(Supposedly arrived from Vancouver by truck rather than in 10-minute hops from Tesla Supercharger to Tesla Supercharger.)
A couple of times, we walked by the Beechcraft Starship, in which high hopes, a proven Pratt engine, and Burt Rutan’s design genius worked together to produce something that was worth less than the two engines still in boxes from Pratt. Approach and arrival…
Wikipedia says that six were airworthy as of 2020. We went back to take another look towards sunset:
Some more fun Rutan stuff in the EAA Museum:
Here’s a Hawker Harrier derivative, still serving in the active duty U.S. Marine Corps (supposedly retiring next year):
Never forget Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc., in which a plaintiff attempted to take Pepsi up on an advertised offer for one of these not-to-easy-to-fly planes:
It was found that the advertisement featuring the jet did not constitute an offer under the Restatement (Second) of Contracts. … “The callow youth featured in the commercial is a highly improbable pilot, one who could barely be trusted with the keys to his parents’ car, much less the prized aircraft of the United States Marine Corps. … The teenager’s comment that flying a Harrier Jet to school ‘sure beats the bus’ evinces an improbably insouciant attitude toward the relative difficulty and danger of piloting a fighter plane in a residential area. … No school would provide landing space for a student’s fighter jet, or condone the disruption the jet’s use would cause. … In light of the Harrier Jet’s well-documented function in attacking and destroying surface and air targets, armed reconnaissance and air interdiction, and offensive and defensive anti-aircraft warfare, depiction of such a jet as a way to get to school in the morning is clearly not serious even if, as plaintiff contends, the jet is capable of being acquired ‘in a form that eliminates [its] potential for military use.'”
I’m not sure how to characterize this one:
American transportation then and now…
Dyke Delta “Whitehouse Limousine”:
Down to the basics:
A Rotax-powered helicopter (with T-bar cyclic):
A 1936 Stinson promoting the health benefits of a 5-cent Pepsi:
Adjusted for official CPI, that’s equivalent to $1.14 in today’s mini-dollars so you might say that Pepsi is cheaper because it is possible to buy a can at Walmart for less than $1.14. However, I think Pepsi in 1936 was likely served at a drugstore counter where people could socialize with friends and, therefore, the present-day comparable is perhaps what a soda would cost at a fast-food restaurant (though, of course, the modern soda is also much larger).
A scale replica of the P-38 by the Brown Arch:
If “buy a shotgun” doesn’t give you an adequate feeling of security, here’s the Home Defense Edition of the Cessna T-37… the A-37:
Oshkosh is more of a social gathering than a trade show, but people still ask “What did you see that was new?” Let’s get that out of the way, then….
Skyryse has a fly-by-wire system that can turn the $1 million Robinson R66 turbine-powered helicopter into a machine with at least some of the intelligence of a $500 drone. I booked and they confirmed via text an appointment to fly their simulator, but when I showed up they said that their schedule was full and sent me away without offering an alternative date-time. I hope that they’re better organized when dealing with the FAA certification authorities!
Champion resurrected what is apparently an old project: a bolt-on electronic magneto that is powered via the same mechanism that powers traditional failure-prone mechanical mags (Avweb). They’re saying that it will take two years to get it FAA-certified for four-cylinder engines and then an unspecified additional amount of time to get it certified for six-cylinder engines. We talked to another manufacturer who makes some stuff that you’d think would be straightforward and could earn a blanket approval for a wide range of airframes, but instead requires FAA approval on a per-airframe basis. “Each airframe takes at least six months,” the company’s chief engineer said, “and sometimes an employee tells us that he needs a signature from a more senior employee and, even though the senior employee isn’t doing any substantive review, that takes months.” EAA was so sure that something like this could never be developed that there isn’t any space for it on the Wall of Ignition in the museum:
Just in time for people who identify as “women” and sought-after minorities to have responded to the call for them to get into aviation, the airlines have almost completely stopped hiring. Quite a few had already committed to booths at Oshkosh so they were there to collect contact information for some future date. Due to the rich having gotten so much richer in the past few years, however, NetJets is an exception:
Speaking of celebrating “women”, we met a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who had flown F-4 Phantom jets (“with enough power, even a brick will fly”) onto aircraft carriers at 135 knots. His wife bravely sits right seat as he flies a simple piston-powered aircraft today. For her achievement as a passenger she was gifted with a “WomenVenture” T-shirt and invited to be honored in a dramatic photograph (note the B-52 in the background, which was a big hit with our kids):
The man who went through Marine Corps boot camp and then risked his life every time that he got anywhere near the F-4 received no T-shirt.
The former Confederate Air Force was at the KidVenture area to teach the young that women (WASP ferry pilots) and Black pilots (Tuskegee Airmen) “triumphed over adversity” (unlike Americans who fought in World War II and triumphed over Germany and Japan?):
What else happens at KidVenture? The little ones learn Air Traffic Control, soldering, riveting, etc.
Circling back to those who triumphed over adversity, “Women in Aerospace” are celebrated with a wall-sized poster in the EAA Museum and this was one of the first things that we saw on entering the grounds:
(EAA is passionate about the inclusion of “women”, but not passionate enough to build permanent restrooms around the event grounds and its campgrounds. So the core of EAA AirVenture will always be people who are happy to take care of themselves and their kids for an entire week while using outhouses. (See also U.S. airlines. They say that they want to recruit pilots identifying as “women” but won’t offer the out-and-back-live-at-home lifestyle that Ryanair offers. With the exception of Allegiant, they are limited to recruiting pilots who are happy to be away from their kids for 10-22 days per month.))
Speaking of the museum, if you want to know how I get defriended, here are a couple of images that I posted to Facebook with the captions “COVID-safe aviation” and “Democrats donated a model of Donald Trump’s design for Air Force One if he should be elected for a second term”:
We are informed that children are innocent and kind and become aggressive only after being corrupted by adults. Based on my discussions with children, if they ruled the world’s nations a lot more disputes would be resolved via strategic bombing. This was a great year at Oshkosh for bombers. World War II was represented with two of the two airworthy B-29s, one of the two airworthy Avro Lancasters, and multiple B-25s. The Cold War was represented by a B-52 and a B-1B flying over on a couple of days (triggered the Apple Watch to warn about damaging noise levels; maybe the software should be smart enough to cross-check with airshow NOTAMS?).
Boeing enabled the U.S. to destroy Germany and Japan and threaten Russia with an annihilation of the whole planet via the B-52. What’s the company up to now?
The Boeing Pavilion enabled visitors to design a livery. I did one that combines a rainbow, a trans triangle, and golden retriever fur:
The EAA Museum contains a good quote for why EAA matters:
Here were the primary T shirts of 2024:
The shirt that I wanted to buy, but couldn’t find, is this one from Chinese-owned Continental (on the back of a guy listening to a talk by Burt Rutan, which I’ll cover in a separate post):
At least some of the downtown areas of Milwaukee make for a nice stop on the way to or from EAA AirVenture. The Third Ward is a particularly well-done gentrification/re-purposing. If you do decide to make a stop, the Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) is home to a four-story museum of paintings and sculpture of humans at work. The Grohmann Museum was funded by Eckhart Grohmann, whose family was expelled from Silesia at the end of World War II (a total of 15 million other ethnic Germans were killed or, with American approval, forcibly displaced).
The tour begins in the rooftop sculpture garden, which contains heroic bronzes:
Here’s a wider view:
Then one heads down a spiral staircase to the paintings and smaller statues:
Of course, this 2020 work titled “Corona” by Hans Dieter Tylle is my favorite:
(The artist is German so he doesn’t depict the hospital administrator billing Medicare $120,000 for putting the patient on a ventilator so that he can have a 90 percent chance of death instead of the 85 percent chance that he came into the hospital with.)
Here’s “The Tax Payer”, 1877, which was hung right next to “Corona”, a perfect juxtaposition for the U.S. system:
The museum reminds us that medical quackery didn’t start with coronapanic:
Grohmann attracted some criticism for including works celebrating Nazi construction and industrial achievements, e.g., the work below.
the most represented artist in the collection, Erich Mercker (1891-1973), was commissioned directly by Hitler’s government to create images of the Third Reich’s expanding infrastructure.
One of the 81 Mercker works in the collection shows laborers cutting stone bound for the Chancellery in Berlin, the Reich’s seat of power, and others depicting bridges of the Autobahn, one of Hitler’s proudest achievements.
At least two other artists represented in the collection also have Nazi ties.
Dr. Grohmann and colleagues told the critics to pound sand.
Here’s an oil painting of one of the world’s worst jobs, i.e., serving on HMS Resolutein the Arctic:
The ground floor contains some stained glass:
The museum features two works by Hunter Biden: “Tapping Slag” and “Hosing Down the Coke” (painted pseudonymously, apparently):
There’s a huge painting titled “After the Mine Accident” (Fernand Dresse) that reminds us that our modern society is built on people who are willing to put their very lives on the line:
At the opposite end of the spectrum… “The Electrician” (J.C. New, 1890):
Unlike any other art museum that I can remember visiting in the past 5 years, the bookstore is entirely free of books promoting art by members of victimhood groups and books about the 2SLGBTQQIA+ lifestyle. Does that mean that the entire building is free of Rainbow Flagism? No. The building also houses offices for humanities professors at the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Nearly all of these teachers have festooned their office doors with the sacred symbology. Here’s Candela Marini‘s door, for example.:
Note that the Duke graduate also promotes “End the War in Gaza”, end the investigation of whether residents of the U.S. are here without authorization (“End 287G“), and questioning the definition of “American”.
Are there any paintings that combine the faculty’s passion for Rainbow Flagism and the museum founder’s passion for productive achievement? Here’s one of the Norwegian Dawn, often tasked with cruising the Greek islands, under construction in Germany:
What’s missing from the museum? Asian art! Hokusai, for example, painted people at work:
And, of course, the Socialist nations made a lot of great art of people working. I didn’t see any Russian or Chinese 20th century paintings of the masses cheerfully toiling (for those who call today’s Democrats “socialist”, remember that relaxing on what used to be called “welfare” was illegal in the Soviet Union; the correct adjective for Tim Walz (still struggling with PTSD after a taxpayer-funded trip to Italy) or Kamala Harris is “transferist“).
If you’re heading to or from EAA AirVenture, here’s an idea for a stop: the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee. This is a report on our July 2024 visit. The museum is close to downtown Milwaukee, not right next to the factory as you might expect (the factory is about 15 minutes out of Milwaukee; tours were shut down due to coronapanic and, as of July 2024, hadn’t reopened). I was disappointed to see the “CAR Parking” sign rather than “CAGE Parking”:
Some guys at the entrance apparently interpret “riding bitch” literally:
A few things that I learned at the museum:
Harley-Davidson has a long tradition in motorcycle racing, though of course these days Honda is the leader
Harley-Davidson has made various forays into diversification. These have included scooters, golf carts, boats(!), and snowmobiles
There never were any motorcycle gangs, but there were plenty of female riders and businessmen organized into “motorcycle clubs” (the gift shop doesn’t sell “one percenter”, “Better your sister in a whorehouse than your brother on a Honda”, or “If you can read this it means that the bitch fell off” T-shirts)
Let’s check out the prices over time. In 1916, a hog could be purchased for $248 (about 7,500 Bidies when adjusted for official CPI):
The museum experience starts with a gallery of early Harleys and an explanation of how the engines have evolved over time:
If riding motorcycles wasn’t sufficiently hazardous to your health you could puff cigarettes while riding into a war zone:
You could tumble over backwards on a hill climb:
Here is what a gathering of motorcycle owners looks like, according to Harley:
Harley tried diversity, but it didn’t turn out to be their strength (as with Intel and the 21st century UK?)
Old meets new (gas vs. electric):
It’s an interesting two-hour experience even if you’re not a motorcycle rider.
The always-interesting folks at DJI have climbed Mt. Everest with a 1 kg. drone:
(There is at least one cut so I think that there might have been a battery change at some point.)
Watching this video it seems clear that the drone was being operated from quite some distance away. If that’s the case, I don’t understand how political and military leaders can be safe going forward unless they want to live in tunnels. What stops an enemy, internal or external, from flying a lethal version of the DJI Mavic 3 a similar distance until a target is identified, e.g., while giving a speech outdoors or walking from a car into a building? If this technology had been available in 1961, for example, Cuba could have sent small drones to kill U.S. President John F. Kennedy after he sponsored the Bay of Pigs Invasion. Or maybe just the threat of Cuba’s drones, had they existed in 1961, would have caused JFK to refrain from sponsoring the Bay of Pigs Invasion. (I guess if we’re going to send DJI technology back in a time machine we’d have to consider the likelihood that the U.S. would have killed Fidel Castro with a drone before Bay of Pigs Invasion was planned.)
Will killer drones make high-profile political and military leadership jobs less desirable? If there were no fear of getting caught, for example, more than half of the Democrats I know in Massachusetts would launch one at Donald Trump. So if the technology were widely available, there is no way that Trump could be safe without living like Adolf Hitler in the spring of 1945. (I talked to some Democrats in Illinois after Oshkosh last month and they too expressed sadness that Trump hadn’t been killed by Thomas Matthew Crooks, the outsmarter of the Secret Service.) JD Vance has already been demonized by the corporate media as a “Project 2025” subversive and a threat to abortion care for baby. Mightn’t the two of them decide to retire to a golf course if Massachusetts and Illinois Democrats had a practical means of acting on their desires?
We are informed that AI is going to transform our daily lives. Web browsers are made by companies that are supposedly at the forefront of AI/LLM research and development. Why isn’t a browser smart enough to fill out the entire form below? It has seen fields with similar labels filled in hundreds or thousands of times. Why doesn’t the browser fill it out automatically and then invite the user to edit or choose “fill it out with my office address instead”?
Google Chrome, at least, will suggest values for individual fields. Why won’t it take the next step? Even the least competent human assistant should be able to fill in the above form on behalf of a boss. Why can’t AIs in which $billions have been invested do it?
A portion of the closing ceremony is dedicated to the host city handover from Paris to Los Angeles, in which Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo will give the Olympic flag to Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. … The [Olympics closing] ceremony will feature prominent performers representing California, a nod to the next host city. Rapper Snoop Dogg — who has become a fixture of this year’s Games — will play a role in the handover segment.
(Prejudice against women is so severe all over the world that the handover is from one mayor who identifies as a “woman” to another mayor who identifies as a “woman”?)
I’m a big fan of Snoop Dogg’s performance in Starsky & Hutch, but it seems that he has a colorful past.
From Rolling Stone, “Snoop Lion Opens Up About His Pimp Past”:
When Snoop Dogg called himself a “pimp” back in 2003, he wasn’t joking. “I put an organization together,” the rapper-turned Rasta artist Snoop Lion tells contributing editor Jonah Weiner in the new issue of Rolling Stone. “I did a Playboy tour, and I had a bus follow me with ten bitches on it. I could fire a bitch, fuck a bitch, get a new ho: It was my program. City to city, titty to titty, hotel room to hotel room, athlete to athlete, entertainer to entertainer.”
Unlike most pimps, Snoop says he let his women keep the money. “I’d act like I’d take the money from the bitch, but I’d let her have it,” he says. “It was never about the money; it was about the fascination of being a pimp . . . As a kid I dreamed of being a pimp, I dreamed of having cars and clothes and bitches to match. I said, ‘Fuck it – I’m finna do it.’”
The above statements get bowdlerized in OregonLive:
The rapper-turned-Rasta artist formerly known as Snoop Dogg tells Rolling Stone he fulfilled a life’s ambition by becoming a pimp — yes, literally — a decade ago.
“I’d act like I’d take the money from the (prostitute), but I’d let her have it,” he says. “It was never about the money; it was about the fascination of being a pimp. … As a kid I dreamed of being a pimp.”
It’s an interesting reflection of current American social mores that Snoop Dogg’s involvement in the world’s oldest profession didn’t motivated Los Angeles officials to find a somewhat less colorful representative.
Readers: What were your favorite Olympics sports/moments this year and what should we watch on Peacock Premium Plus before we cancel the subscription that we started a couple of weeks ago? Our kids so far have enjoyed rugby, equestrian eventing (running horses through the country), breaking, synchronized diving, BMX, volleyball, tennis (Djokovic!), table tennis, and the transition from swimming to biking in the triathlon.
We visited the Pabst Mansion in Milwaukee on our way to Oshkosh. It was completed in 1892 at a cost of $250,000 for 20,000 square feet. Although we are informed that we live in an inflation-free society today, thanks to the efforts of our wise political leaders in Washington, D.C., the $250,000 back then is roughly equivalent to $8.6 million now (the official BLS calculator goes back only to 1913). So that would be $430 per square foot for a house built in two years.
Rich people had a lot of friends back then…
It was a great tour, but I didn’t learn why Pabst went from the world’s largest brewer to being a niche supplier. They didn’t advertise their allegiance to the Rainbow Flag Religion (Bud Light never recovered). Wikipedia says “Pabst’s sales reached a peak of 15.6 million US barrels (1.86 billion litres) in 1978 before they entered into a steep decline”. Today, the company is headquartered in Texas and the brewing is done by contractors.
Before “Oshkosh” (EAA AirVenture), we spent a night in Racine, Wisconsin. The town is notable as the birthplace of J.I. Case, which pioneered backhoe loaders, and S.C. Johnson. The downtown square was once filled with shade trees, we learned:
There are some arty/fun shops:
There’s a big marina:
Do we think that the owner of Knot Woke is going to vote for President Kamala Harris?
Here’s an idea from Linda Dolack for a fun kitchen table project with kids:
Right next to this art, the museum explains that it is tracking “self-indentifying women” and “artists of color”:
The museum was featuring what I think is a great idea for kid room decor: a 2.5-dimensional glass wall mural.
The above mural is by Frances Higgins (1912-2004) and she can’t be commissioned to make more. However, it looks as though her studio is still in operation and individual pieces can be purchased and, perhaps, commissioned. Imagine a custom mural with each element being an aircraft seen at EAA AirVenture! Maybe with the fireworks at the end of the night airshow as well. That would be great for a kid’s room.
What about the gift shop? Exactly one category of books was featured in a window visible from the street:
Once inside, they also had several books on the subject of career advancement via having sex with a married man who was already famous within the field:
A few more items from the shop…
Overall, it is tough to disagree that this is Racine County’s best art gallery!
It began losing altitude a minute and a half before crashing. The plane had been cruising at 17,000 feet until 1:21 p.m., when it dropped approximately 250 feet in 10 seconds. It then climbed approximately 400 feet in about eight seconds.
A spin, which is not recoverable in an airliner, is a consequence of an aerodynamic stall. In a stall, the wings lose lift because the critical angle of attack (angle between the wing and the oncoming air) is exceeded. Why does the plane spin instead of simply descending due to the loss of lift? Because the wings don’t stall to the same extent at the same time. One wing will drop first and the plane then spins in that direction. As flight instructors we are required to learn how to recover from a spin, but these techniques are useful primarily in low-performance single-engine aircraft. A Cessna 172 supposedly will come out of an incipient spin if the pilot simply removes hands and feet from the flight controls. Making an airplane this forgiving impairs cruise speed and, therefore, airliners aren’t designed with spin-recovery in mind. Instead, they prevent the pilots from the initial stall via a stick shaker and/or stick pusher that activates when the plane is getting too slow. Fly-by-wire airliners, such as the Airbus A320, prevent the pilots from stalling by ignoring inappropriate flight control inputs. (Captain Sully had the stick full back during his heroic single-pilot landing on the Hudson, just like a panicked student pilot, but the French software engineers kept the plane flying (not quite at the optimum speed for a water landing due to the higher-than-minimum vertical descent rate, but apparently close enough due to efforts of the French aeronautical engineers in overbuilding the airframe to survive both the high vertical speed and the high forward speed from landing downwind).)
The ATR 72-500 apparently has both the shaker and pusher (source):
Shakers and pushers prevent most stalls, but not all. A Bombardier Q400 turboprop crashed in 2009 despite the shaker and pusher activating after the pilots leveled off and forgot to add power. Wikipedia:
Following the clearance for final approach, landing gear and flaps (5°) were extended. The flight data recorder indicated that the airspeed had slowed to 145 knots (269 km/h; 167 mph).[3] The captain then called for the flaps to be increased to 15°. The airspeed continued to slow to 135 knots (250 km/h; 155 mph). Six seconds later, the aircraft’s stick shaker activated, warning of an impending stall, as the speed continued to slow to 131 knots (243 km/h; 151 mph). The captain responded by abruptly pulling back on the control column, followed by increasing thrust to 75% power, instead of lowering the nose and applying full power, which was the proper stall-recovery technique. That improper action pitched the nose up even further, increasing the gravitational load and increasing the stall speed. The stick pusher, which applies a nose-down control-column input to decrease the wing’s angle of attack after a stall,[3] activated, but the captain overrode the stick pusher and continued pulling back on the control column. The first officer retracted the flaps without consulting the captain, making recovery even more difficult.
(The root cause of the above accident, in my opinion, is the complacent attitude by the FAA and airframe manufacturers regarding deficient avionics. The aspiration seems to be an LCD version of the gauges and dials that were in a B-17 bomber over Germany in World War II. The computers on board the aircraft had all of the information that they needed to warn the crew “you can’t hold altitude at this power setting” long before they came anywhere near stalling. See my 2010 post.)
The ATR 72-500 is equipped with de-icing equipment, but no aircraft is capable of maintaining level flight indefinitely in “severe icing”. Ultimately, pilots of a sophisticated airplane will have to do what the pilot of a crummy airplane with no de-icing gear must do: allow the plane to descend while maintaining a reasonable airspeed. If it is below freezing on the surface, this means that an epic amount of runway will be consumed for landing because it will be unsafe to slow down and also probably unsafe to add flaps (the airplane certified for operations in icing conditions comes with a big book explaining what speeds and configuration to use). If the airplane can descend into above-freezing air, the ice will come off almost immediately.
Circling back to Voepass 2283, the accident airplane from yesterday, the CNN report is consistent with pilots who were trying to hold altitude rather than accept a descent: “The plane had been cruising at 17,000 feet until 1:21 p.m., when it dropped approximately 250 feet in 10 seconds. It then climbed approximately 400 feet in about eight seconds.”
The last sentence suggests that they were actively trying to get back to their assigned altitude of 17,000′. In hindsight, of course, the best course of action would have been to hold 200 knots (a good all-purpose safe speed) and descend to warmer-than-freezing air (Campinas is no higher than about 2,500′ above sea level and was 17C on the surface, suggesting that warmer-than-freezing air was available up to about 12,000′ (lapse rate of 2C per 1,000′).)
(Have I encountered icing myself, you might ask? Yes, but never “severe”. In jets and turboprops I was always able to use the onboard equipment (hot wings or rubber boots that inflate) to deal with the icing while we hunted up or down for an ice-free altitude. In little piston-powered 4-seaters that aren’t certified for known icing, the rule is that you never fly into clouds that are forecast to contain ice. However, sometimes you pick up ice that wasn’t forecast. So the rule is to descend to warmer air and, if warmer air doesn’t exist (New England in the winter), the rule is not to fly through clouds because you don’t know if you’ll be able to shed any ice. An instrument rating combined with an unpressurized non-deiced small plane isn’t a fly-on-your-own-schedule formula because you can’t get over thunderstorm lines in the summer and you can’t go through clouds in the winter due to the risk of ice.)
So… icing by itself likely cannot be the cause of the recent accident in Brazil.
