Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Driving down here to Richmond, Virginia I was listening to an audio version of Barbara Ehrenreich of Nickel and Dimed, a book about how tough it is for the unskilled laborer in the U.S. and how many of these folks must work two jobs to make ends meet.  Upon arriving here, I found one of my teachers, Rob Roberts, working five jobs simultaneously and having done so for nine years.

In a big metropolitan area the TV station helicopter is a monstrous Bell 407 with four blades and enough horsepower from a single turbine to move the Queen Mary.  The 407 carries a pilot who worries only about flying the aircraft and talking occasionally to Air Traffic Control, a camera operator who points the camera at interesting events on the ground, an engineer who makes sure that the camera and video/audio communications links to the station are working properly, and the “talent”, a person with a good wardrobe and make-up whose voice and image skill out into viewers’ living rooms.

Richmond is a smaller city and only Channel 12 (NBC) even has a helicopter.  In the afternoons Rob Roberts fires up the HeloAir Jet Ranger and does all four of the jobs that are being done by four separate people in a big city Bell 407.  On days when he is unlucky some neophyte like me gets in and he now has to add a fifth job: flight instructor.

This is one of the things that I like about aviation.  One is very often pleasantly surprised at the supercompetence of the people involved at every level.  The mechanics are craftsmen.  The pilots usually have an impressive range of other skills.  The young ladies at the front desk of Richmond Jet Center are smarter, friendlier, kinder to a wayward Samoyed, and better looking than people working service jobs anywhere else in the city.  How many other fields can we say this about?  The one with which I have the most experience is software engineering.  Despite the higher pay, I would say that the average denizen of the software world is not supercompetent, though often he views himself as such, and the customers are not typically pleasantly surprised.

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My third flight in “Sky 12” became unexpectedly challenging when the GPS receiver for the microwave uplink failed.  Normally the transmitter automatically aligns itself to point at the TV station and send them a feed from the helicopter’s camera.  It can’t do this alignment if it doesn’t know where the helicopter is and without its GPS the only solution is for us to aim the transmitter manually.  My supervising pilot was Rob Roberts, who has been doing this for 9 years and is an expert in every facet of the operation (see earlier story).  Nonetheless if the helicopter changes its position or orientation the transmitter will need to be reaimed.  So we are forced to do all of our filming from an out-of-ground-effect (mid-air) hover, which I establish about one minute before our signal is due to be broadcast.  Rob doubles as “talent” and is one of the two pilots qualified to be an on-air reporter, for which we have a small camera pointed inside the helicopter.  About 45 seconds before we go live, the guys back at the station say “we’re receiving your feed; don’t move!”  This turns out to be one of the cruelest things possible to say to a helicopter pilot.  Inset into the camera monitor on my side of the machine is a little window showing the actual broadcast coming out of the TV station and into homes.  The little picture and the producer’s words serve as a constant reminder that “any kind of screw up and the screens inside 100,000 Richmond homes will go blank.  This kind of reflection turns out not to be conducive to good flying.

For the rest of the week I was able to handle most aspects of the job without too much fear or incompetence.  However at the end of every flight the fearsome dolly would be waiting.  If we just landed on the ramp it would be too hard for the maintenance guys to pull the Jet Ranger into the hangar.  So we land on a surprisingly small dolly, about 1′ high, which they then tow with a golfcart-style tug.  The dolly is a few feet wider than the Jet Ranger’s skids and a bit longer fore-and-aft so it shouldn’t be all that tough.  However, the one thing that you are taught as a helicopter pilot is never to look down at the ground when you’re trying to hover.  You always look off into the middle distance.  Looking down leads to overcontrol and wild oscillations.  Another problem is that the skids of the Jet Ranger are not easily visible to the pilot, unlike with a Robinson R22.  Finally there is the issue that if you get the helicopter into a position where it might fall off the dolly, or at least half off, there is a serious risk of dynamic rollover and having to go out and buy another $1 million helicopter.  This is the bit of knowledge that makes the whole thing hard.  If there were just some painted marks on the asphalt and the consequence of missing them were being embarrassed and picking the machine back up or buying lunch for the line guys it would be easy.  But the consequence is spectacular destruction and this ruins almost everyone’s concentration.  Apparently there is an expert instructor at the Bell factory school who refuses to land on a dolly.  He doesn’t have to do it regularly so he sees no need to add this kind of stress to his life on occasion.  Sadly at HeloAir one does have to do this after every flight and it turns my knuckles white.  At the end of the week I’m able to do it with only a bit of help from Rob but I would not want to try it by myself.

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Today was my first day flying “Sky 12”, Richmond, Virginia’s only traffic helicopter.  Sky 12 is a Bell 206 Jet Ranger that has been fitted with a Wescam gyro-stabilized camera mount and a microwave link back to the TV station.  Normally the helicopter is operated by a single pilot who simultaneously talks to the TV news producer, aims the camera, and positions the aircraft.  However, for $125 per hour the contractor, HeloAir, sells the right seat to rated helicopter pilots who want to build 206 time or, like me, just have some fun. The left seat is occupied by an expert with thousands of flying hours, a flight instructor’s rating, and years of experience doing TV work. This morning it was Alisa, one of only a few hundred female commercial helicopter pilots in the U.S. [Young female readers: this is a great career for a woman because there is a certain amount of preferential hiring on the basis of sex and employers want pilots who are as light as possible so that they can fill the rest of the ship with equipment or passengers (just don’t expect to earn more than $60,000/year and much much less for the first five years)].

Starting a turbine engine is more complex and fraught with potential for expensive damage than starting a piston engine.  You begin by holding down the starter button and holding it until the turbine has been spun up to about 15%.  Then you roll the throttle to flight idle, which introduces fuel into the turbine.  You continue holding the starter button down until the turbine has reached 60%, at which point turning, burning and cooling become self-sustaining.  If at any time the turbine outlet temperature goes into the red, indicating a “hot start”, you must roll the throttle back to “off” to take the fuel out of the system while again keeping the turbine rotating with the starter so that it gets cooling air.

Once started we lifted off from the ramp and climbed to 1200′ to circle downtown Richmond and await instructions from the station. Upon being told to film a particular bridge we would try to approach it so that we were heading into the wind.  Then we brought the helicopter to an “out of ground effect” (mid-air) hover, with the airspeed coming down below 30 knots.  Remember that we were into the wind so even if we weren’t moving over the ground we were still flying forward through the air to some extent.  This maneuver violates every principle that I had been taught in the light piston Robinson R22 during training.  The R22 has almost no inertia in the rotor system. If the engine quits the blades will spin down dangerously slow within about 1 second.  You must immediately lower the collective to begin gliding but also usually pull back on the cyclic to transfer some of the forward speed energy into higher blade RPM.  If you didn’t have any forward airspeed to perform that flare the blades potentially could spin down below about 83% in which case you fall like a rock and can’t recover without restarting the engine.  The Bell 206, by contrast, has a lot more inertia in the engine, spinning at 30,000 RPM, and the heavy rotor blades.  In the unlikely event that the engine were to quit there would be plenty of time to notice, react, lower the collective, and push the cyclic forward to regain airspeed to be used at the end of an autorotation the ground.

The Jet Ranger is mostly easier to fly than the R22 because it is so much heavier and therefore more stable.  Transitioning pilots will need to get used to a bit of lag after power adjustments are requested, watching the ball instead of yaw strings and using more anti-torque pedal in general, and the lack of feedback from the cyclic due to the hydraulic boosting.

One thing that I loved about the Jet Ranger was the lack of vibration in the ship overall and in the cyclic.  Some R22s feel like they are about to come apart and, even if you aren’t worried, the vibration is fatiguing.  Whether that smoothness is worth an extra $500 per hour is another question…

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I’m a reasonably frequent visitor to my parents’ house in Bethesda, Maryland.  Mom and Dad are both Harvard graduates and consequently have little trouble recognize the utter worthlessness of something developed to a large extent at MIT, i.e., the Internet.  There is thus no high-speed Internet connection in their house and their neighbors apparently share the belief that Internet is not worth paying for because there are no wireless networks from which to steal.

Frustrated at having to drive to a friend’s or sibling’s house every time I wanted to check the weather or email, I signed up for an $80/month Verizon data card.  Washington, D.C. area is one of its flagship service area, promising “typical speeds of 300-500 kbps, capable of reaching speeds up to 2 Mbps”.  Getting the PC 5220 card to work at all required a couple of calls to Verizon tech support, which, unlike Vonage and Lingo, involved minimal hold times and knowledgeable staff.  I needed to download a newer version of some software, which, of course, required an Internet connection…

How does it work?  The average throughput on the “broadband” network here in D.C. has been 50-100 kbps at most.  The software shows that at one point this computer achieved a peak rate of 450 kbps but there are long dropout periods when the rate is 0 kbps.  Most distressing, the service only lasts for 10-30 minutes, after which time this supposedly “always-on” service turns you off and you have to manually disconnect and reconnect to get back on.  Sometimes the software is smart enough to notice that you are disconnected and a little box comes up in the bottom right of your screen noting the fact of the disconnection.  Underneath the note are the words “Verizon: We never stop working for you (R)”.

On balance the service is somewhat similar in feel to a 56 kbps modem except that you never know if that 3-second wait for a Web page is going to turn into 60 seconds because you’ve been silently dropped from the network.

Using Windows XP it is sometimes necessary to reboot the machine in order to switch from 802.11b to Verizon or vice versa.

[Update: Verizon service in Richmond, VA: Richmond is part of the “broadband access” service area.  This translates into an average speed of  10-20 kbps.  There are enough dropouts that downloading a 3 MB email attachment proved impossible after four tries.  However, unlike in Washington, DC, the connection did not have to be manually reestablished every 10 minutes.]

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While driving from Boston to Washington, DC there were two occasions where a national wireless Internet would have saved some fuel.  The first occurred when impulse dictated the following of a “New Jersey State Aquarium” sign off the NJ Turnpike.  This attraction was in the car’s GPS database so I asked the machine to change its destination. However, it turned out that the aquarium was closed for renovation until May and the side trip was merely a fuel-wasting detour.

The second occasion was en route to Longwood Gardens, near Wilmington, Delaware (fabulous greenhouses this time of year).  A bad accident on the other side of the road would have made it much faster to stay on the Interstate for another few exits.

The GPS is a $1000 machine with a powerful computer, a full North American database on a microdrive, and a large LCD display.  Adding an 802.11 receiver would add almost nothing to the cost.  If the U.S. had a free universally available wireless Internet companies such as Garmin would build Internet transceivers into their products so that they would know (1) current opening hours of attractions, and (2) the locations of traffic jams to route around.

We complain that we are running out of oil but we aren’t willing to lift a technological finger to conserve any.

[Note: The traffic accident was an interesting example of Mutually Assured Destruction via SUV.  The driver of a GMC SUV had lost control of his vehicle and spun it around, ending up by smashing into a tree. Because his vehicle was so ponderously bulky the impact had knocked the tree out of the ground.  Sadly, in a Coyote v. Road Runner-esque turn of events, the tree proceeded to fall on the SUV’s roof.  In an effort to keep SUVs from rolling over there apparently isn’t much structure up there.  So the entire roof of the SUV had been flattened by the tree.]

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Turning off New Jersey Route 17 toward my cousin’s house in Allendale it occurred to me that maybe opponents of sprawl and strip malls are overlooking one bright spot.  There is something comforting about driving down Route 17 or the Rockville Pike in Maryland.  You know that if you have a car and a credit card you’ll be able to get everything that you might conceivably ever need and, after all, isn’t that what American life is all about?

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http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/17/national/17peterson.html is an interesting NY Times story because it features Laci Peterson’s stepfather in a Hawaiian shirt talking about Scott’s trip to Death Row.  One does not see that ever day.  The article also contains

In a wrenching display toward the end of the hearing, Ms. Peterson’s mother, Sharon Rocha, assumed the roles of her daughter and the grandchild that was never born, pleading aloud in a trembling voice for “Daddy” not to kill “Mommy and me.”

Assuming the role of a cerebral palsy baby was one of John Edwards’s favorite courtroom tricks.  Perhaps this will be commonplace now.

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An interesting juxtaposition… from a couple of months ago:

[Bernard Ebbers,] The ousted chief executive of a giant telecommunications company rocked with an accounting scandal told his congregation on Sunday that he was innocent of wrongdoing. Appearing at Easthaven Baptist Church in Brookhaven, Miss., as usual to teach Sunday school and attend the morning worship service, Bernard Ebbers made his first public comments about WorldCom since the disclosure of $3.8 billion in improper accounting last week, The Wall Street Journal reported.”I just want you to know you aren’t going to church with a crook,” Ebbers addressed the congregation at the end of the service.

And from today’s London Times:

BERNIE EBBERS, the former chief executive of WorldCom, faces the rest of his life in jail after being found guilty of orchestrating the biggest fraud in American corporate history.  … The jury of seven women and five men found Ebbers guilty on all counts in a Manhattan court.

Why is it that phone companies are always defrauding either customers or investors or both? 

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I’ve had so many interesting hours waiting on hold for tech support from Vonage and Lingo that I decided to write up the experience in http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/voice-over-ip

Please comment with ideas to make this more useful.

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Two talks at MIT this week have been thought-provoking in similar ways.  The first was by a physics professor, Frank Wilczek, who recently won the Nobel Prize for his work on the Strong Force, which holds together quarks to form atomic nuclei.  Wilczek showed some impressive drawings from the latest European particle accelerators in which subatomic particles are smashed together until the quarks start flying out.  (This lecture is available at http://web.mit.edu/nobel-lectures/.)  John Grotzinger, a geology professor, gave a talk about his experience with the Mars Rovers, which found evidence for flowing water on Mars in sedimentary rocks.  The Rovers communicate with an orbiter and can also communicate directly with stations on Earth.  In Grotzinger’s more than one year with the project they’ve never had a communications problem.

So… if human minds can get together to make ever-better particle accelerators, why can’t anyone build a reliable inexpensive nuclear power reactor?  And if the Mars Rovers can call Pasadena, how come nobody with a T-Mobile phone can make a call from most spots on the MIT campus or along Memorial Drive?

In the 1970s people would ask questions of the form “If they can put a man on the Moon, why can’t they do X?”  What would be the modern equivalent?  The one great human achievement of our current decade that can be compared to the lack of accomplishment in most bureaucracies?

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