Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

I sat in a mock-up of the new Cirrus Jet today alongside Alan Klapmeier, the company’s co-founder, who was visiting Hanscom Field (KBED). The interior reflects some truly brilliant design. The seats slide back and forth on long tracks, allowing a lot of flexibility. People could swap seats with the pilots without knocking the thrust lever. The visibility is fantastic, certainly the best of any civilian jet.  The panel is two medium-sized screens, a row of switches, and three small multi-function screens. By refraining from putting in the three or four big screens of a modern business jet, Cirrus has left room for windows.

This promises to be the least expensive of the very light jets, but for a lot of families possibly the most useful. The plane holds two people in front and realistically should be flyable by one parent. That leaves room for a second adult in the front, two sullen teenagers in the middle, and a parent with two younger kids in the back row of three seats (two of which are undersized).

If three adults want to sit in the back and have a conversation, the rearmost seat can slide forward so that it is just behind the two middle seats. This leaves a lot of shoulder room, but the three people are still close enough to talk. If someone wanted to sleep across the three middle seats, the rearmost seat can be pulled up even with the middle two.

Cirrus does not seem to be suffering from the Collapse of 2008 as badly as other airplane manufacturers. My theory is that this is due to their introducing a lot of new features recently, such as a Garmin-based instrument panel and a certified-for-flight-into-known-icing anti-ice system. A 2005 Cirrus is not a perfect substitute for a 2009 Cirrus, as would be the case with many other small aircraft.

Klapmeier is an interesting guy to talk with, very knowledgeable about engineering and certification testing. He is also candid, like you’d expect a company founder to be, rather than evading questions and parroting marketingspeak or legalspeak.

I’m pretty happy with the Cirrus SR20 that I fly regularly, but it isn’t revolutionary. If the Cirrus Vision jet can be delivered at anywhere near the originally promised price ($1 million 2006 dollars) it will certainly be a revolution in family jet transportation.

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I’ll be spending Sunday in Ridgefield, Connecticut looking at Edward Tufte’s new sculpture and hearing him speak at 4 pm (details). This should be convenient for anyone in the New York City area, particularly as the museum has an option for bus transportation to and from Manhattan (takes about 1:15 to drive). Having seen some of Tufte’s earlier sculpture, I’ve been looking forward to this event for months. If any readers of this weblog are interested in joining up for a coffee either on Sunday at the museum (around 3 pm), or Friday evening in Manhattan near the Metropolitan Museum, please let me know via email.

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Since it would appear that my economic recovery plan has little chance of being adopted, I’ve turned my attention to something that would improve long-term U.S. economic growth: improving university education. Comments on this draft would be appreciated.

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Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda is the hot new book on how our tax money is being wasted in Afghanistan. A lot of careful reporting establishes that the opium/heroin trade finances angry Muslims, to the tune of 30 percent of Afghanistan’s GDP. This is not a surprising result when you consider the likelihood of Afghans, more than 70 percent of whom are illiterate, competing successfully in the world economy. What else could they be doing to generate cash?

[The author looks back to the 1970s, when the Afghans had some success with agricultural exports other than heroin, and suggests a goal of returning to the 1970s; she ignores the facts that in the 1970s there was no competition from China and India (both had economies hobbled by government restrictions), transportation from the Far East was much more expensive, and the Internet was not available in China, India, and a variety of Asian countries with highly educated citizens.]

The author’s conclusion is that we need dramatic changes in our strategy. It is not sufficient to destroy poppy crops with aerial spraying. We need to imprison the chemists who turn poppy into heroin. We need to build up the Afghan economy so that its illiterate farmers will find it more profitable to grow something other than poppy. We need to reform the corrupt government, starting with the president’s brother, who is apparently a big heroin dealer himself.

This made me ask whether it is reasonable to assume limits to U.S. power. Suppose that we succeed in imprisoning all chemists and shutting down all drug labs. Given a supply of poppy and a market for heroin, aren’t there some sufficiently enterprising Afghans who could learn to make heroin? Can we build up the Afghan economy so that people can find better jobs than being a drug dealer? We haven’t succeeded in building up the U.S. economy to that extent; there are plenty of U.S. residents who have chosen drug dealing over other careers.  Could we make the Afghan police so effective that they can find and successfully prosecute 100 percent of drug dealers? We haven’t done that with our own police. Can we fix their corrupt government? Our own government just handed out $2 trillion to various cronies.

When planning an overseas adventure, would it make sense to break the project down into small tasks and ask “Can Americans do this?” Let’s consider aerial spraying. That is equivalent to asking the questions “Can an American fly an airplane?”; “Can an American sit in an airplane and identify a poppy field?”; “Can an American purchase some Roundup from Monsanto?’; “Can an American pilot release the Roundup on top of the poppy field?”

The answers to all of these questions is plainly “yes” and in many cases these are things that Americans have 100 years of experience doing. The author of Seeds of Terror dismisses aerial spraying as ineffective, but at least we can be confident that it is doable. An effective strategy that requires us to do things that we can’t do is more like a dream than a workable plan.

Had we broken down our Iraq and Afghanistan projects into tasks of this size, we probably would have found a lot of “no” answers and that would have been a warning that we needed to plan something different and simpler.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/09/opinion/09aciman.html

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Friends have been asking for my thoughts on how Air France 447 crashed. Without the flight recorder and cockpit voice recorder it will be tough to know. Here’s a guess..

1. it was the middle of the night and bumpy; the airplane is on autopilot, just like any other airliner in cruise flight
2. some of the airspeed and attitude instruments disagreed slightly, either because one was defective or conditions were so turbulent that readings differed substantially on the left and right sides of the airplane
3. the avionics did what they always do in this kind of situation… disengage the autopilot and dump the airplane back into the pilots’ laps: “I can’t determine what’s going on, despite my massive electronic brain, so you try to figure out what to do with this airplane.”
4. the airplane immediately started pitching and rolling from the turbulence, thus presenting the tired and startled pilots with an “unusual attitude recovery” challenge
5. the pilots failed to meet the challenge and their control inputs were not helpful in stabilizing the airplane
6. the airplane came apart from being oversped, overstressed, etc.

How could this happen? Those same pilots would have had unusual attitude training in a Cessna 172 and they did fine. There are a few important differences between a Cessna 172 and an Airbus. The unusual attitude training was 20 minutes into a flight during the daytime. The pilots were prepared for it. It takes a long time to push the Cessna 172 over its speed limit or beyond its stress limits. Pushing the nose down on a jet, by contrast, builds up airspeed at a frightening pace. The Cessna is very tough to spin and can be easily recovered from a spin. A multi-engine jet need not demonstrate spin-resistance or spin recovery. The assumption is that the plane will spend its entire life within a normal envelope of flight attitudes and airspeeds. The Cessna 172 is built to withstand nearly 4Gs and can handle more at the cost of some bending. An airliner is designed to withstand 2.5Gs and the Airbus planes have sometimes had trouble even meeting that standard (if you built an airliner as strong as a four-seat airplane you wouldn’t be able to carry as many passengers).

This explanation of the problem does not require the plane or pilots to have done anything unusual. The Airbus had some sort of problem with its very complex set of sensors, gyros, and computers. That is a very common occurrence on a plane that has three of everything. The autopilot tripped off in response to a failure or disagreement. This is normal behavior, though much more common in light airplanes than in jets. A couple of pilots who were tired and deprived of a natural horizon by the darkness, open ocean, and clouds, turned out not to be heroes, at least not this time.

There is probably more to it, but this is my best guess.

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The New York Times Company has been flailing about trying to salvage its $1.1 billion (1993) investment in the Boston Globe. Problems have included a collapse in the market for print advertising here in New England, competition from online sources of information, and difficulties in negotiating with 13 separate unions (see Mancur Olson for how a company with more than one union is typically marked for death; each individual union has a stronger interest in its own members’ compensation than in the continued existence of the company).

Perhaps there is opportunity here. The New York Times is already distributing a hardcopy paper in Boston, i.e., the New York Times. All national papers have the ability to insert custom ads for one region’s printing. So even without the Globe the NYT has the ability to sell ads, print a paper, and distribute it to homes. The only thing that is lacking is a staff to prepare a daily “Boston Wrapper”. The truly local stories in the Globe could easily fit into one printed section… plus two more pages for comics! Instead of calling this a “supplement”, implying that it is added to the paper as an afterthought, have it be a wrapper that is the first thing seen by a reader. The New York Times front section would then be in the middle.

Freed from the responsibility to cover national and international stories, a staff of reporters in Boston could produce perhaps the nation’s best local coverage of city and state politics and government, of important research at regional universities and companies, and of our beloved sports teams. Given that the wrapper would be the first thing that people saw when the paper was on a newsstand there would be much more pressure than currently to find interesting and relevant local stories.

Opinion could also be written with more authority. Currently the Globe writes a lot of editorials on issues of national annd international importance, with the implicit claim that it has weighed the issues on all sides and is, for example, recommending something that will be best for all Americans or sometimes even all humans on Planet Earth. Who are we kidding? Boston is a provincial backwater by U.S. standards. Do wise Latina women make better decisions than white males? How should we know? We have only half as many Latinos in Massachusetts compared to other states (source). Did Barack Obama’s apology to the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims have the desired effect? Very few of those Muslims live in Boston so we’d be guessing.

The editorial page of the Boston Wrapper could unapologetically offer opinion from a New England perspective. Was it good to cancel the new presidential helicopter ($400 million each for a machine that is virtually identical to one made in Europe for $30 million)? Absolutely; it wasn’t being built in New England.  Is it important to improve diplomatic relations with Dubai? Yes; Harvard university has a lucrative relationship with the Emirate (more).

How to start? Start distributing the Boston Wrapper/NYT to every household that currently gets the Globe. Survey the readers periodically. As soon as more than half of the readers say that they find the Boston-wrapped NYT more useful than the Globe, stop printing the Globe.

If successful in Boston, the Times could extend the approach to other cities and eventually turn the death of the Globe into a template for extracting huge profits from the collapse of other cities’ local papers.

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Have you been considering saving up some money, selling your house, and retiring to a 55-foot catamaran for a round-the-world trip? If so, reading Black Wave by John and Jean Silverwood should save you approximately $1 million. The Silverwoods and their four children, aged 4-15, take the dream trip, which starts with crippling seasickness in huge storms to and from Bermuda. Phase II is dodging low-lives and pirates in the Caribbean and on the Pacific side of the Panama Canal. Phase III is waiting in Tahiti for parts to fix the new-in-Panama generator. Phase IV is smashing into a coral reef (Manuae/Scilly) a few hundred miles west of Bora Bora. The Emerald Jane had a GPS, up to date charts, two experienced adult sailors, two vigilant teenagers, and reasonably good weather. Nonetheless, they hit the reef, which quickly shredded the hulls.

A layperson might think that a shipwreck should be manageable because one can always escape in the life raft. If the problem is that one’s sturdy fiberglass boat is being pounded to pieces by surf on a coral reef, of what value is a flimsy life raft? Things get worse very quickly when the 80′ mast of the Emerald Jane comes down on John Silverwood’s leg.

Thanks to the fact that this happened in 2005 and the Silverwoods carried an EPIRB, we’re able to read about the experience and the husband’s life is saved by a French Navy helicopter evacuation. Most people would conclude from this book that the open ocean is not to be messed with, or at least not in a ship smaller than a Coast Guard cutter (200′ to 400′ long (though of course ships of this size sometimes get into trouble and need to call for the helicopters, most notably in Alaska)).

More: read the book

[The pricing of this book is rather odd. The Kindle edition is only $2 cheaper than the hardcover, which includes some nicely printed color photos. The book on 6 audio CDs is $19. The book in MP3 format on a single audio CD is $23 (i.e., they charge you more when their production cost is lower). I would recommend the hardcover because the book makes a nice gift for any friend who likes to sail.]

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I’m just back from six days in the San Francisco Bay Area. Every car trip, mostly up and down the East Bay and to Napa, took roughly twice as long as it would have without traffic (e.g., Napa to Oakland Airport was just over 2 hours). Going 20 mph on a highway gives a person a lot of time to listen to the news and the news was mostly about California’s $25 billion annual budget deficit.

When a business needs to get more cash it looks at its assets and what they can produce. Perhaps the company has teams of skilled employees who could make something more lucrative than the current product. Perhaps the company has a manufacturing plant that could be leased to a startup in a new industry.

What could the State of California do? The “teams of skilled employees” idea is out, given that state workers are paid vastly higher wages and benefits than their private-sector counterparts. With such high labor costs, it seems very unlikely that a state agency could compete with a private firm on any projects of significance. The state runs a variety of schools. The primary and secondary schools are uncompetitive in performance with startup charter schools, so there would be no way to lure tuition-paying students from other countries or states. The universities could produce some cash from out-of-state tuition, but even Harvard can’t make an annual profit of $25 billion.

What does the state control that has a lot of value? Highways! The State of California owns highways that connect people with their friends and their jobs. The same highways connect manufacturing plants with raw materials and customers. It would seem that the most logical place for the state to try to raise money would be by charging congestion fees for the use of these roads. No private company is going to be in a position to compete with the state, at least not for many decades. Businesses and individuals that pay congestion fees may well feel that they’ve gotten their money’s worth, something that apparently the citizens of California do not feel about their taxes (they recently voted not to pay more).

It struck me as odd that the idea of using congestion fees to close the budget gap was never mentioned once during all of the hours that I listened to Californians discuss their intractable budget woes.

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The nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court has sparked a debate over diversity on the Supreme Court.

Let’s look at Sotomayor’s life story: went to college, went to law school, became a government employee drawing a paycheck (source). This is remarkably similar to the life story of other senior government officials as well as politicians. No part of her story includes “was at risk of losing capital due to a change in government regulation” or “was at risk of losing job due to downturn in economy.”

Given that a large number of Supreme Court cases involve business disputes, important diversity on the court would be attained by adding a Justice with some experience in business. A lawyer, regardless of race or sex, who had started a dry cleaners and navigated the regulations associated with hiring a couple of employees would have a radically different experience to draw upon than the current Justices.

Consider George McGovern, one of the towering figures of 20th Century American liberalism. After a life in politics, he purchased a hotel. In a 1992 article, “A politician’s dream–a businessman’s nightmare”, he wrote “I also wish that during the years I was in public office I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender.”

He added “I also lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never doubted the worthiness of any of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: `Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.’ It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators.”

More recently, McGovern authored a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed opposing the Democratic Congress’s current plan to make it easier for unions to organize workers. His sojourn in the business world changed his perspective to the point where he would no longer fit neatly into either the Republican or Democratic party.

There are plenty of Americans with experience in both law and business. Why shouldn’t we have one of them on the Supreme Court?

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