Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” — MLK, August 28, 1963

In the last couple of weeks I applied for a National Science Foundation grant (to go to Antarctica as part of their artists and writers program) and an FAA flight instructor’s certificate, both of which involved cumbersome Web-based application systems.  The NSF won’t let you proceed with any application unless you tell them your race, your sex, and your “ethnicity” (Hispanic/non-Hispanic).  They say that they won’t look at an application unless the cover sheet includes an explanation of how you are going to spend the money in a way that helps what they call “underrepresented groups” (i.e., you’re supposed to say how you are going to hire people with particular skin colors or sex chromosomes).

In using the FAA system a few days later it struck me as odd that they didn’t ask my race, sex, or ethnicity.  In fact this might be one of the last government agencies that handles applications for its services without regard to race, sex, or ethnicity.  The FAA doesn’t say “We really like your skin color, Mr. Airline Transport Pilot certificate applicant, so for you we’re going to cut the required number of hours of experience from 1500 to 500.”

[In case you’re curious, the NSF won’t let me know for some weeks but folks who’ve gotten the grants say that one is almost always denied as a first-time applicant.  I passed my flight instructor test with the FAA examiner (3.5 hours of oral exam plus 1.7 hours of flying a rented Piper Arrow with retractable landing gear).]

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People who sell $1 million condos often complain that paying a 6 percent standard (read “fixed by collusion” among realtors) commission is too much ($60,000 for what might only be a few days of work).  Economists who have studied the real estate market, however, find that in some ways the commission is too low because realtors don’t work very hard to sell clients’ houses compared to their personal houses.  In other words they sell a customer’s house relatively cheap so that it will sell quickly rather than work for many weeks to get the best price and 6% of the extra.

Why haven’t we seen anyone propose a commission structure that says the realtor gets a 25% commission… but only on the amount above the assessed value of the property?  Your typical $1 million NY or Boston apartment is assessed at maybe $850,000 and could be sold for that price with almost no effort in a few days so the commission paid on such a sale shouldn’t be more than $1000.  If a realtor could sell the place for $1.2 million via clever marketing, however, she should be entitled to a fat commission.

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Somehow it seems that I have committed to staying in Boston for the cold miserable months of February through May 2006 to teach 6.171 (“Software Engineering for Internet Applications”).  After reading this article on John F. Kerry’s grades at Yale, I’ve decided to give all of my students Ds.  Apparently that is the path to leadership in America.  The A-students end up going to graduate school and making $48,000/year as humanities professors (until they get denied tenure, at which time they take an entry-level job as a high school teacher, age 42).

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The trip back from Quebec City involved a stop in Burlington, Vermont to clear customs, borrow the “crew car” at the airport gas station (FBO), rent bikes along the lakeshore, and fly back to Boston at around 6:30 pm when the afternoon thunderstorms were supposed to be dissipating.  Each leg of the flight was about one hour and we were in the clouds almost the entire time.  The new airplane has a datalink with the National Weather Service’s NEXRAD system for finding rain showers, thunderstorms, and lightning strikes.  As another demonstration of the power of U.S. government bureaucracy this datalink adds about $10,500 to the cost of the airplane.  If you buy a battery-powered receiver to plug into your laptop and use without connecting to the airplane’s electrical system the cost is about $800.  Consequently, just as with the GPS systems that would warn Cessna pilots out of the Washington, D.C. airspace, hardly anyone with an older airplane has this kind of datalink.  On the second leg the datalink proved very valuable.  The air traffic controllers in this region have a simultaneous display of air traffic and weather and you can ask them for vectors to keep clear of heavy rain but it is very nice indeed to see it all in on the airplane’s dashboard moving map.

As it turned out the rainstorms and lightning were still active in some areas of Vermont and New Hampshire.  But with the datalink we were able to steer clear of anything worse than light rain.  My old plane didn’t have the datalink and I probably would have chickened out and stayed on the ground until the FBO’s weather terminal showed the RADAR calming down.

I’m already missing the friendly people of Quebec.  The Departure controller asked if I’d enjoyed my weekend there.  I especially remember Eric Proulx, a farmer in the city market who showed us photos of his goats at the Ferme Tourilli, and gave us samples of his delicious Cap Rond cheese, which he says is available in one Boston store (I’ve emailed him to find out which one; he couldn’t remember at the time).

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I promised a friend to take her for an excursion by private airplane to a foreign country where they speak a strange tongue unknown to 97 percent of the world’s population.  She readily agreed.  We folded ourselves into the four-seat propeller-driven single-engine Cirrus SR20 and entered the clouds above Hanscom Air Force Base near Boston.  We didn’t see the ground again until about 600′ above a long runway amidst a cold rain-soaked landscape.  “Welcome to Quebec City,” I said to her.

[Tip for dogless travelers:  the Auberge St-Antoine is truly a fine hotel in the old city.]

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I’ve posted a review of my new airplane, the Cirrus SR20, at http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/cirrus-sr20

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Step 1:  Insert Incredibles DVD Disk 2 (Extra Features) into DVD Player.

Step 2: Select Index from the menu.

Step 3: Select Next Page to go to the next page of options.

Step 4: Wait about 20 seconds for a weird little spider to appear in the top right of the screen.

Step 5: Hit the Up key on the remote and then the Enter key to select the little spider.

Step 6: Sit back and enjoy a clip of my cousin Doug Frankel riding a scooter through the hallways of Pixar.

Much more fun than the latest Star Wars movie (where is the humor that they had back in 1977?) and less time-consuming.

[Doug works as an animator at Pixar.  His character on the Incredibles was Edna E. Mode, the fashion designer.]

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Julian and I arrived back in Boston this evening in our new Cirrus SR20, N707WT.  The trip back was a good illustration of the pluses and minuses of small airplane travel.  Although I was fairly tired after 10 hours of flight training all day Friday and Saturday morning we departed Duluth Saturday afternoon in order to stay ahead of a line of thunderstorms.  After gazing down at the interesting colors in Lake Superior and the top portion of Lake Michigan we stopped in Pellston, Michigan near where Lakes Michigan and Huron meet and then departed for an instrument flight rules (IFR) flight around the top of Lake Huron and over Toronto into Buffalo, New York.  The lake and the city lights were quite beautiful from 7000′ above sea level.  We did an uneventful instrument landing system (ILS) approach through some rain into Buffalo.  It was dark by then so it was nice to have the centerline and touchdown-zone lighting.  The FBO at Buffalo found us a $52/night hotel and we collapsed until 9:00 am this morning.

From Buffalo to Boston is only about 2.5 hours but one must cross the Berkshires (3000′ high) and the forecast was for moderately low clouds, ice in those clouds, rain, and a really low freezing level due to the cold temps on the surface (only about 48 degrees in Albany today).  It wasn’t safe to go under the clouds given the numerous obstructions from towers, hills, and mountains.  The Cirrus doesn’t have a turbocharger so it wouldn’t have been able to climb over the top of the clouds, forecast to 20,000′.  We waited on the ground in Buffalo until 3:00 pm for some of the rain to dissipate on the RADAR and for some of the temperatures aloft to warm up.  We decided to fly to Albany at 7000′ and if we picked up any ice we’d go to the minimum enroute altitude (5000′) and see if that was above freezing.  If it wasn’t we’d continue to descend and land in Albany where we knew that the temperature would be above freezing.  We would not continue across the Berkshires where it would be impossible to descend as far or as quickly due to the mountains.

We entered the clouds about 2500′ above the runway at Buffalo and broke out about 6000′ above sea level.  This was a great illustration of the advantages of an instrument rating.  Instead of bumping around near the ground we were above the clouds in smooth air.  Gradually, however, we approach a wall of higher clouds.  This was the rain system we’d seen on the RADAR and that we could also see in our airplane, which has a receiver to get weather information from the XM radio satellites (this instrument runs from the Avidyne multi-function display, which had failed during a training flight and restarted automatically but then crashed and got stuck on our trip into Buffalo, so we didn’t have much confidence in this).  At 7000′ the main outside air temperature (OAT) gauge showed +4 degrees C.  This is the one associated with the engine-monitoring system and in most Cirrus airplanes is the only one enabled.  We had met a mechanic on Saturday, however, who knew how to reenable the OAT gauge on the primary flight display (PFD), which has its probe farther out on the wing.  This read -2 degrees C.  We asked Air Traffic Control to ask some of the airliners for temperature reports at 7000′ and we learned that it was probably much closer to -2 than to +4. 

Heading towards Albany we picked up a little frost on part of the wing as the temperature dropped to -4 degrees C (or +2 if we believed the standard instrument).  We asked for 5000′ and the temperature rose and the frost came off.  We asked for a routing closer to Hartford, Connecticut to stay over lower terrain and into warmer air.  ATC gave us the new routing over Westover Air Force Base in Western, MA.  The rest of the flight was uneventful though almost solidly in the clouds the whole time.  My landing wasn’t quite as smooth as the ones that I had done in training though by no means was it hard.  The primary flight display (PFD) did not like the little bump, however, and drew red X’s across its electronic attitude indicator and gyro compass, telling us not to trust them and to refer to the backup “steam gauges”.

Our total flight time from Duluth to Boston was about 7 hours despite slight headwinds almost the entire way (this is unusual when going west to east; it is supposed to be a tailwind).  The Cirrus is a fast little plane that is economical to operate and reasonably priced.  But we couldn’t fly on our schedule and we never knew whether we were going to make it through Albany or not.  The minimum airplane that is practical for transportation as opposed to recreation is something like a Piper Malibu with a turbocharger to climb above the clouds and de-icing equipment sufficient to earn FAA certification for “flight into known icing”.  The Malibu would have climbed over the top of all that weather and then come down into Boston.  We never would have had to turn on the de-icing gear.

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Picking up an airplane in Duluth, Minnesota is a bit different from my last experience picking one up in London, Ontario.  The Canadian factory didn’t have a “Guns are banned from these premises” sign out front.  Another difference is that the Cirrus factory has an F-16 parked right next to it, belonging to George W. Bush’s beloved Air National Guard.  This F-16 is apparently in need of some maintenance because it has been sitting out for the entire winter.  Only our government can afford to leave a $30 million airplane outside exposed to the harsh northern elements!

One thing that is more or less the same is the miserable weather.  For the morning flight today the weather was 100′ overcast and 1/4 mile visibility.  I went to the Duluth Aquarium instead and then to the Richard I. Bong museum in Superior, Wisconsin.  Bong was a Wisconsin farm boy who went on to become the U.S.’s most successful P-38 fighter pilot in the Pacific War, downing more than 40 Japanese planes.  The museum staff, having noticed my coupon from Cirrus, hauled out an old movie on “how to fly your new P-38” from Lockheed circa 1942.  The product was described in the video as a “real fighting man’s airplane” and a “man’s airplane”.  Close-to-the-ground maneuvers were described as “not likely to be a habit-forming.”  The plane worked well for Bong, who survived all of his combat missions.  Sadly he was killed while test-flying a jet-powered fighter in 1945.  Major Bong was 24 years old.

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The end.

[Story put out by Famous Dave’s, a bbq place in downtown Duluth, Minnesota.]

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