ADS-B should sequence airplanes at nontowered airports?

by philg

I flew the Cirrus recently to Gaithersburg, an airport that supposedly sees only 131 operations per day (airnav). On the flight from Allentown, Pennsylvania to KGAI, the controllers did not even once tell me to look for a nearby plane. I was pretty much alone in the sky at 6,000′.

Things were different within 5 miles of the destination airport. I arrived on a gusty bumpy Tuesday at 1 pm and became the fourth airplane in the pattern as this non-towered airport. I departed behind a Pilatus PC-12. The Pilatus crew waited for a small plane to land before they could depart. I asked a plane on downwind to extend slightly so that I could get out with my IFR clearance (i.e., there were at least four airplanes operating at 5 pm when I departed). Given the active flight school at KGAI and the fact that I have nearly always found myself with company in the traffic pattern there, I question the 131/day number (since there is no control tower, the statistic may not be authoritative).

There is some structure to the traffic pattern at an airport that makes it a bit easier for pilots to identify each other, but self-sequencing is not always successful. AOPA’s Air Safety Institute:  “Eighty percent of the midair collisions that occurred during ‘normal’ [not formation or aerobatics] flight activities happened within ten miles of an airport, and 78 percent of the midair collisions that occurred around the traffic pattern happened at nontowered airports.”

Americans have spent billions of dollars over the last twenty years on ADS-B, partly sold as a way to avoid midair collisions. I’m wondering now, though, if ADS-B solves the wrong problem and/or the non-problem of enroute traffic conflicts.

Maybe it was too advanced an idea in the 1990s when ADS-B was conceived (with an implementation date of Jan 1, 2020!), but I wonder if it would make sense for ADS-B gear to sequence airplanes at nontowered airports. Why couldn’t the pilot press a button on the transponder and have the ADS-B software say “You are Number 3 for Runway 32. Number 2 is turning right base. Number 1 is on final”?

Full post, including comments

Why does the U.S. accept refugees from Bhutan?

by philg

I’ve recently finished Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America by James and Deborah Fallows. James is a Cirrus pilot and the couple traveled around via light airplane so I thought that there would be some interesting material for pilots (presumably reflecting the general public’s lack of interest in the details of flying, not too much ink is spilled on the subject of flying per se).

The authors describe a country where nearly every corner is packed with immigrants of all types, including asylum-seekers and refugees:

Like Sioux Falls, Burlington[, Vermont] has been a resettlement city for refugees for decades. It, too, has refugees from all over the world, and it, too, has embraced the sense of becoming a richer, better city for having them. During our first days in Burlington, I sat in on a workshop at the Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program (VRRP) in Burlington, where nearly twenty very newly arrived Bhutanese were learning the cultural ropes for their new jobs. Get to work on time. Check bus schedules on holidays. Call your boss if you are sick. Be friendly to your colleagues. Smile. Sit with workmates at lunch, even if language is a barrier. Wear deodorant and clean clothes every day.

The authors are enthusiastic about the potential of a planned economy (“public-private partnerhip”), especially when applied to the challenge of bringing in low-skill immigrants:

Miro Weinberger, mayor at the time we visited, is himself an example of Burlington’s draw for its particular kind of human capital. Weinberger’s parents, from Long Island, moved north during the Vietnam War “to opt out and find a different value system,” Weinberger told us. He is one of many forty-something children of that migration who stayed in Vermont. “You’ll hear a lot about public-private partnerships,” he told us on our first visit. “This is a place where it’s really true.” In Vermont, these efforts—to teach nutrition and sustainability courses in the schools, to find work for some of the Burmese and Bhutanese refugees being resettled in the area, to foster tech start-ups—are often called “social responsibility” efforts, a part of the brand we came to think of as being classically Burlington.

What is hard to understand is why people from Bhutan qualify as refugees. (Or at least did in 2013 when the authors visited.)

The U.S. Department of State says that Bhutan is as safe as anywhere on Planet Earth (travel page). Lonely Planet says “Bhutan is a remarkably safe destination, almost completely devoid of the scams, begging and theft that affects its neighbours.”

The described Vermont Refugee Resettlement Program is part of a larger organization that is funded about 90 percent by tax dollars. The public housing, Medicaid, food stamps, and Obamaphones consumed by the Bhutanese in Burlington are funded by tax dollars. Why are taxpayers funding refugees from a country that they would otherwise be dreaming of being wealthy enough to visit (Bhutan charges a minimum of $200-250 per tourist per day, depending on the season, plus airfare from the U.S. isn’t cheap!).

[If the public-private partnership yields the Bhutanese only a low-wage job or if demand for workers who don’t speak English proves weak, the folks described will be lifetime dependents on U.S. taxpayer-funded welfare (means-tested public housing, Medicaid, and food stamps, for example).]

Maybe there is an argument for filling the U.S. with immigrants from Bhutan, but why are they “refugees”?

Readers: Are there other luxury tourist destinations from which a person can come to the U.S. as a “refugee”?

Related:

  • “In Bhutan, Happiness Index as Gauge for Social Ills” (nytimes): “In 2015, his staff members released a study that showed 91.2 percent of Bhutanese reporting that they were narrowly, extensively or deeply happy, with a 1.8 percent increase in aggregate happiness between 2010 and 2015.”
  • “Vermont job creation lagging nation’s by considerable margin” (Burlington Free Press, October 31, 2018): “Unlike in Vermont, the U.S. economy has been adding jobs at a very respectable rate. To show how far Vermont is lagging the nation, consider that Vermont now has the same number of jobs it had in early 2015.” (not too many employers required fluency in Dzongkha, as it happened?)
Full post, including comments

Artwork of victimhood strategy proves unprofitable for our local museum

by philg

The deCordova museum hit the financial wall recently and is being absorbed by a more successful nonprofit. From the press release:

Like many non-profits, deCordova has an endowment that has not grown over time to keep pace with the organization’s needs. The endowment currently covers only 7% of the annual operating costs, compared to a national average of 22% for art museums, and up to 70% for some museums in the Boston area. While the Museum has expanded and diversified its revenue sources, it was not enough to support even a dramatically pared down operating budget.

Integration with The Trustees will provide deCordova with long-term fiscal stability, but that’s not the only reason this integration makes sense.

The museum’s main strategy recently could be characterized as the “the artwork of victimhood.” From “Expanding Abstraction: New England Women Painters, 1950 to Now”:

This exhibition presents a vital yet lesser-known history of abstract painting in New England by showcasing the work of women painters with strong connections to the region. Despite their relative exclusion from mainstream and male-dominated conversations on postwar abstraction, these artists have made significant contributions to the field.

From Dana C. Chandler Jr.’s “The Ghetto”:

Since the 1960s Dana C. Chandler Jr. has been committed to addressing social inequities fostered by racism in the United States. His art confronts the stark realities of poverty, incarceration, and oppression as well as leadership and empowerment in African-American history and contemporary life.

Well, you get the idea. How could they have run out of money given this virtuous program? The museum is surrounded by Millionaires for Obama. If these folks are as committed to social justice as they say, why wouldn’t they open their checkbooks, as well as their hearts?

Full post, including comments

Ideas for flying around New England

by philg

A Swiss surgeon recently came to Boston for a conference. East Coast Aero Club prices are 1/3 to 1/2 what it costs to rent a plane in Switzerland so he decided to spend a week before the conference flying the Cirrus SR20 3-4 hours each day, with periodic cigarette breaks (regrettably the Cirrus is placarded against smoking, thus rendering it less than ideal for a European physician; in the good old days, four-seat GA planes had ashtrays!).

I thought I would share the set of proposed flights in case it is useful to others.

Readers: Let me know if you have other/better ideas!

Full post, including comments

Stuff that I got spectacularly wrong in 2003

by philg

I’ve been going back through some old blog postings here as part of the migration effort from Harvard’s server.

Here are some things that I got wrong…

Full post, including comments

Silicon Valley is the best reason to vote Republican next week?

by philg

As technology takes over American lives, literally in the case of Facebook, I wonder if voting Republican tomorrow isn’t the best way for Americans to #Resist total domination by their smug rich Silicon Valley overlords. The titans of Silicon Valley often seem to infer from their wealth that they have special insight into how a society should be organized and how non-wealthy, non-important people should conduct their lives (see Lean In for example, and “Guy with a ‘Whites Only’ sign in his conference room tells others not to discriminate”). Having created one of the nation’s highest tax states (#6 in percent of residents’ income devoted to state and local government) that operates perhaps the worst-performing school system (nytimes) in an environment of racial inequality (“California is the center of American racism?“), these folks feel confident in preaching proper government organization to the ignorant non-Silicon Valley masses. While presiding over enterprises whose employees overwhelmingly identify as white or Asian men, the CEOs prate in the media about how other companies should hire and promote employees who identify as non-white/non-Asian women. If they think not enough reporters are listening, they simply buy the media (see below).

Even on business subjects, these folks have essentially no useful experience to relate. If you’re manufacturing car parts or providing landscaping services or running a restaurant, how is it useful to hear from the CEO of a company that has had, essentially, a monopoly for 5-15 years? The regulated Bell System monopoly had its drawbacks, but at least Americans were spared from having to purchase and read books by its managers offering purported secrets of their success. Nobody who ran a business exposed to competition was forced to watch a Bell System executive being interviewed on TV with fawning questions about how he or she had made the company so profitable.

Anecdote at the lower end of the wealth spectrum: a (white) friend who studied at Stanford and lives in Berkeley traveled to Ohio to canvas African-Americans in Cleveland to encourage them to go to the polls and vote for Hillary (Trump ultimately won). The majority of people who opened their doors told him that they didn’t expect a Hillary presidency to make them better off than would a Trump presidency. He might have concluded from this that black Americans rationally evaluate their interests and vote accordingly. Instead he concluded that black Americans were dumber than he had anticipated.

The election of Donald Trump was helpful in deflating some of these sermonizing billionaires, but the Insufferability Index seems likely to rise if Democrats win a lot of mid-term seats. Could it be that the best reason to vote Republican, therefore, is to quiet down the Blowhards of the Bay for a couple of years? Trump makes them angry, but a hate-filled Silicon Valley Master of the Universe might be less annoying than a self-sastified one?

[This advice is purely for readers. My own ballot here in Massachusetts is dominated by Democrats running unopposed. There are essentially no options for incorrect voting.]

Related:

Full post, including comments

Google management supports a walkout by female employees

by philg

A subclass of employees of Google today will stop working and “walk out” (to where? a suburban parking lot?).

The management of the company says that they support this walkout.

Can we infer from this that this subclass of employee is not considered productive or important by management?

See “The $90M Women’s Walkout At Google: Is Real Change Coming?” (Forbes) for how it turns out that the subclass is “employees who identify as female.”

(Also interesting from the Forbes piece is this characterization of the Google Heretic’s memo:

One instance that comes to mind is the ten-page memo that fired Google engineer James Damore wrote in 2017 explaining why women make bad engineers and arguing against the advancement of women in STEM

A perfect illustration of “people don’t remember what you say; they remember how you made them feel”!)

A flight school owner would never express happiness that mechanics or instructors were walking out. These employees are critical to generating revenue. What kind of message does the Google management send when it says “Go ahead and don’t bother to work on Thursday; the business will be just fine without female employees”?

Related:

Full post, including comments

Could a man have shared this on Facebook and kept his job?

by philg

A big law firm partner shared the following (friends-only) on Facebook:

I have something to say to all the young girls out there.

Love yourself. Appreciate your body. Tell yourself that you are beautiful every day.

Are you listening?

It’s important.

I’m telling you this because you don’t realize you are going to get so, SO much fatter over the next 20 years. Oh my god. So fat.

This litigator identifies as a woman (I’ve worked for her as an expert witness and her version of femininity is not a meek one!). What if a high-performance professional identifying as a man shared the above? Would that be a career-killer?

Separately, I hope that this discussion encourages everyone to eat candy in moderation. Happy Halloween!

Full post, including comments

Massachusetts ballot questions

by philg

This year we voters in the Land of Righteousness (i.e., Massachusetts) get to decide…

Question 3: whether the government should continue to be able to imprison people for up to 1 year and/or fine them up to $50,000 for failing to keep up with proper thinking regarding transgender bathroom and locker room access. (boston.com)

Question 1: whether the government should set the maximum number of patients a nurse can take care of (varies by type of facility, e.g., 3 patients/nurse in “step-down” and 1 patient per nurse for ICU; see boston.com)

Question 2: creates a commission to study ways to work around the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United. Decries the “corporate takeover of the First Amendment”

Can we infer from the above that citizens are more or less happy with everything else that goes on in our state?

Question 3 is the most interesting one. The current law is from 2016 and provides for correct bathroom thinking. Anyone who identifies as a woman can use a women’s locker room, for example. Folks in Massachusetts pride themselves on not being racist, sexist, and stupid, like the Trump supporters in other states. And yet tens of thousands of seemingly righteous Massachusetts voters signed a petition to put a “restore hatred and improper thinking” question on the ballot.

Full post, including comments

Yale students upset at a political party that “favors the wealthy”

by philg

An East Coast Aero Club customer from Switzerland wanted to burn up some Cirrus SR20 time. So it was off to KHVN and the Yale University Art Gallery. Walking around the campus we saw signs preparing Yale students for the upcoming election. I posted the following on Facebook:

Students at a school that costs more than $73,000 per year are upset at the idea of a political party that “favors the wealthy”…

(You’ll have to click on the images to really see them; WordPress is not nearly as smart as Facebook about image display.)

My friends immediately jumped to Yale’s defense. The school gave huge discounts to the poor. I agreed that this was great, but pointed out that only 2.1 percent of Yale undergrads come from bottom-quintile families (nytimes) and also that the school apparently created poverty because 7.8 percent of graduates fell into this bottom quintile for income: “Maybe it is time to re-think some of those majors!”

I then added the following:

The Yale students are upset because Trump is “disrespectful to women”. But if they respect women, why wouldn’t they save a ton of money and attend University of Connecticut, where a higher percentage of faculty is female? (CollegeFactual says that 62 percent of teachers at U. Conn are female; the corresponding number at Yale is only 56 percent) “The ratio of male to female faculty at Yale is above average.” Yale students want to respect women faculty at other schools rather than at their own? Or Yale students respect women in general, but, compared to students at other universities, they prefer to take classes taught by men?

The Yale students say that Trump “subjugates people of color” (unlike the  Yale students who call 911 whenever there is a sighting… (nytimes)) and “supports white supremacists”. Did Trump ever name one of his buildings after a white supremacist? The NYT reports that Yale named a college after “one of the 19th century’s foremost white supremacists” (nytimes). And, apparently, blackface was a common Halloween costume at Yale until recently (TIME).

A fellow Facebooker pointed out that Calhoun’s name had been replaced by Grace Hopper’s (sacred female computer nerd). So Yale should be off the hook because they supported white supremacy only for a few hundred years and stopped in 2017.

A thoughtful friend:

I’m not sure why you think the two notions are mutually exclusive. Why can’t one be well off, or from a family that’s well off, and still support a party that strives to represent people equally, as opposed to lobbying to protect wealthy people from, say, paying less than their fair share of taxes?

My response:

Sure. In the same way that a person can put a “I want to help the poor” bumper sticker on the back of a $70 million Gulfstream or $120,000 Mercedes. If these folks actually did care, though, why are they consuming so much personally rather than giving money to the poor. Why do they need to wait until Robin Hood is elected before they stop spending it all on themselves?

If these kids cared about the non-wealthy, wouldn’t they use their $300k in Yale expenses to fund 15 poor people to graduate from state schools? (And then use their academic smarts to get a full ride at a high end university with merit scholarships.)

Separately, I happened to be at the Providence, Rhode Island airport during Brown University’s parent weekend. The PVD ramp was clogged with heavy personal jets, including a Gulfstream G650. The folks working at the FBO said that fueling bizjets for parents visiting their 91-percent very liberal or liberal children made it the airport’s busiest weekend. By noon on the Sunday they had already sent 22 families off in their private jets.

 

Full post, including comments