Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

A friend got a water buffalo for Christmas from her dad. She won’t actually take delivery of the animal. The Web page says that it will be given to a family in Asia. If you read the fine print on the page, however, it turns out that there is no actual buffalo and no actual family and you won’t get a photo of your family and your buffalo. The money simply gets dumped into the common fund at the charity. We are trying to decide if this is the crummiest possible Christmas present.

[Would it actually be effective to give every poor family in Asia a water buffalo? Wouldn’t that simply result in overgrazing? It shouldn’t be that hard to breed water buffalo, so you’d think after thousands of years they would have the optimum number without Western intervention.]

January 19 update: Things got a little out of hand with this posting, including the purchase of a real water buffalo for a real family. See this 57MB Quicktime movie for the full story. All credit to Robert Thompson.

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While driving the clogged freeways of California, I listened to an NPR show in which the central complaint was the inequality of income distribution in the United States. Walter Benn Michaels bashes universities for being obsessed with admitting rich kids with Hispanic last names or dark skin, instead of kids from poor families. Nobody raised what to me seemed like obvious questions, e.g.,

1) Should we stop accepting poor immigrants if we are worried about income distribution? A Somali immigrant might end up achieving a higher standard of living here than in Somalia, but he or she is going to swell the ranks of below-average earners.

2) Are the people whom we consider poor today better or worse off, materially, than America’s poor were in the 1950s or 1970s?

3) Is it inevitable that as an economy gets more complex, those who are clever and talented will find ways to get rich that weren’t available in a simpler economy? (And people who aren’t clever or talented won’t get any boost.)

Question 3 seems like the big one for me. I was driving from a photographer’s house in Napa to an animator’s house in Oakland. My host in Napa would have been lucky to earn a middling salary on a newspaper or magazine staff in the 1950s. He is moderately rich today because our more sophisticated economy (1) allows him and his wife to finance and publish their own books, cutting publishers out of much of the profit, (2) allows him to market his decades of photography via the Internet to stock photo customers, and (3) allows him to do assignment work for magazines worldwide, the phone and the jet airliner making him just about as accessible to a European magazine as a European photographer. My host/cousin in Oakland has a great talent for art and loves doing animation. 50 or 100 years ago, he would have been a commercial artist selling illustrations for $5-25 apiece. Maybe if he had been lucky, he would have gotten what would then have been a low-paid job at Disney (as actors were not well paid under the studio system, animators did even worse). Today there are dozens of employers of animators in the U.S., including Disney, Dreamworks, and Pixar. Licensing deals with toy companies and cable networks, and new technologies such as the DVD make animated movies vastly more profitable than they were 50 years ago and enough of those profits have trickled down to the animators that they can afford to live very comfortably indeed.

The folks on NPR are complaining about how the rich are getting richer and we need to change government and institutional policies accordingly. However, both of the folks I visited owe most of their wealth to changes in the economy and world markets that have nothing to do with government or university policies (nobody even cares if they have a college degree).

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It is almost impossible to insure or to give away a piston-powered twin-engine airplane these days. The oft-stated rule is that, in the event of an engine failure, “the second engine takes you to the scene of the accident”. Engines tend to fail shortly after takeoff when the pilot is busy, the airplane is slow, and the ground is going to come rushing up if swift action is not taken to feather the propeller (feather = turn the propeller blades so that the edges face the wind and it doesn’t create a huge amount of drag on one wing). When an engine quits, the pilot is supposed to push up the two mixture controls, the two prop speed controls, the two throttles and then make sure that the gear and flaps are up. After that it is identify and verify the dead engine by pulling back the throttle and seeing that there isn’t any yaw. Finally one is supposed to pick the correct prop speed control from among the six power levers and pull it back to feather. I thought I’d done just this and was a bit surprised by the fact that the airplane was yawing as I pulled the lever back. I kept pulling. My instructor, Jim Henry, is normally the soul of cool and calm. He jumped out of his seat and pushed my hand out of the way. “Maybe you shouldn’t pull back the mixture on the good engine.”

Ooops. One lever too far to the right. We were up at 3000′ above the ground, so there was no real hazard, but now I’ve learned why the average engine failure in a twin isn’t managed very well by the pilot. It really may be beyond the capabilities of the typical pilot. Turbine-powered airplanes, by and large, don’t ask pilots to be this good. On a King Air, a dead engine’s prop will feather itself and some rudder boost will be applied as well. On a turbojet, there isn’t a concept of feathering.

I’m ready for my multi-engine instructor checkride, but I might be kidding myself if I said I was ready to handle a real engine failure shortly after takeoff in a piston twin.

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I was saddened to receive a newspaper article on the death of Alisa Howell, who introduced me to the Bell 206 Jet Ranger and flying the TV news helicopter in Richmond, Virginia (old weblog story plus some photos). I remember that Alisa had studied English at University of Washington before deciding to train towards a career as a helicopter pilot. She was a good writer, took care of two dogs, and had a wry sense of humor. She would have stood out in most crowds, but even more so at the airport where she was an attractive slender stylish young woman in a world of mostly beefy older slobbish guys. The details of the crash aren’t known, but it sounds as though marginal weather was a factor. I remember that Alisa was more cautious than the high-time guys at Helo Air with whom I flew later in the week. She also was a very capable and thorough pilot.

It is a real shame to lose someone like this.

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I went to the MIT campus the other day to swim and practice a bit with swim fins in celebration of my new Nitrox SCUBA certification (see http://photo.net/travel/diving/decompression-illness for why Nitrox is such a good idea). Before swimming, I had coffee with a former student, a girl from a Persian Gulf country. She asked what I thought of her idea for solving the problem of Israel’s existence: all of the Jews from Israel could be deported to the U.S. and resettled here. I pointed out that most of the Jews in Israel were the remnants of Jewish communities from Arab countries (e.g., from Baghdad (source)). Her fellow Muslims had found the presence of these particular Jews intolerable in ghettos within their cities in 1950. Her fellow Muslims found the presence of these particular Jews intolerable 500-1000 miles away in Tel Aviv. Why did she imagine that Americans would welcome these people as intimate neighbors?

I picked up a copy of the December 8 issue of The Tech. The biggest employment advertisement reads as follows…

Interested in Hedge Funds, Private Equity, and Real Estate? MIT’s Investment Management Company is Looking for Investment Analysts to Help Steward MIT’s $12 Billion Investment Portfolio.

MIT has achieved a new level of self-sufficiency. Profits from tuition stack up into a multi-$billion hoard. The students who pay that tuition can be tapped into to manage the accumulated $billions.

The pool locker room is still without any supply of soap in the showers (soap supplies in public swimming pools are required by law in many states, but not in Massachusetts). The scale that had been in the men’s locker room has been removed. We may be getting fatter, but at least we won’t be depressed by knowledge of that fact…

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Our flight school is getting rid of its two-seat trainer airplanes. At least half of the new students, with an instructor, will be over the payload limit. The Katanas hold 400 lbs. with full fuel and the Piper Tomahawks around 350 lbs. with tab fuel. At 200 lbs. I certainly am using up my full share of the payload. How will beginners learn to fly? In four-seat airplanes such as the Piper Warrior. Two present-day Americans are about the same weight as four Americans were back in the 1950s when these airframes were certified.

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My turbine-crazed friends and I did a test flight in a King Air 200 today. David is a magnet for miserable weather and every time we fly together the clouds are spread over the airport with winds gusting to 30 knots (fairness compels me to note that he accuses ME of being the bad weather magnet). Today was no exception: clouds, cold, wind gusting over 30 knots, snow showers, wind shear advisories.

If you’re going to fly in miserable weather, the King Air isn’t a bad choice. The plane is famously immune to icing, rough runways, pilot incompetence, and mechanical woes. The plane has two big jet engines turning 4-blade props that spin at 1500-1900 rpm. Cabin size is slightly smaller than a Pilatus PC-12 and the King Air lacks the huge door that enables bulky cargo (and obese passengers?) to be forklifted into the plane. If you do have a lot of fat friends, it is comforting to know that the plane, designated C-12F, is regularly operated by the U.S. military at 15,000 lbs; the civilian model has a gross weight of 12,500 lbs., coincidentally the maximum weight aircraft that may be legally flown without a type rating. Cruise speed, range, and payload are similar to the PC-12. Construction quality is superb, as is the cabin fit and finish, at least on a par with the Pilatus. The pilot seat is more adjustable and comfortable than the seat in the PC-12. Once seated, you’re surrounded by Collins Pro Line 21 avionics, the same glass panels that are in mid-sized business jets and very similar to what is in Boeing airliners. The Pilatus, by contrast, comes with the same radios as the Diamond Katana two-seat plastic trainer. I immediately fell in love with the user interface, presentation, and capabilities of the Collins system, which were vastly better than anything that I’ve ever flown before. [God help you after the five-year warranty runs out and you have to replace one of those puppies at airliner prices.]

Taxiing the King Air is simple, much easier for a beginner than the Twin Commander. Takeoff is straightforward except that the pilot is 100 percent responsible for watching engine torques and temperatures. You rotate at 100 knots, enter the clouds, and if you’ve pushed the power levers too far forward a couple of small gauges off to the right will start flashing. The consequences of overtorquing a free turbine such as on the King Air are much smaller than the direct-drive engines on the Twin Commander, which is presumably why Beech didn’t bother with automated systems to limit power automatically.

The King Air is extremely stable and it was easy to hold the plane in a reasonable attitude despite moderate turbulence. I felt no urge to engage the autopilot and was able to keep the plane on heading and altitude more easily than the similar weight Twin Commander that I’ve been flying (on the downside, the King Air felt less nimble). Interior noise is as low as 78 dBA in some parts of the airplane during some phases of flight and as high as 88 dBA. Generally speaking, interior noise was 81-85 dBA, similar to the Twin Commander, but inferior to the turbojets that people have been buying instead of the King Air. Sitting in the back while others flew, my stomach did not enjoy the side-to-side yaw from all of the bumps.

Our friend David, with 600 hours and no multi-engine rating, was given a simulated engine failure. The King Air has an autofeather system; if an engine quits, the prop automatically feathers to a low-drag angle. He handled the resultant yaw with ease, keeping the airplane straight with rudder. An engine failure in a twin turbine airplane is much easier to manage than in a twin-engine piston.

Landing wasn’t all that easy with a gusty 30 knot wind at a significant angle to the runway, but it wasn’t all that difficult either; 120 knots down the glideslope slowing to 100-110 over the numbers. Despite the supposed power lag with a free turbine, I found the airplane to be approximately as responsive to power changes as the Twin Commander, which is a similar weight. The switch and systems complexity didn’t seem substantially greater than in the Pilatus or TBM-700. A lower time but serious pilot could be trained to operate this plane safely and the insurance companies seem to agree, having quoted similar rates and training requirements for my 600-hour friend in the Pilatus and King Air.

Operating cost on a King Air is higher than on the Pilatus due to spinning two engines. The fuel burn is 100 gallons per hour instead of 70-75. Is the difference worth it? If you’re over the North Atlantic and one of those engines suffers a loss of oil pressure, very likely!

What does the Pilatus do better? Short runways. The Pilatus flies and lands so slowly that pilots experienced with both seem to be comfortable with 30 percent less runway. Unless the approaches were completely flat, you probably wouldn’t take a King Air 200 into an airport shorter than 3000′.

[Second opinions: Our Boeing 767 pilot friend thought the plane was vastly superior to the Pilatus. The 600-hour pilot thought it was harder to control than the Pilatus (I reserve judgement on this one because we flew the planes under such different weather conditions).]

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Here’s what I wrote at Amazon about my T-Mobile Sidekick:

The good: Full-time connectivity with AOL Instant Messenger, useful if you’re working with a team of folks who also use AIM.

The physical design: Sort of nice, but it should be a flip-phone like the original Treo. Despite being careful to use the key lock, the phone made at least one call per day that I did not intend.

Voice quality: About 30 percent of people on the other end of the line complained that they heard a bad echo. This went away when I selected speakerphone mode, so it was a problem with the device and not the T-Mobile service.

Web browsing: Very slow and the browser isn’t recognized by sites such as Google as coming from a small screen, so you get the large screen versions of every site. The browser can’t handle Javascript, so some newer sites aren’t usable (admittedly this is more a statement about how bad today’s Web developers are). When I swapped this for a T-Mobile MDA (Windows-based phone), the Web browsing speed went up despite the fact that it was using the same network.

Overall User Interface: Poorly conceived. There are two ways to get to the address book. One is from the “phone” menu and one is from “address book”. If you get to a contact from the phone menu, you can’t see the mailing address, email address, or any other info. If you get to a contact from the address book menu, it is possible to call one of the phone numbers but the option is buried deep in a menu and there is no shortcut. The Windows-based phones handle this much better. Where a Windows-based phone gives you a welcome screen showing events for today, new messages, todos, etc., you’d have to hunt among many different screens on the Sidekick to get this info.

Syncing with the Internet: The idea of the Sidekick is a great one; have all of the information on a Web site and the phone keeps itself sync’d up with the site. Sadly, the Web applications aren’t the most powerful and they are cumbersome to use. You can’t leave yourself logged in from your desktop computer to the calendar or address book. If you want to look up an address from your home computer, you’ll have to go to the T-Mobile Web site to log in and then click a few more times to get to the Sidekick desktop. If you’ve kept a lot of information in Outlook over the years, you’ll find that much has been truncated after export/import to Sidekick. An Outlook note associated with a contact, for example, can be much longer than the corresponding field with Sidekick.

Basic Functions: There is no calculator that I could find. A Windows-based phone would give you a whole spreadsheet AND a calculator.

I hate to be a shill for Microsoft and I don’t think it would be that hard to make something better than Windows Mobile, but the Sidekick is not it.

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The new phone is the T-Mobile MDA. It is not a flip-phone like my old dead Motorola Windows-based phone, but it has a full QWERTY keyboard and the charging connector isn’t broken yet. The newest versions of the Windows phone OS seems to have some improved features, e.g., you can sync Notes from Microsoft Outlook. The new phone has voice dialing, which I appreciate.

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New England is one of the nation’s most miserably windy areas. Boston is far windier on average than Chicago, for example. The prevailing winds tend to be from the northwest. Logan Airport has parallel runways in every orientation except northwest. When the wind is really blowing from the northwest, therefore, flights start backing up at Logan, all forced to use Runway 33. More than 30 years ago, some bright administrator at Massport decided that building a 5000′ (short by jet standards) commuter airline runway 14/32 (oriented towards magnetic heading 320 in one direction, i.e., facing a northwest wind). This led to a big fight by neighborhood and environmental groups, a court injunction in 1976, a lifting of the injunction in 2003, and the runway opening last week (new airport diagram).

In the same amount of time that it took Los Angeles to add millions of jobs, India and China to grow their way out of abject poverty, and the microprocessor to grow from infancy to 3 billion instructions per second… we here in Boston managed to build one runway facing the wind…

[Logan was in the news about a month ago as well. Massport tried to prevent Continental from providing wireless Internet in its lounge, fearing that it would cut down on the number of people who fork over $8/day (down from $10) to Massport for the privilege of using Internet while trapped at Logan (and already paying substantial passenger fees to Massport rolled into their ticket price and Continental, of course, was paying high rent for the lounge space). The FCC rained on Massport’s parade, citing rules that prevent landlords from electronically imprisoning tenants.]

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To round out my spate of airplane reviews… I made a couple of noise measurements today in the Twin Commander on the way back from Portland, Maine. This is truly a pilot’s airplane. At 10,000′ and 200 knots, the front seats were 81-82 dBA and the rear seats, which are closer to the props, were at 85 dBA. The owner reports that the sound levels are considerably less at higher altitudes and were reduced in this airplane by “super soundproofing” when the interior was redone.

[I’m now up to about 10 hours of multi-engine turbine time and also picked up my Airline Transport Pilot certificate earlier in the week, doing a checkride in the Cirrus SR20. Goals for the next few months: ATP multi-engine, multi-engine instructor, helicopter instrument/ATP and helicopter instrument instructor.]

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