Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A bizarrely nice day for flying and a Christmas dinner invitation on Martha’s Vineyard were sufficiently motivation for me to pull the Cirrus out of its hangar today. While letting the electric preheater take the overnight chill out of the engine, I ran into my friend Michael, who flies for Linear Air, a local charter company. I thought he might be upset about spending Christmas in a Cessna Caravan going to East Hampton and western Massachusetts instead of being home with his family. He said “I can’t think of a better way to celebrate Christmas than by flying.” I wonder how many other careers there are where folks enjoy being at their jobs on Christmas Day!

The air traffic controllers were all cheerful as well, and the Cirrus, pulled back to lean of peak, delivered 20 miles per gallon. We cruised to the Vineyard at 160 mph on 5 gallons of gasoline. The only challenges were bumps en route and landing in a gusty crosswind.

Merry Christmas to everyone who has been kind enough to read this Weblog over the last year.

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Folks:

I’ve completed a draft of a photographer’s guide to Istanbul:

http://photo.net/travel/turkey/istanbul

and would appreciate comments.

Thanks,

Philip

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Robinson delivered 800 helicopters in 2007.  The December issue of Rotor and Wing magazine reported results of a survey of operators in which Robinson took the #1 spot.  Robinson scored very well in performance, reliability, and parts availability.  They were dinged for a lack of technology innovation, a reflection of the fact that Frank Robinson seems never to have met an electronic circuit that he liked or thought could do a better job than a low-time pilot.

http://www.aviationtoday.com/rw/issue/features/17375.html has the full story.

[If you want to spend $20 million on your helicopter instead of $300,000, Sikorsky is #2.  The innovation leaders at Eurocopter  scored rather dismally due to their poor customer support.  The Agusta/Westland guys who recently won the U.S. presidential helicopter contract came in dead last.  Former Fiat owners will find it difficult to believe that an Italian product didn’t meet American standards for reliability.  Looks as though Barack Obama may have to take the Metro…]

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The latest issue of AOPA Pilot magazine contains the following data:

• In 1967, median household income in the U.S. was $12,000 and a four-seat Piper Cherokee was $16,000.
• Today, median income is roughly $48,000 and the same airplane (they still make it!) is $230,000.

Where it took 16 months of income to buy a basic four-seat airplane in 1967, it takes 57 months now.  The question is “Why?”

Airplanes are made in small quantities and have not benefited from automation and capital investment in tooling the way that automobiles have, so you wouldn’t expect their price relative to incomes to have fallen.  On the other hand, there have been some efficiencies introduced such as computer-controlled machining so the number of labor hours should have been slightly reduced.

Workers in airplane factories are not paid more than average and roughly the same number of working hours are required to build an airplane.

Airplane companies are not ridiculously profitable.  In fact, many struggle to survive.

People often cite litigation as a reason for aircraft being expensive and say that one third of the price of a new airplane goes to liability insurance, but that still doesn’t account for most of the increase.

It can’t be regulation because the FAA was just as bureaucratic back then and most of the designs that are being produced today were certified in the 1950s and 1960s.

[Unrelated items from the same magazine:  (1) We lost 8,314 bombers during World War II, counting only B-17s and B-24s and counting only those lost in the European theater.  Each B-17 carried a crew of 10; each B-24 carried 7-10 men.  (2) a Formula 1 driver survived a crash in which the G forces were estimated to be 178.]

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I spend about half of my time with white collar Ivy League elitists in Cambridge and the other half with blue collar airplane mechanics at Hanscom Field in Bedford, Massachusetts.  The elitists overwhelming dislike George W. Bush, consider the people who voted for him to be idiots, and consider W. himself to be an embarrassment.  The elitists will talk your ear off about how it is impossible for middle class folks in the U.S. to get by anymore (though they themselves are buying new cars, vacations abroad, etc.).  The airplane mechanics, who earn a bit less than auto mechanics, would seem to be precisely the folks that the elitists and the Democratic class warrior candidates are talking about.  Do these guys appreciate Hillary and Barack looking out for them?  At lunch today, I asked the assembled mechanics what candidates appealed to them.  Ron Paul and his lower tax/smaller government pitch had some appeal.  Otherwise, these guys had very little good to say about the candidates in general and nothing good to say about the Democrats.

Barack and Hillary in particular excited ridicule among these wrench-turners.  They thought the idea of vastly expanded government services would result in vastly expanded taxes and a contracting economy, with fewer jobs for everyone.

I still claim that the Democrats will win, if only because they are considered less culpable for the Iraq morass, but it seems that they aren’t going to win with the votes of the people they claim to be so concerned about.

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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7073131.stm

has some informative graphics explaining how sub-prime lending came to be so profitable for banks and investment banks, with some fun facts, such as Deutsche Bank is now the largest property owner in Cleveland.

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The December 17 New Yorker carries a review of a new book on IQ by Malcolm Gladwell. The book, by James Flynn, discusses the fact that IQ rises every generation, attributing this rise to the fact that IQ measures the ability to think abstractly and the world continues to get ever more abstract. Flynn reanalyzes the IQ measurements of Japanese and Chinese-Americans and finds that in fact, Chinese and Japanese do not have a higher IQ than white people. They simply work harder, requiring an IQ of only 90 to rise into the professional, managerial, and technical occupations, compared to an IQ of 97 for lazy white people.

Speaking of dumb, yesterday’s freezing rain turned the 2′ snow banks at the sides of our roads here in Boston into 2′ solid ice extruded pyramids. Sidewalks and driveways are sheets of ice. The temperature is around 20F and the winds were blowing up to 50 mph. This is still fall; winter does not officially start until next week. Could a Hollywood script have created a character dumb enough to pay $2 million to live in a draft 100-year-old single family wreck of a house here in Cambridge?

Coming from the other side of the IQ spectrum, an airplane sales guy called from Orlando, Florida. He works for a big company with an excellent reputation whose product mostly sells itself (back-ordered until 2012 right now). He pays no state income tax on his salary and bonus (probably around $350,000 per year, as I learned when budgeting for folks to sell jet time cards for our new aviation venture). He woke up to a sunny but chilly 40-degree early morning. Mid-day temperatures were more agreeable (mostly in the 70s this week).

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I just completed recommending one of my 6.171 graduates for a master’s in computer science (I guess he isn’t that smart, since he wants to go back to school instead of working for Google).  It was a great tour of just how painful Web applications can be.

Harvard University rejected my recommendation because the software insisted on me figuring out what exact department the kid was applying to and what degree.  The menu offered about 300 choices, the first 10 of which started with “African-“.  None of the CS choices worked and I eventually tried the African- degrees but they weren’t accepted either.

Many of the schools allowed the uploading of a letter, but never in HTML, the original format of my letter.  Sometimes it had to be Microsoft Word.  Sometimes it had to be RTF.  Sometimes it had to be PDF.

Nearly every application required at least two extra keystrokes, e.g., “sign here to confirm the recommendation” would lead to a page with a button to “proceed to the submit page” that would lead to a page with a button to “submit the recommendation”.

University of California is an interesting institution.  There was no commonality among procedures or software at four U.C. CS departments.  One department insisted on 100 percent paper.  The others each had their own peculiar Web software.

If you didn’t know better, the experience might lead you to believe that the average Google employee knew more about building software than the average professor of Computer Science…

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At dinner last night one of the “money guys” at the airport explained why U.S. airfares have been so high recently and planes so full.  “In 2000 when the airlines couldn’t pay their leases, the owners of the planes said ‘There isn’t anybody else we can lease these big jets to, so we’ll renegotiate the terms to whatever you can afford.’  Since 2005, when a U.S. airline stumbles and can’t make its lease payments, G.E. Capital yanks the plane and sends it to China or India.”

We’ve been sending all of our money overseas, presumably in the expectation that folks over there will come back and buy Treasury Bills and other U.S. financial instruments.  Last year we were upset because the Chinese came over and wanted to buy stock in our companies and sometimes the whole company.  Next year, maybe the big story will be how they came and bought anything that wasn’t nailed down, especially airliners.

The one thing those foreigners almost surely won’t want to buy is a $1 million wood-framed house in an ugly exurban golf course development.  So the jet market should get tighter even as real estate continues its slide.

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If you asked me how often I’m able to complete a planned flight in the Cirrus, I would say “almost never”.  It seems that low IMC or icing or horrible turbulence or baking heat interferes.  Today, however, we managed to get four people up to Portland, Maine and back almost as quickly and easily as if we had driven.  The turbulence wasn’t too bad.  The visibility was superb.  Both BED and PWM had cleaned up after the big snow storm and hadn’t yet been hit with tomorrow’s freezing rain and snow storm.  My friend Adam was kind enough to swing by the hangar yesterday and plug the airplane’s heater in so we were able to start it in the 20-degree cold without damaging the engine (about $40,000 to replace).

We started with a sightseeing tour over downtown Boston and then up the shoreline to Cape Ann.  We continued up the beach and landed with a 15-knot wind straight down runway 36 at Portland, turning off into the FBO.  They handed us the keys to an SUV, which we drove to the Duck Fat sandwich/fries/beignet shop.  After that, we visited the art museum (report over on photo.net) and then returned to the airport for a night flight back to BED.

Upon pulling up to the hangar and wondering how I was ever going to get the plane uphill and over a little snowbank, my friend Joris appeared with a car and a snow shovel.

One passenger had never been in a small plane before.  After landing, she said “That was one of the coolest things that I’ve ever done.”

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