Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

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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I spent last weekend at a wedding where the bride and groom were both members of the Harvard Class of 2001. Harvard builds a strong class spirit and ensures that most of a graduate’s friends will be from the same class by maintaining freshman-only dorms in the Yard (the impact on academics is negative because there are no upperclassmen from whom to learn study habits or get help with homework, but this isn’t a big deal at a school where “A stands for average”).

Five years after graduation, what are these bright young expensively educated people up to? Although the bride and groom were in medicine and business, a plurality of their classmates had gone to law school and/or were working in Washington, D.C. as lobbyists or legislative assistants. With so many of America’s best and brightest making the personal choice to go into fields that, at best, transfer money from one pocket to another, I thought “Thank God we have immigrants, since if we had to rely on these folks for economic growth, we’d be toast.”

[Camera nerds: If you’re curious to see how an EOS 5D performs in the low available light of a church or restaurant, check out my slide show from the wedding: medium-sized or huge.]

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Last weekend I drove out to the Berkshires for a wedding. It was my first roadtrip since buying the helicopter and I was struck by how difficult it was to get an idea of how things were arranged and how people were living. The vast majority of the land in the Berkshires, a branch of the Appalachian Mountains, is inaccessible to the ground-bound due to the fact that it is fenced-off and private or simply that there are no roads. Great Britain has a tradition of “right to roam”, now codified (see http://www.countrysideaccess.gov.uk/), that would enable a sturdy walker to poke around on foot, and citizens of former Communist countries were able to walk most places, but the U.S. has no such tradition.

Henry David Thoreau saw our modern confinement coming in his June 1862 Atlantic magazine essay, Walking:

… most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. … I know very well that they have confined themselves to the highway ever since … the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, … but is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day. …

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.” …

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? …

There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture even politics, the most alarming of them all—I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the landscape. …

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only—when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to the public road, and walking over the surface of God’s earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman’s grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

Are Thoreau’s “evil days” here? For the ground-bound, certainly, but I don’t feel them when I’m up in an aircraft. In more or less the entire United States, it is possible to fly anywhere one wishes for the simple pleasure of looking. We members of the public have lost some airspace to the military, for training. We have lost some as a result of fears of additional attacks by angry Muslims. We have lost some as a result of politicians being paid off by corporations who did not want their captive audience seeing advertisements from banner towing airplanes (Disney grabbed airspace above its theme parks and the professional sports owners grabbed the airspace over stadiums; they’d been trying for years, but the FAA’s staunch resistance was too great until the September 11th attacks enabled the transfer of public property on the grounds of security).

Thoreau would today be arrested if he tried his old trick of walking around the beaches of Massachusetts, which, unlike in most states, are owned right down to the low tide waterline by the private property holder. Upon his release from jail, would he come down to our flight school (not far from his home in Concord) and learn to fly a helicopter?

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The April 17, 2006 New Yorker magazine carries an interview with Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of Where the Wild Things Are, whose protagonist is a young boy named Max.

“My God, Max would be what now, forty-eight? He’s still unmarried, he’s living in Brooklyn. He’s a computer maven. He’s totally ungifted. He wears a wolf suit when he’s at home with his mother!”

[Note: “Computer maven” is New York-speak for “programmer” or “computer expert”.]

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http://philip.greenspun.com/teaching/6171/2006-spring/rentacoder contains a usability analysis of www.rentacoder.com. The ideas were compiled from MIT student answers to a mid-term exam.

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http://philip.greenspun.com/photography/slide-show?size=small&spec_file=/photography/exhibits/alaska-trip-2005.ss

demonstrates a new version of the slide show software developed by Shimon Rura, Julie Melton, and myself.  If you “view source” you’ll get documentation and a link to a .tar file.  The new version is designed for easy reskinning.

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Yesterday morning I decided it wasn’t worth showering or shaving before walking out the door for breakfast in Harvard Square with my friend Doug. The weather was so gloomy, who would be likely to see us anyway? Around 10:00 am, we arrived in the non-square Square and were accosted by a local CBS TV news crew. I hadn’t shaved for two or three days. Alex was looking a bit soggy in the drizzle. They stuck the camera in my face and asked what I thought about the City of Cambridge City Council voting, the night before, to make Cambridge a sanctuary city for illegal immigrants. I responded that I wasn’t sure where these folks were going to live, given that none of my friends with jobs can afford to live in Cambridge anymore. The City of Cambridge does have a subsidized housing program (anyone earning less than $75,000 is entitled to a taxpayer subsidy), but these houses require a lot of patience and paperwork to get into. So… we are a declared sanctuary for illegal aliens, as long as they have $1.5 million to buy a house.

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Gentle Readers:

Thanks to the efforts of Hal Roberts and a few other (nerd-)heroes at the Berkman Center, we have finally escaped the ghetto of Manila.  This Weblog is now running on WordPress and should be faster, more reliable, and a lot more spam-proof.  Please comment (note that comments are now going to be subject to pre-moderation).

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