Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Julian had a business meeting in Manhattan, so we decided to stretch the legs of the Robinson R44 helicopter. I loaded Mark, a helicopter student friend, into the ship at Hanscom on Tuesday morning and we departed for the Beverly, Massachusetts airport (BVY). At BVY, Mark got out of the front right seat and moved to the back. Julian got in. We proceeded through downtown Boston and picked up the AMTRAK rail line south to Norwood, Massachusetts.

The clouds were less than 1000′ above the ground, but the visibility underneath the clouds was reasonably good at 7-9 miles, so we hugged Interstate 95 all the way through Bridgeport, Connecticut where the ceiling began to lift a bit. Not quite sure of the most polite way to navigate the airspace around New York City, we contacted New York Approach for VFR advisories just SW of Bridgeport. They handed us off to a special LaGuardia Airport tower frequency, 126.05, for low-flying VFR aircraft, especially helicopters. We were cleared through the LaGuardia Airport Class B surface airspace and down the Hudson River. We circled the Statue of Liberty and then called for landing advice at the Downtown/Wall Street heliport. The friendly guy working the radio gave us the winds and directed us to a transient pad where Julian got out and walked to his meeting while Mark moved into the front seat for the short hop over to Teterboro, New Jersey (TEB).

We shut down at TEB for about 30 minutes and loaded my cousin Lynn and her 11-year-old daughter Olivia into the helicopter for a scenic tour up Rt. 17 (mall, mall, mall) and then over their hometown of Allendale, New Jersey. After circling Olivia’s school, we proceeded over the George Washington Bridge, down the Hudson, around the Statue of Liberty, up the East River, over Central Park, and back through the haze to Teterboro. Nobody complained about the haze or the bumps.

Back at Teterboro, Jet Aviation insisted that we land on a dolly, which is difficult enough for most helicopter pilots. The advantage for them is that they can tow the helicopter around and reposition it. The challenge for the pilot is that the dolly isn’t much larger than the skids and any mistake will result in the helicopter falling off the 2′-high dolly and crashing into the ground. The line guys at Jet Aviation made the challenge vastly more difficult by positioning the dolly so that (1) I would have to land with my tail into a 20-25 knot gusty wind (facing into the wind is the more stable way to hover a helicopter), and (2) I would have about 5′ of clearance between my tail and a $5 million business jet parked right up against the dolly. Most of the helicopter pilots who land at TEB are professionals and in theory all of them would be up to the task of putting their tail into the wind and up against a bizjet, but even for a heroic Vietnam vet it probably wasn’t a prudent thing to be doing. I refused to do it, calling on the radio and insisting that they move the dolly to an uncluttered area on the ramp and point it so that the helicopter would be facing into the wind. The line guys never seemed to comprehend the “face into wind” part, but at least they moved it and the set-down would be crosswind rather than downwind. I didn’t see the need to involve anyone but myself in the flaming wreckage of our new helicopter, so I had Mark escort my cousins out and well away from the helicopter/dolly interaction. In the end, the setdown turned out to be uneventful.

Julian checked us into the W Hotel Times Square, one of the few hotels in Manhattan that had rooms left. It is unclear who wants to visit New York City when it is 90 degrees out with 90 percent humidity, but apparently there is no shortage of customers in July. The room was $400 per night. Julian has a fancy Amex card and got upgraded to a “spectacular” room. It was just barely larger than the two beds, which were the room’s only furniture other than a narrow counter/desk by the window and one desk chair. Julian wrinkled his nose “This room smells like body odor”. The A/C didn’t work right. The clock and phone by Julian’s bed shut down when he turned off the overhead light. Escaping to the lobby wasn’t an option because it was deafeningly loud (music, bar, bare stone) and too dimly lit to read a magazine.

Dinner at Lever House was almost good enough to compensate for the crummy hotel. The other Manhattan highlight was a trip to the new Morgan Library.

The trip back to Boston would have been a great advertisement for Amtrak. We waited for about 20 hours for severe thunderstorms, which included tornados and hail, to clear out of the Northeast. We departed Teterboro through haze and made it as far as Hartford, Connecticut before rain and low clouds started making us feel uncomfortable. By the time we got near Providence, Rhode Island we needed a break from following roads and dodging towers. We set at at North Central airport, SFZ, near Smithfield, Rhode Island, and waited for four hours. Our final legs to Beverly and Bedford included some beautiful rain-cleared weather complete with a rainbow terminating in the center of Logan Airport.

The R44 is just about ready for its first 100-hour inspection. So far the machine is rock-solid. By contrast, our Cirrus airplane is just out from its annual inspection, which took three weeks and constituted the plane’s fourth month in the shop during its first year of ownership. Immediately after coming out of the inspection, one of the cylinder head temperature probes began to give erratic readings. Today Avidyne called and said not to fly the plane on instruments because they are recalling our primary flight display (PFD). The PFD was removed from the airplane and upgraded with some new software back in January, with a cost in downtime of about three weeks. This was supposed to fix the PFD’s tendency to crash during flight. Apparently there are some other issues and now Avidyne wants to shut the plane down for about two weeks.

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Folks: In response to a lot of questions from readers, I have drafted an attempt to explain the entire Nikon digital SLR camera system in one page. Please comment with suggestions/improvements/corrections.

Thanks in advance.

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Folks: I’ve drafted a review of the new Robinson R44 helicopter: http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/robinson-r44

Please comment with suggested improvements. Thanks.

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The Harvard English department hasn’t been in the news too much lately. Their last big splash was a few years back when they invited Tom Paulin, an Oxford professor and poet to receive some big honors and give an important public lecture. Paulin’s sideline in Jew-hatred got a lot of press and attracted some comments from Larry Summers, then president of Harvard (and the only Jewish president in Harvard’s history). Most of Paulin’s opinions turned out to be fairly standard for a European, e.g., equating Israelis with Nazis. Paulin did supply a few unique amusing incidents. For example, he had a run-in with an Oxford teacher named “Fritz Zimmerman”, who had dispensed some harsh criticism to a Muslim student. While defending the Muslim student, Paulin talked about Zimmerman’s Israeli connections, failing to notice that his antagonist was German, not Jewish.

My neighbor ran into a Ph.D. student in the English department the other day. He told her that there were 12 Ph.D. graduates this year; two had found the tenure-track jobs for which they had trained.

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Edward Tufte has released his fourth book on information design: Beautiful Evidence. As with the previous books in the series, there are a lot of great ideas that stand alone. I’m going to list a few that I think have the most practical value. One overall theme to the book is “a guide for what to do with high-resolution display devices”. An increasing amount of contemporary design is done for low-resolution displays, such as television and computer monitors. If we get a 1200 dpi version of one of these designs, as is easily possible with an inexpensive laser printer, we are not getting much benefit from that increased resolution. A lot of the ideas in Beautiful Evidence can be used today with Web scripts that generate PDF files to be printed. The rest of the ideas will be waiting for designers 20 years from now when computer monitors finally catch up to paper.

Idea 1: Sparklines (see examples from Tufte’s Web site). Tufte points out that nothing stops the modern printer from including small graphs right in-line with text or tables and that these graphs make comparisons much easier. Baseball fans will enjoy Tufte’s depiction of a baseball season, first for one team and then for all teams. Tufte argues convincingly that showing history in a “sparkline” reduces “recency bias, the persistent and widespread over-weighting of recent events in making decisions.”

Idea 2: Forcing people to write English sentences instead of PowerPoint bullets results in a lot more clarity, especially with respect to causality.

Idea 3: If you’re running a business, figure out how to pack a huge amount of information, including sparklines, onto a single 11×17″ sheet of paper and print it out on a laserprinter, then give it to decision makers. With that one sheet of paper, they will have as much information as 15 computer screenfuls or 300 PowerPoint slides.

Amazon should have the book in stock eventually, or order straight from the publisher: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_be

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I visited Washington, D.C. over the weekend to attend my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary party. Due to a soaking rain that was parked all the way up and down the East Coast, I decided to fly commercial rather than take the paint off the leading edges of the Cirrus’s wings. Flying on Delta gives one a lot more time to read the newspaper than flying the Cirrus. One interesting posting was from a New York Times article on the disappointing financial results of Warren Buffett’s NetJets fractional jet company. Buffett is a big advocate for aviation:

Mr. Buffett, as well-known for his frugality as he is for his wealth, has famously pooh-poohed expensive cars, fast boats, sprawling estates, gleaming baubles and other trappings of wealth in favor of much more modest accouterments — except for jets, which he has made no secret of adoring. Private jet travel, Mr. Buffett has said, is worth much more than a large home or a fancy car. Zipping about in jets, he said, can change the quality of your life.

The other article was the cover story of Saturday’s Washington Post: “D.C. Wants HIV Testing for All Residents 14 to 84”. The article points out that “D.C. has the highest rate of new AIDS cases in the country” and that the federal Center for Disease Control is encouraging routine HIV testing. This seems strange to those of us who were around in the 1980s. When HIV was first identified as the cause of AIDS, quite a few Americans put forward the idea of widespread testing and then various sorts of steps to quarantine those who were infected. These advocates for testing were attacked as hardhearted and the politically correct public health official approach to the problem was to behave as though everyone were infected and not test anyone, even those in high-risk groups. For some reason, the public health bureaucracy seems to have come full circle and now advocates the testing that they once opposed.

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On Thursday (June 22) evening at 7 pm, my friend Paul Cantrell and I will be giving a talk entitled “What Every Airplane Pilot Should Know about Helicopters”. The talk is free and open to the public. It is sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration and hosted by Wyotech in their Griffin Building at 150 Hanscom Drive, Bedford, MA 01730. It will last until 9 pm and should include a walk-around of a Robinson R44 helicopter.

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On the JetBlue flight out to California, I tore a page out of the May 29, 2006 New Yorker. The item, by Lillian Ross, is about Roustam Tariko, a Russian guy who was rumored, inaccurately, to have been the purchaser of a Picasso painting that sold last month for $95 million at Sotheby’s.

“Italian aristocrat with big gallery in London calls to sell me paintings. So I escape in my Boeing Business Jet [ed: 737 airframe with fancy interior], converted, with expensive everything. I live mostly in my plane. I go and go and go in freedom. .. Art dealers from all over world are now asking me to buy Picassos, other Impressionists. … But I do not buy them. I’d rather invest in my freedom, rather than in my walls.”

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Let’s do a little experiment to see how WordPress handles photos.

Some photos in the life of N404WT, a Robinson R44 helicopter trying to make its way in the world…

first photo | second photo

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My main activity this week was taking delivery of a new Robinson R44 helicopter, which a friend and I are going to use for some video and still photography on the West Coast before bringing the machine back to East Coast Aero Club at Hanscom Field (Bedford, MA) to serve as a $299/hour trainer for folks who don’t want to deal with the weight constraints and ultraresponsive handling of the R22.

Mechanically and cosmetically the helicopter has been more or less flawless so far. One fuel drain has been leaking and the engine is very slow and reluctant to cool down in the hot (30-40C) ambient temperatures here in Southern California.

I wanted to see how the machine would perform at high altitudes, which is where a lot of helicopter pilots get into trouble. In the thin air, you need more power to keep the (rotary) wing flying. The non-turbocharged engine, however, begins to lose power output as soon as you climb above sea level. The slower you go in a helicopter, e.g., when approaching to land, the more power you need. This combination leads to a lot of accidents when folks slow down trying to land at a high altitude airport.

Our experiment involved filling the helicopter up with maximum fuel and loading three guys, including myself, into the cabin. We proceeded to depart the Los Angeles Basin for Big Bear, which is at 6700′ above sea level but sported a density altitude of 8600′ (helpful digital sign in the runup area), thanks to the hot temperatures. The other two guys were Lib and Gareth, local flight instructors from Universal Air Academy in El Monte, California, who have a lot of experience going up to Big Bear. I was on the controls.

We flew a shallow approach to the runway at Big Bear, with the intention of flying a low approach only and never getting below the 20-knot (approx) airspeed that is the boundary of “effective translational lift” (ETL), a speed at which the rotor system is getting clean air and operates much more efficiently than in a hover. The discipline of saying “we are not going to slow this helicopter down or do a real landing” is important. Most problems in aviation stem from overcommitment to a challenging plan, e.g., landing in a crosswind or on a short runway.

We had lots of reserve power available, according to the gauges, and we climbed out nicely from our low approach. For the next approach, we decided to attempt landing. If you don’t have enough power, you can always slide the helicopter onto the runway at 20 knots. With good technique and smooth control inputs, however, it should be possible to arrest the descent into a hover. I did manage to get the ship down to a 2′ hover over the runway, with 1″ (out of 21 and change) of manifold pressure to spare. We taxied into the ramp and had breakfast at the locally renowned airport restaurant.

Our next stop was the big airport at Palm Springs. The Atlantic FBO there has an outdoor swimming pool and Jacuzzi for visiting pilots. We had a salad at the adjacent restaurant, then began to feel physically ill from the 100-degree heat. We borrowed a car from Atlantic, a white Chevy Cobalt, and decided to kill some time at the nearby airplane museum, packed with airworthy WWII military planes. As I turned left onto the four-lane moderately high-speed local road, an SUV came up on our tail and tailgated us for awhile, honking repeatedly. I stayed in the left lane, however, because we didn’t know exactly where the airplane museum was. After about three quarters of a mile, we pulled off into the left turn lane and the SUV driver pulled alongside, continued honking and gave us the finger. He appeared to be over 80 years of age. Lib and Gareth were almost doubled over with paroxysms of laughter.

We went back to El Monte. Bryan Robinson, a 10,000-hour pilot originally from Scotland (no relation to Frank Robinson, the engineer behind the R22 and R44), took me out to practice settling with power and autorotations. Bryan is truly the master of all things rotary-wing and has flown almost every kind of fancy jet-powered helicopter. His favorite helicopter? The little R22, because it is the most responsive. Bryan lent me his new Toyota Prius so that I could do some shopping. If you don’t need to keep bicycles inside the vehicle, which is what attracts me to minivans, the Prius seems like an almost ideal car.

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