Short guide to breaking in a new piston aircraft engine

by philg

Mike Busch, author of “the big book on piston engines,” has a helpful article in the Jan/Feb 2019 issue of COPA Pilot, the Cirrus owners’ group’s magazine. Busch explains why engines need to be run hard for a few initial hours and then offers a concrete procedure:

Break in the engine by running it as close to maximum continuous power as possible without allowing any CHT to exceed 420F for Continental cylinders or 440F for Lycoming cylinders. Run it this hard for an hour or two until you see the CHTs come down noticeably , indicating that the lion’s share of the break-in is complete.

This requires running at nearly full throttle at a low altitude (the engine won’t generate more than about 75 percent power after climbing to an ordinary cruising altitude of 6,000 or 7,000′ due to the lower density of air molecules up there).

This is timely for me because we’ll be breaking in a new engine for the Cirrus SR20. After 14 years and roughly 2,000 flight hours it seems prudent to swap out the engine, despite the fact that it hasn’t given any signs of ill health (this is contrary to Busch’s recommendation to wait until the engine tells you it is sick and then maybe only replace one cylinder).

Maintenance shops say that they hate dealing with Continental and love Lycoming, which might be one reason why Cirrus has switched to the Lycoming IO-360 engine for the more recent SR20s. Our little cluster of T-hangars also contains at least one story of a Continental engine that failed after a few hundred hours due to manufacturing defects and terrible support from Continental (instead of sending out a new replacement engine for the nearly new aircraft, the best that Continental would do is take the old engine back, try to fix it, etc. That would have resulted in months of downtime at a minimum. So far the wisdom of the shops has been proven correct. We had some issues with our order and couldn’t even get a return phone call from Ernesto Rodriguez, the customer support manager at Continental. I kind of like the idea of the 200 hp 6-cylinder Continental engine in the SR20 as offering greater smoothness than a 4-cylinder engine (what Cirrus is buying now from Lycoming), but one notable feature is that the per-mile cost of engine reserve actually becomes higher for the older SR20 compared to the SR22 (they both use 6-cylinder Continental engines and the cost of overhaul or swap-with-reman or swap-with-new prices are almost identical between the 200 hp SR20 engine and the 310 hp SR22 engine, as you might expect given that the mechanical configuration is pretty similar other than dimensions). To minimize interactions with Continental and save about $12,000, perhaps the smarter thing to have done would have been to wait for the engine to get sick and then ship it to one of Busch’s favorite field overhaul shops (see previous post: https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/08/13/euthanasia-for-aircraft-engines/).

Why do engines need breaking in? Busch has some interesting figures showing the grooves in a new cylinder that are supposed to make the barrel “oil-wettable”. These have a spiky top that you want to grind down with hard usage to slightly flatter. Busch says that ordinary Philips 20W-50 “might be a better choice for break-in oil” than the traditional straight-weight Aeroshell W100.

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Barbara Ehrenreich: Working out is another form of conspicuous consumption

by philg

From Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer by Barbara Ehrenreich… 

Working out is another form of conspicuous consumption: Affluent people do it and, especially if muscular exertion is already part of their job, lower-class people tend to avoid it. There are exceptions like the working-class male body builders—“ meatballs”— who can be found in places like Gold’s Gym, as well as the lower-class women who attempt to shed pounds at Curves (a descendant of the women’s-only gym where I started my workout career). By and large, though, working out is a reliable indicator of social status.

And why should the mind want to subdue the body systematically, repeatedly, day after day? Many gym-goers will tell you cheerfully that it makes them feel better, at least when the workout is over. But there’s a darker, more menacing side to the preoccupation with fitness, and this is the widespread suspicion that if you can’t control your own body, you’re not fit, in any sense, to control anyone else, and in their work lives that is a large part of what typical gym-goers do. We are talking here about a relative elite of people who are more likely to give orders than to take them— managers and professionals. In this class, there are steep penalties for being overweight or in any other way apparently unhealthy. Flabby people are less likely to be hired or promoted; 13 they may even be reprimanded and obliged to undergo the company’s “wellness” program, probably consisting of exercise (on- or off-site), nutritional counseling to promote weight loss, and, if indicated, lessons in smoking cessation.

The author points out that the fitness culture provides equal opportunities for misery:

But if women are in a way “masculinized” by the fitness culture, one might equally well say that men are “feminized” by it. Before the 1970s, only women were obsessed with their bodies, although in a morbid, anorectic way. But in the brightly lit gyms, where walls are typically lined by mirrors, both sexes are invited to inspect their body images for any unwanted bulges or loose bits of flesh and plan their workouts accordingly. Gay men flocked to the gyms, creating a highly chiseled standard of male beauty. The big change, though, was that heterosexual men were also “objectified” by the fitness culture, encouraged to see themselves as the objects of other people’s appreciation— or, as the case may be, scorn. For both sexes in the endangered white-collar middle class, the body became an essential element of self-presentation, not just its size and general shape but the squareness of shoulders, the flatness of tummy, and, when sleeves were rolled up, the carefully sculpted contours of muscle.

Ehrenreich points out that blue collar workers are likely to be so damaged by age 50, e.g., with back pain, that they can’t participate in the fitness competition.

Knee and lower back pain arise in the forties and fifties, compromising the mobility required for “successful aging.” … The U.S. Census Bureau reports that nearly 40 percent of people age sixty-five and older suffer from at least one disability, with two-thirds of them saying they have difficulty walking or climbing.  … “You don’t become inactive because you age,” we’ve been told over and over. “You age because you’ve become inactive.”

Who is fighting the hardest against what formerly had been accepted as the natural order?

The goal here is not something as mundane as health. Silicon Valley’s towering hubris demands nothing less than immortality. The reason why Kurzweil has transformed himself into a walking chemistry lab is to prolong his life just long enough for the next set of biomedical breakthroughs to come along, say in 2040, after which we’ll be able to load our bodies with millions of nanobots programmed to fight disease. One way or another, other tech titans aim to achieve the same thing. As Newsweek reports: Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal, plans to live to be 120. Compared with some other tech billionaires, he doesn’t seem particularly ambitious. Dmitry Itskov, the “godfather” of the Russian Internet, says his goal is to live to 10,000; Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, finds the notion of accepting mortality “incomprehensible,” and Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, hopes to someday “cure death.”

If you are one of the richest men in the world, and presumably, since this is Silicon Valley, one of the smartest, why should you ever die?

Maybe it is time to hit the gym…

More: Read Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer.

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Was there a big sale on blackface and KKK costumes that I missed?

by philg

The Virginia governor, Ralph Northam, is in the news for a 1980s photo featuring blackface and KKK costumes.

My question today for readers: Have you ever personally attended an event in which people dressed up either in blackface or in a KKK outfit?

Personal answer: No! And I don’t think it is because I have been associating only with the most sensitive Americans.

Was there a wave of popularity for either blackface or KKK costumes at some point that I completely missed?

Related:

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“There’s so much messaging in general about STEM, STEM, STEM”

by philg

“As STEM majors soar at UW, interest in humanities shrinks — a potentially costly loss” (Seattle Times) is kind of interesting.

The liberal-arts decline is making the university financially poorer, too.

That’s because it’s cheaper to teach a history class than a computer-science course — but the UW charges the same for both. In effect, the humanities courses have always subsidized engineering, natural sciences and computer-science classes, said Sarah Hall, vice provost of UW planning and budgeting.

Nationally, it costs an $410 per credit hour to teach electrical engineering, one of the most expensive majors. Sociology, one of the cheapest-to-teach subjects, costs less than half of that — about $176 per credit hour.

Should people go to college in order to be happy or in order to earn enough money to pay back student loans and compensate for four years out of the workforce? Humanities professors have the answer!

Humanities professors disagree. They say it’s a myth that humanities majors can’t find jobs, and it’s disappointing that so many people are discouraged from pursuing their passions.

“What’s sad for the younger generation is that so many students here have been literally pushed away from the social sciences and humanities to STEM, and are not happy,” said UW history professor James Gregory.

“There’s so much messaging in general about STEM, STEM, STEM,” he said.

The innumeracy displayed by journalists and editors is interesting. The Seattle Times:

The stereotype that English majors wind up as highly educated baristas isn’t borne out by research, Stacey said. A recent study showed that many English majors are more likely to become teachers, lawyers, CEOs and legislators.

So they’re saying that if “many” out of thousands get good jobs then English is plainly a good vocational choice. The link-to article is even more interesting:

According to the Census Bureau, graduates with an English degree have about a 4.9 percent chance of working in one of these food service occupations for some time between the ages of 22 and 26. By comparison, the average among all degree holders in this age group is about 3.5 percent. So English majors are only about 1.4 percentage points more likely to work in food service than the average for all degree holders.

Wouldn’t it be a 40 percent increase to go from 3.5 to 4.9, not a 1.4 percent increase? And that’s across all degree holders, not measured against STEM graduates. Considering how many degrees are irrelevant to employers, a 40 percent greater likelihood of becoming a burger-flipper is huge!

Related:

  • “Two big questions for economists today”: Justine Hastings, of Brown University, presented “Earnings, Incentives and Student Loan Design: The Case of Chile.” It seems that Chile did what the U.S. did, i.e., offered a lot of student loans for higher education. Their program was more intelligently designed, however, in that they didn’t allow universities to raise tuition in response to this new source of funds. Schools ended up with more students, but not more money per student as has been prevalent in the U.S. Nonetheless, the default rate has been high, especially for graduates of non-selective schools and especially for those who majored in humanities and arts. Unlike Americans, Chileans don’t like to keep flushing cash down the toilet, so now they are experimenting with adjusting the maximum loan amount according to the expected return to getting a particular degree (in Chile you don’t apply to “University of Santiago” you apply for a specific major). It turns out that when students see that the government won’t lend them the maximum for a particular degree program they get the message and try to switch into a degree that will result in higher post-graduate earnings. This is especially true for “low SES” students. SES? Due to the rejection of Marx, mainstream economists apparently can’t talk about class so they refer to “Socioeconomic status“. Hastings has a separate paper “The Labor Market Returns to Colleges and Majors: Evidence from Chile” with the discouraging result that attending a lower quality college and majoring in poetry will not set the country’s employers on fire and, in fact, many people would have higher lifetime earnings if they refrained from attending college.
  • “The Hard Part of Computer Science? Getting Into Class” (NYT, Jan 24, 2019)
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Reading list for 2019…

by philg

… or at least for the next couple of months. Here are some books that I’ve ordered and perhaps readers will want to check out some of these so that we can have a discussion here.

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Surrounded by attractive college women at the gym…

by philg

A friend in his 30s works out every morning at a Planet Fitness. Our conversation:

Him: At least 25 percent of the customers at that time of day are attractive women from [adjacent university].

Me: Why don’t they work out for free at their school’s gym?

Him: I don’t know.

Me: Haven’t you talked to them? Have you ever been out on a date with one and asked her why she subscribes to this commercial gym?

Him: I’ve never asked one on a date.

Me: You’re a real gentleman!

Him: It would be too much work. With Tinder and Bumble, I can [be in bed with a woman] an hour after opening the app.

(I’m sticking with my gym. It costs a lot more than the $10/month that he pays, but we are not weight-shamed by fit 20-year-olds.)

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El Chapo’s Temporary Flight Restriction

by philg

Before a recent night flight from Hanscom Field (KBED) to Land of Gulfstreams (Teterboro, NJ; KTEB), I decided to call the official government-sponsored weather briefer at Leidos. The KTEB folks were shutting down one runway and I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t missed anything else important.

The briefer asked “You’re familiar with El Chapo’s TFR in Brooklyn?” I hadn’t heard about it, but it seems that El Chapo is being protected by a temporary flight restriction centered on the courthouse, with a radius of 0.4 miles, and from the surface up to 1,500′. The user-friendly page doesn’t mention El Chapo, but the XML text does:


<XNOTAM-Update xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="http://atasoap.atalab.faa.gov/NOTAMS/xNOTAM.xsd" version="0.1" origin="" created="2019-01-21T06:40:13">
<Group>
<Add>
<Not>
<NotUid>
<txtNameAcctFac>FDC</txtNameAcctFac>
<dateIndexYear>2018</dateIndexYear>
<noSeqNo>4123</noSeqNo>
<dateIssued>2018-12-22T00:47:00</dateIssued>
<txtLocalName>190107-190228 NYC El Chapo New</txtLocalName>
<codeGUID>80c5da6e-ffc3-431d-9aee-2338aee5a52d</codeGUID>
<noUSNSWorkNo>18-018534</noUSNSWorkNo>

</NotUid>
<codeDailyOper>false</codeDailyOper>
<dateEffective>2019-01-07T05:01:00</dateEffective>
<dateExpire>2019-02-28T23:59:00</dateExpire>
<codeTimeZone>EST</codeTimeZone>
<codeExpirationTimeZone>EST</codeExpirationTimeZone>
<AffLocGroup>
<txtNameCity>BROOKLYN</txtNameCity>
<txtNameUSState>NEW YORK</txtNameUSState>

Separately, let me say thanks to the good folks at Meridian TEB. It is a bad day for any FBO when a piston-powered aircraft shows up and that’s especially true at Teterboro (do you want to sell 15 gallons of 100LL to Joe CFI in the flight school Cessna or 2000 gallons of jet fuel to Gulfstream Al (Gore) or the Clinton Foundation?). Meridian has always been friendly and helpful, even keeping midget chocks around for those of us who fly Cirrus or similar. This was a business trip and my departure was set for Official Polar Vortex Panic Day. It was 3 degrees overnight on the ramp and warmed up only to about 12 by mid-day. Starting an aluminum aircraft engine after it has been cold-soaked does a lot of damage. Meridian kept the plane in their warm maintenance hangar overnight and until our 2 pm departure. It is ground-support folks like this that make personal aviation practical in the U.S.

Finally, now that the shutdown is over, our local government workers are working 24/7. Email received today:

Please be advised that the Bedford Air Traffic Control tower will provide ATC services during the overnight hours 2300-0700, this Sunday night, after the Super Bowl.

Additional Airport Operations staff will be on hand to support the increased aircraft arrivals.

(usually the tower is closed from 11 pm to 7 am)

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Middle class Californians subsidize wealthy Tesla owners, 2019 edition

by philg

“I got an electric car. My electric bill went down” by Brad Templeton is worth reading. He summarized it on Facebook:

Surprise: I got an electric car and my power bill went DOWN. Why? When you get an electric car in California, it allows you to switch to a heavy “time of use” power plan with expensive power in the peak (2pm-9pm) and much cheaper power in the night. I charge my car at night and moved my pool pump to the night so the net was my bill went down — my electric car gets almost “free” electricity, it seems. YMMV.

One angle he doesn’t cover is that the guy who could afford to purchase a new Tesla is being further subsidized by people who can’t afford to purchase a new Tesla (or any other new car!).

Related:

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Fahrenheit 11/9

by philg

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9 is streaming on Amazon Prime right now.

It’s worth watching, even if you don’t advocate for abandoning capitalism in favor of socialism, as Mr. Moore does.

The first section is about the 2016 election. Moore says that Trump didn’t want to run for president, but only staged a couple of fake rallies to show NBC that he should be paid more. Only when Trump saw how voters loved him did he decide to run in earnest. The presentation of footage from the respective campaigns on the night of the election is dramatic even though we know the outcome.

The next section is about the incompetence, insincerity, and mendacity of establishment Democrats, including Hillary Clinton and the officials who suppressed votes for beloved Bernie Sanders at the convention, even from states that Mr. Sanders had won (but what difference would it have made? Hillary did win more votes).

Moore doesn’t waste too much time trashing establishment Republicans, whom his audience presumably already associate with being on the payroll of the rich. In fact, he says that, starting with Bill Clinton, most Democrats are also on this payroll and there is little to distinguish non-socialist Democrats from Republicans.

Moore covers the Flint, Michigan water situation in detail (it was all caused by Republicans and cronies who wanted to make big $$; simple incompetence was not a factor), but the relevance to Donald Trump is never clear. Everything significant happened prior to Trump taking office (though Trump was the only candidate from either party to visit Flint during the campaign, according to Moore). There is footage of Obama lying to citizens about drinking the water. He is shown asking for a glass and just wetting his lips with the potentially tainted water, but not sipping any. Hidden below the podium is a glass of the actual water that he is consuming.

Another theme that keeps coming up is the Parkland shooting, but Donald Trump’s involvement is not explained.

There is a lot of footage of Adolf Hitler. Trump’s voice is synced up with Hitler’s lips moving. (Those who are passionate about women in aviation will be disappointed that Hannah Reitsch isn’t shown or quoted (“It was the blackest day when we could not die at our Führer’s side.”))

Yale History professor Timothy Snyder is quoted saying that the comparison of Trump to Hitler isn’t perfect, but only because no comparison ever is. A 99-year-old Nuremberg prosecutor is interviewed saying that what Trump is doing by separating children from migrant parents at the border is as bad as the crimes he was prosecuting, e.g., killing 90,000 Jews. (Michael Moore has experience with U.S. family court litigation, but not a custody lawsuit that separated a child from a parent. All of the fighting has been over cash and real estate. The litigation has stretched over most of this decade and a new lawsuit was filed a few months ago (Daily Mail).)

The Reichstag fire is compared to 9/11 in terms of providing the would-be dictator an excuse to seize power, but it is unclear how Trump could have engineered an emergency 15+ years prior to taking office.

Moore and Professor Snyder seem pretty sure that Trump is on track to be the next Hitler, but they don’t say how it can be accomplished.

I had never seen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on video before (we are not TV news watchers), so it was interesting to see footage of her campaigning. Moore expresses enthusiasm about young female socialists, preferably immigrants and/or Muslim, taking over the Democratic Party.

The documentary footage closes with the Hawaii mistaken missile alert (all done by state officials in a state that last voted for a Republican in 1984) and with a student from Parkland speaking dramatically about the school shooting (but, again, why is Trump to blame for these unfortunate events?).

So Fahrenheit 11/9 is worth seeing both for how Michael Moore weaves together familiar topics and also to try to understand how young Americans who call themselves “socialist” think.

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Want to know what a test pilot actually does?

by philg

If you want to know what a test pilot actually does, explained in a way that is technical and precise yet comprehensible and clear to non-experts, let me recommend watching Day 3 – PM session from http://web.mit.edu/webcast/16.687/iap2019/

(Diogo Castilho, an F-16 pilot from the Brazilian Air Force who is finishing his Ph.D. in aero/astro at MIT, talks about a couple of flight test programs)

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