Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Wrapping up my stay in Washington, DC, here’s a report on the museums.  The National Gallery has a Dan Flavin show.  Even if you have seen his fluorescent light works in Marfa, Texas or at Dia:Beacon this exhibition is worthwhile.  My favorite piece is “untitled (honor of Harold Joachim) 3″, a corner installation that graces the cover of Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights.  The new National Museum of the American Indian has a temporary show of George Morrison wood collages.  Morrison was a 20th century Chippewa artist.  The cafeteria is fantastic.  The rest of the American Indian museum is worth seeing in the sense that a train wreck is fascinating.  The project cost more than $220 million and is kind of a sick supersized parody of Frank Lloyd Wright’s NY Guggenheim.  There is a huge cylindrical atrium that is basically empty and that barely relates to the exhibits, which are well off to the side in dark claustrophobic galleries.  The artwork and artifacts are dimly lit and crammed into crowded display cases.  Compared to the anthropology museum in Mexico City or the average American Indian museum in Oklahoma or South Dakota this new Smithsonian is a depressing example of the current state of American non-profit organization management.  It reminds one of the disappointing Udvar-Hazy Air and Space annex at Dulles Airport, where nearly $1 billion seems to have been invested in the kind of museum that Polynesian cargo cultists might have built.  I.e., a lot of interesting objects (airplanes) are displayed but the assumption is that they can’t be understood or explained.

[Update:  Ellis Vener just emailed a photo that he snapped of Alex in the back seat.]

Just finished Philip Roth’s latest novel, The Plot Against America, a worthy addition to any Jewish pilot’s bookshelf.  Roth concentrates on his usual terrain of Newark, NJ Jewish family life.  This time the background is an America in which Charles Lindbergh has beaten FDR in the 1940 presidential election.  Lindbergh proceeds to negotiate deals with Japan and Germany rather than enter World War II and the federal government initiates some programs designed to disperse Jews from their traditional neighborhoods in places such as Newark out into the American heartland, e.g., rural Kentucky.

A lame ending and not as good as American Pastoral, for which Roth won the Pulitzer, but a lot better than Roth’s early novels and worth a try even if you were at some point forced to read Portnoy’s Complaint.

Alex and I set off from Boston Tuesday on a trip via light aircraft to northern New Jersey, Washington, DC, Norfolk, VA, and Gettysburg, PA.  I try to avoid flying in the clouds and I try to avoid flying in the dark.  But there was a cloud deck over New Jersey at about 2500′ above the ground and the weather for Wednesday was forecast to be much worse.  So it was going to be a flight through at least some clouds.  If I had been alone I would have left around noon but a friend wanted a ride for the first leg of the trip and couldn’t leave work immediately.  So we didn’t take off from Hanscom Air Force Base (Bedford, MA) until after 3 pm.  Knowing that there would be clouds in New Jersey and not wanting to deal with the complex air space around New York City, I filed an instrument flight rules (IFR) plan.  Knowing that it would be dark when we arrived I decided to go to Teterboro airport where they have a precision instrument landing system (ILS) rather than cheaper simpler Essex County Airport where they have smaller runways and no ILS (Essex County is where JFK, Jr. kept his Piper Saratoga; Teterboro is closer to Manhattan but horrifically expensive for fuel and other services).  From the weather forecasts that I’d seen it sounded as though 6000′ would put me above the lowest deck of clouds and below the higher decks.  That was indeed true until around Hartford, CT.  Then we were headed straight for the top of a cloud.  The dog in the back didn’t budge from his sleeping position but I could feel some tension from the right seat.  “Why aren’t we climbing to get above that cloud?” my passenger asked.

An instrument clearance means that Air Traffic Control (ATC) has cleared a block of airspace in front of you of any other airplanes that are also flying under IFR.  The pilot is still responsible for looking for visual flight rules (VFR) airplanes when out of the clouds but it is ATC’s job to keep everyone inside the clouds separated from each other.  The system only works if pilots don’t deviate from their clearance, which includes an assigned altitude.  This I explained just as we went into the cloud top.  In addition to obscuring one’s view of the horizon clouds have a nasty habit of containing turbulent air.  The airplane rocked a bit.

The real problem with flying in clouds in the New England winter is airframe icing.  Whenever the temperature in a cloud is below 0 C there is a risk of ice accumulation.  The temperature, on average, drops 2 degrees C for every 1000′ rise in altitude.  So at 6000′ it was about 12 degrees colder than on the ground or -2 C.  A simple airplane such as my Diamond Star DA40 does not have heated wings, a heated propeller, rubber boots along the wings that can crack ice, or a system for spreading antifreeze out onto the wings.  It does have “pitot heat” to make sure that the instruments for measuring airframe and altitude don’t have their air intakes frozen shut.  I had turned this on just before entering the clouds but it is only helpful for maintaining airplane control while getting out of the ice.  My rule for instrument flying in the winter is that I won’t go unless it is above freezing at 3000′ above the ground.  Because there are no mountains or other obstacles over the coastal sprawl of the East Coast it is always possible to descend to 3000′ without fear of hitting something.

After 15 minutes in the clouds small amounts of ice began to accumulate on the “wing walk” grippy surface next to the cockpit.  Airliners and the one small airplane on the radio (New York Approach) were complaining about ice accumulation and asking for lower altitudes.  The helpful controller said that people a few miles ahead were reporting ice and asked me if I wanted lower.  I was cleared first to 5000′ where the temperature was 0 and the ice accumulation stopped but the built-up ice did not come off.  At 4000′ the temperature was +2 and the ice quickly disappeared.  We were still inside the clouds at 4:30 pm when the sun was supposed to set so we noticed only a rapid darkening of our surroundings.

Teterboro airport tends to be busy and a day with low clouds when everyone is coming in IFR slows things down considerably.  In theory ATC should have parked us in a holding pattern somewhere.  I would have been responsible for driving around in fairly precise ovals, 1 minute long on the flat side, at some precise point in space.  In practice the New York controllers are so good and they have complete RADAR coverage so to be nice they just gave me vectors that took me northwest of Teterboro until it was my turn to come back in.  With vectors they just say “fly heading 270″ and you point the airplane west at the present altitude.  After about a 10-minute vector delay we were turned back in towards Teterboro and cleared down to 3000′.  We didn’t break out of the clouds completely until we were at 2000′ and heading in towards Runway 19 at Teterboro.  It can be a challenge to locate a runway amidst the clutter of parking lot and street lights in an urban area but the Teterboro runway is 7000′ long and has a fancy centerline lighting system.  In any case it isn’t necessary to visually identify the runway until several hundred feet above the ground.  An ILS is flown by tracking two radio beams emanating from just in front of the runway.  The localizer beam gives left/right guidance and the glideslope beam gives up/down guidance.  Deviation from the center of these beams is displayed on a little round dial on the airplane dashboard.  Not wanting to trust my perceptions in the dark, I flew the gauges while running the pre-landing checklist.

Once on the ground we taxied off the runway as fast as possible because there was a huge Gulfstream business jet right behind us, moving at more than 2X the speed of the little Diamond Star.  Both of us taxied into Jet Aviation, one of the airport gas stations at Teterboro.  Their parking lot this Tuesday before Thanksgiving was crammed with business jets and turbine-powered helicopters.  There were probably $2-3 billion worth of airplanes on their ramp and in their hangars.  The Jet Aviation staff took our bags from the plane through the palatial terminal into a waiting Hertz rental car, a little over 2 hours after we’d taken off from Bedford and about 3 hours after we’d left Cambridge.

Next stop is Washington, DC.  We have a big family dinner there at 4 pm on Thanksgiving Day but the weather forecast calls for clouds, rain, strong headwinds, turbulence, gusty surface winds, etc.

Helicopters that are descending with a fair amount of power produce an annoying sound called “blade slap”.  Beginners are cautioned to avoid this condition because it leads to people on the ground complaining to the FAA about “those damned helicopters.”  (One can avoid blade slap by lower the collective to descend more positively rather than drifting slightly down.)  A big turbine-powered helicopter flew over Harvard Square the other day, slapping away.  I was with a friend, call her “K”, who hasn’t spent much time in the work force.  I asked her whether she found the sound annoying.

“Helicopter noise doesn’t bother me,” K responded.  “I assume that it is a traffic helicopter or some sort of medical emergency.  What I really hate is airplane noise.”

Why?

“Whenever I hear a big commercial jet overhead I think about companies sending their employees out for ridiculous meetings with each other where they will show vacuous PowerPoint presentations and have meaningless conversations.”

According to this summary of a GAO report (links to the full PDF on gao.gov), “Development of the GPS-enhancing Wide Area Augmentation System took six years longer and cost $1.5 billion more than it should have, the GAO said, largely due to ineffective coordination among various offices of the FAA that were working on the program”.

I’m considering a trip to the South Pacific in late December/January.  Never having been there I would appreciate advice from those who have (you can use the comment section below).  Here are some things that I would like to be able to do there:  snorkeling over coral reefs that grow up very close to the surface in calm water; beginner surfing lessons; bicycle riding on quiet roads and/or mountain biking on not-very-technical trails (not super hilly); meeting interesting well-educated locals and/or tourists; renting and flying a small plane or helicopter with an instructor; reading a book on a balcony or deck overlooking the water.

As far as practicalities go, I’d like to stay 3-5 days in any one place and not spend too much time transferring from island to island.  It would be good to find some places with enough infrastructure to support comfortable mid-range hotels.  I don’t want to slum it with the backpackers but I don’t want to spend $1000/day to sit on a beach either.  From my cursory reading of the guidebook it seems that a lot of these islands are so underdeveloped that creating a Western-style hotel environment is very expensive.

Where to start, then, amidst the millions of square miles of the South Pacific?

Last Friday I took a checkride to add a Private helicopter rating to my Commercial pilot’s certificate.  The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will, in theory, examine applicants for this rating but in practice prefers that you pay a Designated Examiner.  The fun started at 9:00 am in Nashua, NH at CR Helicopters with Joe Brigham, a retired legend in the cranberry bogs of New England.  The oral portion of the exam lasted until nearly 11:00 am at which point the winds had picked up from calm to a typically unpleasant New England 10 knots gusting 15.  When the objective is to hold the helicopter steady within a foot or two of a reference point on the ground these kinds of winds make life tricky, especially in the Robinson R22, one of the world’s lightest helicopters.

Running the startup checklist on the R22 takes about 4 minutes during which one tests the engine’s dual independent ignition systems, the carb heat, the sprag clutch that enables the rotors to freewheel if the engine quits, and the low RPM warning horn that sounds if the blades begin to slow down.  The test complete, I called Nashua Tower to ask for clearance to a grassy area east of the paved 5500′-long runway.  Once we got across the runway Joe asked to see a sideways hover taxi then a backwards hover taxi.  These are done with the skids of the helicopter 3-5 feet off the ground.  I set the helicopter back on the grass and Joe asked me to pick it back up.  When we were 2′ from the ground he twisted the throttle on his side of the ship to idle, simulating an engine failure.  The helicopter immediately started a yaw to the left.  I pushed the right antitorque pedal to bring the nose back to where it had been pointed.  As the R22 settled towards the ground I pulled the collective pitch control to use some of the rotational energy of the blades to cushion the impact.  Every time you pull more collective the helicopter wants to yaw to the right so I had to step on the left pedal.  We thumped down on the ground about 1 second after Joe had closed the throttle, reasonably smoothly and within about 5 degrees of where we’d started on the heading.  The standard for a Private rating is 10 percent and Joe declared that I had demonstrated a hovering autorotation.

The next maneuver was the Quickstop, simulating an attempt to take off and then an abort due to failure to clear trees or the appearance of an obstacle.  We had to get over to the side of a small hill about 1000′ away.  I accelerated the helicopter to about 40 knots and 40′ above the ground and then pulled sharply back on the cyclic to flare off the speed while simultaneously lowering collective to prevent the helicopter from ballooning up in altitude and using the antitorque pedals to prevent yaw.  At the end of the Quickstop Joe asked for a running landing to simulate bringing the helicopter down at a high altitude in which the machine lacks sufficient power to hover.  We slid into the grass.

We were near the hill at this point so it was time to demonstrate slope operations.  One approaches the slope at a 45-degree angle with the helicopter yawed so that the skids are parallel to the slope at all times.  You hover so that the upslope skid is about 2-3′ above the ground and then gradually lower the ship until the upslope skid touches.  At that point you push the cyclic into the slope to lock the skid against the slope while simultaneously adjusting collective pitch to hold a level attitude.  After pausing in that position for a moment I lowered the collective to bring the downslope skid into contact with the ground while simultaneously adding addition cyclic towards the upslope to keep that skid locked.

Slope operations complete we started with a normal takeoff and normal approach.  Unless you are all by yourself in a Blackhawk you don’t take off straight up in a helicopter.  You bring the ship up into a hover and then push the cyclic forward until the helicopter is flying fast enough that the blades are biting into fresh undisturbed air.  This is called “Effective Translational Lift” (ETL) and the helicopter rapidly picks up speed and then altitude beyond this point.  The normal approach and landing is a reasonably shallow angle coming down toward some traffic cones abeam the Nashua windsock.  Once back on the ground Joe asked for a maximum performance takeoff in which one does try to depart as nearly vertical as is possible.  This involves spending some time under the R22’s “deadman’s curve”, a combination of having a low airspeed and a low altitude such that it would be impossible to make a smooth landing in the event of an engine failure.  Joe asked for a steep approach to the cones.  This is not straight down as you might think but rather just steep enough that you could clear the trees around a mid-size field before landing on someone’s helipad.

Next up was an autorotation.  This involves closing the throttle about 700′ above the ground and gliding down at about 65 knots and 1500′-per-minute descent rate.  Starting roughly 40′ above the ground I began to pull back on the cyclic to slow our forward speed and reduce the descent rate.  When the forward speed was just about gone I leveled the ship with the cyclic so that the tail did not strike the ground and began to let the R22 sink towards the ground with just a bit of forward speed.  At the last minute I pulled the collective to cushion the final impact with energy from the rotating blades.

The final part of the checkride was escaping from a vortex ring state.  Joe took the controls and slowed the helicopter down so that we had lost almost all forward speed.  Then he lowered the collective to start a 500 foot-per-minute descent from our 700′ altitude.  The helicopter began “settling with power” into its own disturbed air, falling suddenly much faster than the initial descent rate established by Joe.  The controls became mushy just as he said “You have the controls”.  The way to escape from a vortex ring state is by pushing the cyclic forward to try to fly the helicopter forward out of the disturbed air while simultaneously lowering the collective so that the helicopter isn’t beating the air so hard.  Once I had recovered some flying speed I pulled on the collective to resume a climb.

That was it.  What can one do with a Private helicopter rating?  Take friends for rides, basically, and that’s about it.  I’ll be starting work on my Commercial rating next week.

Last night four of us walked over to Passim, the legendary folk music club in Harvard Square, to hear Arlo Guthrie perform.  Passim is a basement room furnished with spectacularly uncomfortable cast-off folding chairs.  Vegetarian food is available.  The chairs and the food immediately raise the question of, if folk music is supposed to represent the struggle of working-class Americans how come Passim doesn’t serve food that these folks would actually like (e.g., hamburgers) and chairs that would accomodate the typically obese frames of the poor.  Most of the time artists at Passim speak out from the stage against U.S. oppression of Iraqis, against George W. Bush, against Republicans, etc.  These protests elicit universal applause from the audience, all of whom apparently can agree on these points and all of whom are apparently rather irritated.  A true protest at Passim, one that would challenge the prevailing beliefs in the room, would be a leaflet arguing in favor of eating steak, touting its anemia-fighting and mood-mellowing properties.  Not to mention the fact that steak encourages the consumption of red wine, which is known to have many health benefits.

Guthrie came on stage after a warm-up by Alastair Moock, whose songs are heavily laced with the modern vocabulary of recovery.  The audience was awed by Guthrie’s impressive guitar playing, songwriting, and storytelling.  The guy has been on the road for most of his 57 years!

Arlo Guthrie is a lot less bitter about the American political situation than the average performer at Passim and the average audience member.  He pointed out that there is only one guy in the White House and lots of folks outside the White House.  Guthrie further noted that if the world were truly full of peace and love like all the folk singers wanted and if everyone were in perfect health then it would be awfully hard to accomplish any positive changed.  By contrast, “in a world as fucked us as this one it has never been possible to do so little little and achieve so much good.”

Guthrie drew a lot of strength from the final words of “Ma” in Grapes of Wrath:  “we will always be here, because we’re the people”, explaining that politicians come and go but the people remain to do the work and therefore can’t be ignored.  It occurred to me that perhaps this idea is obsolete in an age of offshoring.  In the old days there was always work for unskilled uneducated American labor.  Now that Mexico, India, and China are tied to us with Internet and container ships is that still true?

The headline in this article says it all… “Britain leads the world in giving out anti-depressants”

Who would have predicted that bad weather, congested roads, and an absurdly high cost of living would lead to unhappiness?

Despite widespread dissatisfaction with George W. Bush the Democrats managed to lose the 2004 election.  The U.S. has a population growth rate of 0.92% (source: CIA Factbook) and our population is forecast to reach 450 million by mid-century.  Thus economic (GDP) growth and job creation are essential if Americans are to enjoy a constant or rising standard of living.  Bush and Cheney weren’t our most successful business managers but they at least did work in the business world, attempting to produce economic growth and jobs.  The Democrats picked challengers who spent their entire lives working for the government or suing medical doctors for causing cerebral palsy.  These are activities that may redistribute the pie but won’t grow it.  Edwards might have been a particular weakness on this score because of the studies showing that lawyers reduce GDP.

Does anyone know of a governor or national Democratic politician who previously had a successful career in business?