the wharf at the Port of Jacksonville’s Blount Island terminal as gantry cranes loaded her decks with cargo containers. She was a steamship (designated by the “SS” before her name), using two large boilers to power a single-propeller shaft. And she was old, built by the Sun Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company in Chester, Pennsylvania, just south of Philadelphia, which rolled her into the Delaware River for service on January 1, 1975. That put her in the minority of big ships [in 2015]—less than 9 percent of the world’s merchant fleet is over twenty years old.

This doesn’t sound good for structural integrity:

Twenty years later, in the mid-1990s, she was hauled into a shipyard in Alabama, where her mid-body was lengthened to increase cargo capacity.

The 790-foot El Faro didn’t make it past her 40th birthday, sadly, but it turns out that she would almost certainly have been scrapped many years prior to the dramatic events of 2015 if not for U.S. laws to restrain maritime trade.

Sun Shipbuilding has since closed, a casualty of America’s decline in manufacturing, leaving a dwindling number of shipyards able to construct big cargo ships in the United States, which also means a dwindling number of shipyards capable of fulfilling the requirements of the Jones Act, a 1920 law requiring that any cargo transported from one U.S. port to another must travel on ships that are American built, American crewed, and American owned. (Puerto Rico, being a U.S. territory, counts as a U.S. port.) The law was designed to protect America’s supply routes during times of war. Today its primary effect is to protect the jobs of American sailors, preventing companies from hiring much cheaper crews from Third World countries. But there is a cost—and it is steep. To build a Jones Act ship costs $120 million to $140 million. To build the same ship in South Korea, which is a developed nation, would cost about $32 million, according to Court Smith, an industry analyst with Shipping Intelligence and Analytics. It’s even cheaper to build one in India or China. South Korea builds roughly two hundred commercial ships a year, according to Smith. America puts out maybe four. As a result, shipping companies pushed the life spans of their expensive American-made ships to the absolute limit. The average age of the U.S.-flagged cargo fleet is thirty-three years, compared to thirteen years for the global fleet, according to UN statistics, and most shipping experts say the average age a cargo ship is retired worldwide is around twenty years. El Faro was a product of this dynamic. Due to its age, it was allowed to remain outdated in certain areas. For example, a regulation requiring new ships to carry enclosed lifeboats was waived for older ones, for which compliance would require a costly retrofit. Grandfathered in, El Faro continued to carry two old-fashioned open-top lifeboats. Likewise, the ship’s emergency position-indicating radio beacon, or EPIRB, did not have to be encoded with GPS, which would give the ship’s position in a time of distress.

In addition to putting American sailors lives’ at risk, the Jones Act dramatically drives up costs for businesses and individuals in Puerto Rico, Alaska, and Hawaii. In addition to the obvious costs described above, there is the non-obvious cost that the closed market facilitates collusion:

For two decades, Sea Star had been one of several shipping companies that sailed supplies to Puerto Rico on a regular schedule. All that competition meant slender margins and low profits. But companies stayed with the route to Puerto Rico—travel between a U.S. state and a U.S. territory—because they had invested so much to comply with the Jones Act. There were no dodgy flags of convenience for El Faro; she flew the Stars and Stripes. That was a high barrier to entry for would-be competitors—they would need an American-built ship, crewed by U.S. sailors. Then, in 2002, one of those firms, Navieras, went bankrupt. Suddenly the companies still afloat—including Sea Star, Crowley, Trailer Bridge, and Horizon—started seeing increased business and profits for the first time in decades. Rather than risk losing their newfound earnings to any potential newcomers, the companies bought Navieras’s ships, and executives from at least three of the companies, Sea Star, Crowley, and Horizon, conspired to fix their prices. They created secret email accounts to communicate, and set up spreadsheets that kept track of their rates, which increased by as much as 30 percent—so that, as Forbes magazine wrote, “they could assure that nobody was cheating, while they were cheating.” They weren’t clever enough to fool the FBI, however, which got involved after learning of a meeting between executives from the competing firms.

Even a newly built South Korean ship would have had some trouble handling what the American captain and crew did with El Faro, but the new ship might not have sunk and, if it had, the modern lifeboats would have given the crew a chance to survive.

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Did the U.S. boost Iran’s military power by killing Saddam Hussein?

by philg

Iran has been displaying its military power recently and its indifference to directives from the U.S. The country attacks the west in general and Israel in particular via support for the Houthis, Palestinian militant groups (Hamas, UNRWA, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, et al.), and Hezbollah. Iran has also been supplying Russia with drones, thus taking the opposite side of the conflict with Ukraine from the US and Europe.

I’m wondering if the U.S. is ultimately responsible for Iran’s freedom to flex its military muscles. The biggest thorn in Iran’s side was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (eight years of war, for example). By killing Saddam Hussein and trying to run Iraq as our puppet state, the U.S. essentially functioned as Iran’s military ally. More recently, the U.S. has been helping Iran more directly:

Separately, in May 2024 Joe Biden criticized Israel for killing Hamas soldiers in ways that put non-soldiers (“Hamas voters”?) at risk (AP). This month, Joe Biden criticized Israel for killing a Hamas leader in a way that resulted in zero civilian deaths (Reuters). Maybe there is some ideal ratio of Hamas/non-Hamas deaths that Joe Biden thinks Israel should be required to achieve?

From state-sponsored NPR:

There isn’t a price tag on the above, but I have to believe that Saddam Hussein was able to keep the Iranian military busy at less than 1/50th the dollar cost of what the U.S. military will spend.

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Science denier wins Olympic gold by identifying as a woman

by philg

“Novak Djokovic defeats Carlos Alcaraz for first Olympic gold medal” (NBC):

He had tried five times to win the gold, failing each time. … The two sets played had to go into a tiebreaker, which was neck and neck the entire way. During the first set, there were 13 unsuccessful break points. The match lasted nearly three hours, an eternity for earning the best two sets out of three.

A three-set match? That’s typically for tennis players who identify as “women”. Thus, it seems fair to say that Djokovic, who has repeatedly denied Science by refusing to be injected with a Scientifically-proven vaccine against COVID-19, won gold due to switching gender IDs. (It would have been easier if Spanish prodigy Carlos Alcaraz hadn’t also changed gender IDs.)

Related:

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Why doesn’t anyone want to buy Intel’s Gaudi AI processors, supposedly cheaper than Nvidia’s H100?

by philg

Intel claims to have a faster and more cost-effective AI system than Nvidia’s H100. It is called “Gaudi”. First, does the name make sense? Antoni Gaudí was famous for doing idiosyncratic creative organic designs. The whole point of Gaudí was that he was the only designer of Gaudí-like buildings. Why would you ever name something that will be mass-produced after this individual outlier? Maybe the name comes from the Israelis from whom Intel acquired the product line (an acquisition that should have been an incredible slam-dunk considering that it was done just before coronapanic set in and a few years before the LLM revolution)?

Intel claims that their Gaudi 3-based systems are faster and more efficient per dollar and per watt than Nvidia’s H100. Yet the sales are insignificant (nextplatform):

Intel said last October that it has a $2 billion pipeline for Gaudi accelerator sales, and added in April this year that it expected to do $500 million in sales of Gaudi accelerators in 2024. That’s nothing compared to the $4 billion in GPU sales AMD is expecting this year (which we think is a low-ball number and $5 billion is more likely) or to the $100 billion or more that Nvidia could take down in datacenter compute – just datacenter GPUs, no networking, no DPUs – this year.

Nvidia’s tools are great, no doubt, but if Intel is truly delivering 2x the performance per dollar, shouldn’t that yield a market share of more than 0.5 percent?

Here’s an article from April 2024 (IEEE Spectrum)… “Intel’s Gaudi 3 Goes After Nvidia The company predicts victory over H100 in LLMs”:

One more point of comparison is that Gaudi 3 is made using TSMC’s N5 (sometimes called 5-nanometer) process technology. Intel has basically been a process node behind Nvidia for generations of Gaudi, so it’s been stuck comparing its latest chip to one that was at least one rung higher on the Moore’s Law ladder. With Gaudi 3, that part of the race is narrowing slightly. The new chip uses the same process as H100 and H200.

If the Gaudi chips work as claimed, how is Intel getting beaten so badly in the marketplace? I feel as though I turned around for five minutes and a whole forest of oak trees had been toppled by a wind that nobody remarked on. Intel is now the General Motors circa 2009 of the chip world? Or is the better comparison to a zombie movie where someone returns from a two-week vacation to find that his/her/zir/their home town has been taken over? Speaking of zombies, what happens if zombies take over Taiwan? Humanity will have to make do with existing devices because nobody else can make acceptable chips?

Related:

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Climate Change: the Science is settled and also was “completely overturned” in mid-2024

by philg

We’ve been informed that, when it comes to climate change, “the Science [was] settled” as of no later than 2007 when Professor Dr. Al Gore, Ph.D. talked to fellow Scientists in the U.S. Congress (state-sponsored NPR). Science’s climate models generate accurate predictions of Earth’s future temperatures, storm patterns, hurricane frequency and track, etc. These models depend critically on submodels of ocean behavior. According to Scientists at the World Bank in 2022:

Oceans are the largest heat sink on the planet. They absorb 90% of the excess heat caused by climate change. Oceans are also a very efficient carbon sink, absorbing 23% of human-caused CO2 emissions.

Here’s some July 2024 news from MIT:

“By isolating the impact of this feedback, we see a fundamentally different relationship between ocean circulation and atmospheric carbon levels, with implications for the climate,” says study author Jonathan Lauderdale, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. “What we thought is going on in the ocean is completely overturned.”

As it happens, “complete overturning” of what had been settled Science requires a higher level of panic:

Lauderdale says the findings show that “we can’t count on the ocean to store carbon in the deep ocean in response to future changes in circulation. We must be proactive in cutting emissions now, rather than relying on these natural processes to buy us time to mitigate climate change.”

“My work shows that we need to look more carefully at how ocean biology can affect the climate,” Lauderdale points out. “Some climate models predict a 30 percent slowdown in the ocean circulation due to melting ice sheets, particularly around Antarctica. This huge slowdown in overturning circulation could actually be a big problem: In addition to a host of other climate issues, not only would the ocean take up less anthropogenic CO2 from the atmosphere, but that could be amplified by a net outgassing of deep ocean carbon, leading to an unanticipated increase in atmospheric CO2 and unexpected further climate warming.”

Expected the unexpected, in other words, even when Science is settled. (Separately, with the Science having been settled prior to this “complete overturning”, why does the overturner refer to “some climate models” making a prediction and not others? With settled Science, shouldn’t all climate models agree on the major points, just as all models of orbital mechanics agree on when Halley’s Comet will return to our charred planet?)

From Nature Magazine:

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Accountability in Iran versus in the U.S.

by philg

“Iran Arrests Dozens in Search for Suspects in Killing of Hamas Leader” (NYT):

Iran has arrested more than two dozen people, including senior intelligence officers, military officials and staff workers at a military-run guesthouse in Tehran, in response to a huge and humiliating security breach that enabled the assassination of a top leader of Hamas, according to two Iranians familiar with the investigation.

The high-level arrests came after the killing in an explosion early Wednesday of Ismail Haniyeh, who had led Hamas’s political office in Qatar and was visiting Tehran for the inauguration of Iran’s new president and staying at the guesthouse in northern Tehran, Iran’s capital.

The fervor of the response to the killing of Mr. Haniyeh underscores what a devastating security failure this was for Iran’s leadership, with the assassination occurring at a heavily guarded compound in the country’s capital within hours of the swearing-in ceremony of the country’s new president.

Can anyone recall a similar failure to achieve security here in the U.S.? If so, how many arrests were made of people who failed to achieve what they were paid to achieve?

Separately, the article says that Israel was responsible, but what is the evidence for this?

The deadly blast, which also killed Mr. Haniyeh’s Palestinian bodyguard, wasn’t only an earth-shattering collapse of intelligence and security; nor only a failure to protect a key ally; nor evidence of the inability to curb the infiltration of Mossad; nor a humiliating reputational blow. It was all of those, and more.

Perhaps most important, it delivered a jarring realization that if Israel could target such an important guest, on a day when the capital was under heightened security, and carry out the attack at a highly secure compound equipped with bulletproof windows, air defense and radar, then no one was really safe.

If being a senior Hamas leader can yield personal wealth, e.g., via skimming US and EU taxpayer dollars off the UNRWA budget, wouldn’t the most likely suspect in hastening the martyrdom of a senior leader be a junior leader?

Finally, we are informed by corporate media that Palestinians do not support Hamas. Aj Jazeera, on the other hand, shows us “Palestinians in the occupied West Bank protest against Haniyeh’s killing”:

If these folks viewed Hamas rule as oppressive or illegitimate why would they be out in the street upset that a senior Hamas leader is gone?

The Deplorable New York Post covers similar events here… “Hamas flag-wielding anti-Israel protesters show off portrait of killed terrorist leader Ismail Haniyeh in shocking Times Square rally”.

What about the 0.6 percent of (88+ million) Iranians who don’t identify as Muslim? It would be interesting to know if they are upset about their Hamas-affiliated guest ascending to Islamic Heaven.

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Why aren’t there front load washing machines with the same depth as top load washing machines?

by philg

A lot of houses have closets and hallways architected to fit a standard top loading washing machine, which seems to have been roughly 27x27x44″ high. Here’s a 3.9 cu. ft. Whirlpool:

By cheating just a little, e.g., stretching the depth to 27 and 7/8″, Whirlpool can deliver a machine with a 5.2 cu. ft. drum.

It would seem obvious to build a front load washing machine with the same 27×27″ footprint, but nobody seems to do that. One of Whirlpool’s smaller front loaders is advertised as “closet-depth” and, in fact, is about 31.5″ deep. Their bigger front loaders are over 33 inches deep with the door closed. If you scale down to a “compact” front loader, as seen in Europe, the footprint is 24×24″ and capacity drops to just 1.9 cu. ft.

What’s the engineering challenge to making a front loading washer that exactly fits the footprint of a legacy washing machine and, thus, fits into an older American house as it was originally designed?

(Our house is an example of one in which 27-inch depth is the limit. The laundry room connects the family room/kitchen to the garage. A machine deeper than 27 inches will stick out beyond the door frame (top of the figure below) and obstruct access into the garage:

In fact, the only way to have 27-inch deep machines not poke into the hallway is to dig into the 4-inch drywall behind the machines, e.g., to make water and gas connections. Everything must be perfectly positioned for the machines to sit flush on the baseboard.

In other fun appliance news, an architect who redesigned our Harvard Square apartment’s kitchen notched out cabinets to precisely fit a particular LG fridge that we bought back in 2013. The fridge has French doors, which introduces another point of failure beyond a conventional side-by-side fridge or bottom-freezer fridge. The “mullion door” or “flapper door” in the middle of the French doors had a failed spring. I thought about buying a replacement, but was concerned that the notches wouldn’t work for the new fridge and also I couldn’t find any current fridges that had stainless steel sides as the old one did. Thus, it was time to think about repairing the minor problem with the 11-year-old fridge.

I was renting it out on AirBnB, couldn’t get up to Cambridge to fix it myself, and didn’t want to hassle my friend from MIT who is a mechanical genius but has his own 130-year-old 3-story wooden house to maintain. I called LG service and they offered a fixed $399 flat-rate repair fee. I gave them the model and serial number in advance and told them exactly what the problem was and what part was needed. The technician came out to the apartment, diagnosed the problem as the flapper door, and then said that no replacement part was available (the LG Parts web site showed a compatible replacement and eBay had the exact part number available from an appliance store that apparently had a lot of old stock). While monkeying with the fridge, he managed to short out the control board so the fridge went from “tough to close” to “completely dead.” The flapper door actually has an electrical connection to the control system in order to run a heater that prevents condensation from forming on the door. I then asked a series of people who answered LG’s 800 number with thick Indian accents whether I could perhaps get a refund of the $399 repair fee since they themselves acknowledged that they hadn’t repaired anything. They never simply refused to refund the money, but always said that it would be considered by some other group and that someone would get back to me. Of course, nobody ever did get back to me and LG never did issue any refund.

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Hanna Reitsch after Germany was defeated (including her work with Amnesty International)

by philg

A fourth post based on The Women Who Flew for Hitler, a book about Hanna Reitsch and Melitta von Stauffenberg.

Although both of these women were awarded Iron Crosses by Adolf Hitler, only Hanna was an enthusiastic supporter of National Socialism. The aeronautical engineer and disciplined test pilot Melitta survived until just three weeks before the end of the war so we’ll never know what she would have accomplished in the world of civilian aviation. Much of her work was on instruments and systems for flying at night and in bad weather, so she likely would have done valuable work in the Jet Age.

During the war, Hanna had lost her nerve only once. This was during a morale-boosting visit to the Russian Front:

No sooner had she reached the first German ack-ack position than the Russians started a heavy bombardment. ‘Automatically everyone vanished into the ground, while all around us the air whistled and shuddered and crashed,’ she wrote. After their own guns had pounded out their reply, a formation of enemy planes began to bomb the Wehrmacht position. ‘I felt, in my terror, as though I wanted to creep right in on myself,’ Hanna continued. ‘When finally to this inferno were added the most horrible sounds of all, the yells of the wounded, I felt certain that not one of us would emerge alive. Cowering in a hole in the ground, it was in vain that I tried to stop the persistent knocking of my knees.’

(The above suggests that Israel could have brought the Gaza fighting to a swift conclusion if it had used 155mm artillery to attack Hamas-held positions rather than high-tech drones and other precision munitions that have convinced Palestinians that war with the IDF is a manageable lifestyle (in a June 2024 poll, the majority of Palestinians wanted to continue fighting against Israel (Reuters)). The initial death toll among civilians would have been higher, but the long-term death toll might have been lower if the IDF fought intensively enough to motivate Gazans to surrender, release their hostages, and rat out Hamas members.)

Hanna had friends with direct knowledge of the German death camp system and had seen photographs, taken by Russians, of the Majdanek extermination camp (captured in July 1944). The reports and the photos, however, did not change her views regarding the overall merits of the Nazi system. Regarding the concentration camps, the book covers another “breaking the glass ceiling” angle:

Buchenwald covered an immense site, but its hundreds of barracks were overflowing with thousands of starving prisoners. The camp was ‘indescribably filthy’, one Stauffenberg cousin noted, and ‘there was always an air of abject misery and cruelty’. Female SS guards carried sticks and whips with which they frequently beat prisoners, especially if orders – given solely in German – were not obeyed immediately.

While the concentration and extermination camps were being overrun, Hanna was one of the last Germans to spend time with Hitler, flying into Berlin in April 1945 and landing a Fieseler Storch right next to the bunker.

In that instant Hanna decided that, if Greim stayed, she would also ask Hitler for the ultimate privilege of remaining with him. Some accounts even have her grasping Hitler’s hands and begging to be allowed to stay so that her sacrifice might help redeem the honour of the Luftwaffe, tarnished by Göring’s betrayal, and even ‘guarantee’ the honour of her country in the eyes of the world.49 But Hanna may have been motivated by more than blind honour. She had worked hard to support the Nazi regime through propaganda as well as her test work for the Luftwaffe, and there is no doubt that both she and Greim identified with Hitler’s anti-Semitic world view and supported his aggressive, expansionist policies. Hanna ‘adored Hitler unconditionally, without reservations’, Traudl Junge, one of the female secretaries in the bunker, later wrote. ‘She sparkled with her fanatical, obsessive readiness to die for the Führer and his ideals.’

In another example of how the Israelis might have defeated Hamas, the author notes that even a German-built underground bunker isn’t a practical refuge against sustained shelling.

Over the next few days, the Soviet army pushed through Berlin until they were within artillery range of the Chancellery. Hanna spent much of her time in Greim’s sickroom. Sometimes she dozed on the stretcher that had carried him in, but essentially she was a full-time nurse, washing and disinfecting his wound every hour, and shifting his weight to help reduce the pain. Any sustained sleep was now impossible as the bunker shook, lights flickered and even on the lower floor, fifty feet below ground, mortar fell from the eighteen-inch-thick walls.

Hanna escaped at the end of April 1945, flying as a passenger with Robert Ritter von Greim and his personal pilot. Hanna was captured by the Allies and interrogated by Eric Brown, a British pilot, and Americans interested in Germany’s advanced weapons.

‘Although she was reluctant to admit this,’ [Eric Brown] later wrote, it soon became evident that Hanna had never flown the plane under power, but only ‘to make production test flights from towed glides’.

To Eric it was clear that Hanna’s ‘devotion for Hitler was total devotion’. ‘He represented the Germany that I love,’ she told him. Hanna also denied the Holocaust. When Eric told her that he had been at the liberation of Belsen, and had seen the starving inmates and piles of the dead for himself, ‘she pooh-poohed all this. She didn’t believe it … She didn’t want to believe any of it.’ Such denial was painful for them both, but Eric found that ‘nothing could convince her that the Holocaust took place’. Hanna was, he concluded, a ‘fanatical aviator, fervent German nationalist and ardent Nazi’. Above all, he later wrote, ‘the fanaticism she displayed in her attitude to Hitler, made my blood run cold’.

When the Americans organized a press conference for her to publicly repeat her denunciation of Hitler’s military and strategic leadership, she instead defiantly asserted that she had willingly supported him, and claimed she would do the same again.

The only woman among the leaders awaiting trial, she was soon particularly close to Lutz Schwerin von Krosigk, the regime’s former finance minister. Having enjoyed long conversations ‘about everything’, she told him she could ‘feel your thoughts steadily in me, stronger than any words’. When she learnt that her brother Kurt had survived the war, she proudly wrote to him that for many months she had been ‘sitting behind barbed wire, surrounded by the most worthy German men, leaders in so many fields. The enemy have no idea what riches they are giving me.’

The Americans seemed unsure how to classify Hanna. In December 1945 they had recorded that she was ‘not an ardent Nazi, nor even a Party member’. Other memos listed her optimistically as a potential goodwill ambassador or even ‘possible espionage worker’. Hanna’s celebrity, and close connections with former Luftwaffe staff and others once high up in Nazi circles, made her a potentially valuable asset ‘with the power to influence thousands’. But her stated desire to promote ‘the truth’ was never translated into action. Eventually they decided to keep her under surveillance in an intelligence operation code-named ‘Skylark’. The hope was that she might inadvertently lead them to former members of the Luftwaffe still wanted for trial. Hanna started receiving her ‘highly nationalistic and idealistic’ friends as soon as she was released. To pre-empt criticism, she cast herself as a victim. She ‘had a worse time [in US captivity] than the people in concentration camps!’ the pilot Rudi Storck wrote in a letter that was intercepted.

Hanna knew about this surveillance and even asked US intelligence to give her a new car when her Fiat sports car broke down (we did give her the car!). It’s a little unfair to blame Hanna for thinking that the main thing that the Nazis did wrong was to lose the war:

Among the national surveys that followed in West Germany, one from 1951 found that only 5 per cent of respondents admitted any feeling of guilt concerning the Jews, and only one in three was positive about the assassination plot.

How effective are trained psychologists?

Although acquitted in 1947, [SS officer] Skorzeny had been kept at Darmstadt internment camp to go through what he called ‘the denazification mill’.52 Hanna had been the first person he visited while on parole. Skorzeny escaped the following summer, eventually arriving in Madrid where he founded a Spanish neo-Nazi group.

Hanna’s two-month visit to India in 1959:

She loved the warmth of her reception, gave frequent talks on the spiritual experience of silent flight, and developed proposals for glider training with the Indian air force. She was also thrilled with what she called ‘the lively interest in Hitler and his achievements’ that she claimed to receive ‘all over India’.68 The cherry on the cake came when the ‘wise Indian Prime Minister’, Jawaharlal Nehru, requested she take him soaring. Hanna and Nehru stayed airborne for over two hours, Nehru at times taking the controls. It was a huge PR coup, widely reported across the Indian press. The next morning Hanna received an invitation to lunch with Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi.

She was also warmly received in the U.S.:

In 1961 Hanna returned to the USA at the suggestion of her old friend, the aerospace engineer Wernher von Braun, who was now working at NASA. She often claimed to have refused post-war work with the American aeronautics programme on the basis that it would have been the ultimate betrayal of her country.† Braun felt differently, and occasionally tried to persuade Hanna to change her mind. ‘We live in times of worldwide problems,’ he had written to her in 1947. ‘If one does not wish to remain on the outside, looking in, one has to take a stand – even if sentimental reasons may stand in the way of coming clean. Do give it some thought!’

While in the States, Hanna also took the opportunity to join glider pilots soaring over the Sierra Nevada, and to meet the ‘Whirly Girls’, an international association of female helicopter pilots. As the first woman to fly such a machine, she found she had the honour of being ‘Whirly Girl Number One’. It was with the Whirly Girls that Hanna was invited to the White House, meeting President Kennedy in the Oval Office. A group photo on the lawn shows her in an enveloping cream coat with matching hat and clutch, standing slightly in front of her taller peers. Her smile is once again dazzling; she felt validated. In interviews she revealed that Kennedy had told her she was a ‘paradigm’, and should ‘never give up on bringing flying closer to people’.

She came back to the U.S. in the 1970s:

She tactfully did not attend the 1972 Munich Olympic Games, and does not seem to have commented on the murder of the eleven Israeli athletes. The highlight of that year for her was a return to America, where she was honoured in Arizona, and installed as the first female member of the prestigious international Society of Experimental Test Pilots. She could hardly have been happier, sitting in a hall of 2,000 people, discussing a possible new ‘Hanna Reitsch Cup’ with Baron Hilton. Back in Germany, she was now receiving hundreds of letters and parcels from schoolchildren as well as veterans, and even became an ambassador for the German section of Amnesty International. ‘There are millions in Germany who love me,’ she claimed, before adding, ‘it is only the German press which has been told to hate me. It is propaganda helped by the government … They are afraid I might say something good about Adolf Hitler. But why not?’

What’s Amnesty International up to lately? Since October 7, 2023, at least, tweeting out a continuous stream of support for one side in the Gaza fighting. Example:

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