Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Anti-war protests in all 50 states and in front of the hated King Bush II”s Texas ranch were a fixture in American life and newspapers from 2003 through mid-2008. The protests seem to have disappeared yet the ills of war remain. Let’s look at what is bad about our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

• Americans are being killed
• American taxpayers are being improverished
• limited American resources are diverted to unproductive activities (bombing an opium factory in Afghanistan is not likely to lead to long-term growth the way that building a factory in North Carolina would)

All three of these things were bad in 2004 when the U.S. was rich and getting richer. They are even worse now. We have had a decline in birth rate and population growth due to the economic collapse. This makes the death of an American soldier if anything more costly becuase there are fewer children growing up to replace him or her. We have less money now, so whatever it is that we’re spending on our adventures amongst the Jihadis is less affordable (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933935.html shows that spending is higher than ever and continuing to grow).

Given that the cost of the wars in American life and taxpayer funds is less bearable now than before, how come the antiwar protesters seem to have melted away?

[Update: Tim Hsia, in the New York Times, writes about the same issue.]

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As far as I can tell the government’s proposed “health care reform” can be summarized as “put more money into the existing U.S. system”. I’m wondering why we as a society would want to do this.

Let’s look at how our current system is doing, starting with this table of life expectancy for different countries worldwide. Mexico seems like the best comparison. Mexicans share our continent, our love for soda and corn syrup, and our tendency towards chubbiness (source). We spend approximately $8500 per year per American on health care and live to the age of 78. A Mexican can expect to live to age 76. How much do Mexicans spend on health care? Their per-person GDP is only about $13,000 per year, and they supposedly spend about 6 percent of GDP on health care (source) so $800 per person is a good estimate.

Another way to look at these numbers is that an American will spend $600,000 in order to add two years to the end of his life. Those two years may very well be spent in an intensive care unit or a nursing home and certainly are not likely to be spent on the tennis court or visiting the Venice Biennale.

For $600,000, an American could have the following:

• a house, free and clear of all mortgages (median price for a single family house sold nationwide in May 2009 was $170,000)
• a lifetime supply of automobiles, assuming $20,000 per car, a 10-year life per car, and 50 years of driving ($100,000)
• 50 vacations for a family of four (average cost $1600; total of $80,000)
• a college education ($25,000 of tuition for four years at a public university, roughly the average cost)
• two children, reared to the age of 17 ($125,000 per kid, average cost for a basic family (source); note that a pair of Americans could have four children, all of whose costs would be completely paid for out of this $600,000)
• $75,000 in walking-around money

If we had unlimited money it certainly would be nice to have the kind of health care that we have. But the Collapse of 2008 highlighted the fact that we don’t have unlimited money and resources. Wouldn’t most Americans rather have their house, car, vacations, college, and children paid for than get extra MRIs, helicopter medevacs, and death-after-weeks-in-the-ICU that the insurance companies and government (Medicare/Medicaid) are buying on our behalf?

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Yesterday’s Washington Post carries an article on the medical helicopter industry: “The Deadly Cost of Swooping In to Save a Life”. A few interesting excerpts:

• a medevac helicopter pilot has a 113/100,000 chance of dying each year; the Post reporter compares this to 80 for an “airline pilot”. This is clearly a mistake given that scheduled airline crashes are infrequent. Probably the 80/100,000 figure refers to all commercial pilots (the Bureau of Transportation Statistics says that there are approximately 800,000 airline flights each month in the U.S. (source); to kill off 80 airline pilots per year you’d need to have 7 pilots die each month or 3.5 airliner crashes per month (two pilots per airplane); the NTSB shows that the actual number is more like 3 per year (source)).
• “With a population of 4.2 million, Kentucky has 26 medical helicopters — more than many nations. Canada, which is about nine times as large with a population of 33 million, has 20. It has never suffered a fatal crash.”
• Medicare pays $220 million per year for medevac flights

My personal theory about safety in this industry is that it could be significantly enhanced if pilots had the “Microsoft Flight Simulator” view on a big LCD screen in the instrument panel. When a helicopter goes into the clouds it is usually close to terrain and radio towers and the pilots weren’t expecting to fly on instruments. That is a completely different task than going airport-to-airport on a planned IFR flight in an airplane. The typical medevac helicopter, even if equipped for instrument flight, has basically the same instruments that an airplane from World War II had (plus a moving-map GPS, which does not help the pilot keep the helicopter under control). Thanks to the miracle of government regulation, the Microsoft Flight Simulator view costs a kid $28, the pilot of a Garmin G1000-equipped four-seat piston airplane about $10,000 and maybe $50,000 to install in the panel of most helicopters.

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This is to invite readers to join me in Porter Square on Wednesday at 11 am for a book reading (directions) from Max Said Yes! The Woodstock Story. This is a beautifully illustrated book for children by a couple of friends in Los Angeles. To celebrate the hippies of Woodstock and their rediscovery of Third World food, let’s have lunch afterwards at Anna’s Taqueria. Email philg@mit.edu if you’re likely to come!

[Update: I made a couple of videos of the readings with a FlipHD camera. Comments would be welcome. Video 1 has both authors reading; Video 2 is captured closer and has just one reader.]

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A couple of friends needed a ride to Martha’s Vineyard, so we left the house just before 1 pm and drove to the Cirrus hangar. About two hours later we had landed at the big airport on Martha’s Vineyard and said goodbye to our friends. My favorite copilot and I then were picked up by a couple of friends and taken to Oak Bluffs to look at the gingerbread cottages and religious camps. We bought some fudge at Murdick’s and walked around the marina before heading over towards West Chop, stopping to pick up a lobster roll and some fresh Haddock for dinner. Before dinner we went to the beach and swam in the Vineyard Sound. Then our hostess cooked the fish and some Verrill Farm corn that we’d brought from Concord, MA. She drove us back to the airport at 9 pm where I ran into a friend who flies a Medflight Citation Jet. The weather had been reported as 300 overcast but as we were taxiing out the sky was clear so we never activated our instrument flight plan. Nonetheless we departed Runway 24 over the dark ocean and there was no way to control the airplane except by reference to instruments (same problem that JFK, Jr. had). About 30 minutes later we were back at Hanscom Field.

It occurred to me that we had done an entire typical Martha’s Vineyard vacation in one afternoon: beach, lobster roll, fish dinner, tourist fudge, quaint cottages, friends.

[When government officials go to the Vineyard things are a little more cumbersome. The Attorney General was vacationing this week, apparently. A taxpayer-funded Gulfstream was waiting at KMVY to pick him up. Dozens of Secret Service SUVs with Virginia license plates swarmed around the airport. Young beefy guys with earpiece radios roamed about. We could have paid him $1 million to take a “staycation” instead and come out ahead. Barack Obama’s end-of-the-month visit to the Vineyard is going to be even more costly. Rumor has it that the U.S. Navy has diverted two submarines to the island and the Secret Service have been casing various locations for months. When King Obama I is on the island both airports will be closed to private citizens. A guy who has been running sightseeing rides in an old biplane is going to lose about 10 percent of his annual income. If we assume that 1500 private flights will be cancelled and each flight would have been an average of 2 hours long, that’s 3000 hours of flying that won’t happen. Good for the environment, perhaps, but it will take more than $1 million out of the economy (figuring the average cost per hour of $300, lumping in jets and piston). Pilots won’t get paid. Fuel won’t get sold. Charter companies and flight schools will lose revenue.]

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If you’re headed to the beach this month and looking for the most appropriate sunscreen, this New Yorker magazine article (Zev Borow, August 10) should help.

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Here’s one for my friends who know and love the Canadair Regional Jet… 47 passengers spent the night inside a 50-seat airplane (story).

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Gregory Clark, who dumped cold water on the dreams of development economists and good-hearted people worldwide with A Farewell to Alms (see my blog posting from a year ago), is back with another pail of icy salt water. This time he throws it in the face of folks who think that an economic recovery will bring jobs and prosperity to America’s lowest skilled workers. See this op-editorial in the Washington Post.

[Clark’s book is much more interesting and completely argued. In the op-ed he leaves out one of his central points, which is that modern industrial processes are less tolerant of careless or incompetent workers than older processes. In a plant where a single mistake can result in the spoiling of $1 million of material or the death of another worker, quite a few Americans would not be welcome in that factory even at a wage of 1 penny per hour. Especially given government mandates of minimum wages and health care benefits, quite a few American workers fall into the same class as horses did in the early 20th century. Even a free horse wasn’t productive enough to earn his cost of maintenance. Machines did not replace humans in the 20th century, as had been predicted by forward thinkers, but machines did replace horses. Coincidentally, the New York Times yesterday carried a story about Iraqi immigrants to the U.S. The fundamental problem seems to be that there is not a market-clearing wage at which American companies want to hire these folks and at which the Iraqis are able to sustain themselves.]

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Researchers have found that generic American parents, faced with a child who can’t do math or science, will say “Don’t worry, Johnny, because you have so many other talents.” Asian parents, supposedly, will say “Since you aren’t apparently naturally gifted at math or science you’ll have to study extra hard in these areas,” and not stop nagging until the kid is doing well.

This evening I encountered a woman talking about her kids. “They’re just not numbers people. I tell them it doesn’t matter if they can’t do math or work with numbers because we’re English and Social Studies people.”

[The mother who was speaking has an administrative job with a company contracting to the government of Massachusetts and her innumeracy has not, as far as she knows, hindered her ability to earn a living.]

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A lot of folks have been asking me about the Hudson River mid-air collision on Saturday, including some WCVB TV reporters (clip). The best information that I’ve been able to find is a New York Times graphic showing the path of the accident airplane.

Some context may be obtained by visiting http://skyvector.com/ and choosing the New York Terminal Area Chart (currently the default on the site). Most of the airspace around New York City is Class B, the most protected airspace in the U.S. In Class B airspace every aircraft must be talking to air traffic control, identified on radar, and positively separated from other aircraft. This is how we fly our sightseeing tours over downtown Boston, which falls within Logan Airport’s Class B. Due to the historically large numbers of sightseeing airplanes and helicopters zipping up and down the Hudson River, the FAA decades ago carved out a “VFR corridor” to allow aircraft flying over the river at or below 1100′ above sea level to fly without talking to a controller. In fact, an airplane could fly through the corridor without being equipped with a radio.

The FAA does not explain how pilots should use the corridor. Common sense and convention suggests the following:

• keep to the right
• fly low (700′ or below) if you’re a helicopter and not subject to the “at least 500′ above any vessel, person, or structure” rule
• fly high-ish (900′ to 1100′) if you’re an airplane
• tune your radio to the published common traffic advisory frequency (CTAF) and periodically broadcast position reports

Teterboro Airport is more or less abeam mid-town Manhattan. An airplane departing Teterboro could enter the corridor almost anywhere. Whenever I have done it, however, it has made sense to me to first head north over the land and still within Teterboro’s controlled airspace. I enter the corridor at the George Washington Bridge. The tour helicopters generally don’t come that far north. I switch to CTAF and say “Hudson River Traffic, Cirrus  Seven Whiskey Tango at the George Washington Bridge southbound 900”. The next call is abeam Central Park. Even at 110 knots I have a couple of minutes in which to let the downtown mob know that I’m coming and to listen for airplanes and helicopters farther downtown.

With this accident, it appears that the helicopter may have climbed higher than typical, perhaps close to the 1100′ ceiling of the corridor. More problematic was the airplane pilot’s decision to enter the busy corridor on a busy weekend day at its busiest spot, more or less abeam the W. 30th St. heliport. He would have been required to be talking to Teterboro or Newark Tower until the very moment that he was over the river (though there is some suggestion in today’s New York Times that he was handed off from TEB to EWR and did not check in with Newark). He thus denied himself the chance to spend a minute or two broadcasting his progress down the river and listening for the helicopter who would surely have reported lifting from W. 30th. Had the airplane pilot spent an additional four minutes of flight time (two minutes north to the G.W. Bridge and then two minutes south down the river) the accident probably could have been avoided. This is not to criticize the pilot. The Teterboro controllers are not famous for being friendly or flexible. It is possible that the airplane pilot asked to fly north first and was denied due to traffic (TEB is one of the nation’s busiest airports).

Should anything be done? It might be helpful if the FAA published an official guide to using the Hudson River corridor codifying the rules listed above and adding one new rule: airplanes should enter the corridor at the G.W. Bridge or farther north and/or from the Verrazano Bridge or farther south. Controllers at nearby airports should be trained to encourage pilots to follow those entry procedures. Except for seaplanes or helicopters lifting from the river itself, nobody should join the party right in the middle (a seaplane or helicopter taking off from inside the corridor would likely have been monitoring the CTAF for at least a couple of minutes).

About a month ago, I had to go to Washington, D.C. to be deposed as a software expert witness (albeit not as an aviation expert witness). As the weather was fairly nice, I elected to fly a Cirrus SR20 down there and stopped at Teterboro for lunch with a cousin. I brought my nephew along for the trip and decided to show him New York City from the Hudson corridor. It was the middle of the week rather than a weekend day. We flew north to the G.W. Bridge prior to entering the corridor. We stayed at 900′ and never got close to any other aircraft as far as I know.

More: an interview with me on local TV

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