The Permanence of Temporary Things: A Meditation

In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia,
On the trail of the lonesome pine—
In the pale moonshine our hearts entwine,
Where she carved her name and I carved mine;
Oh, June, like the mountains I'm blue—
Like the pine I am lonesome for you,
In the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia,
On the trail of the lonesome pine.

—from "The Trail of the Lonesome Pine"

A few hundred million years ago, a river dried up. It had been around for several million years, a barely-noticeable flicker in the geological sense of time. Perhaps it had found a new path, as shallow things sometimes do when things start to change around them. Perhaps its source had dried up and it no longer had anything to draw from, and as its lifespring dried up, it did too.

Whatever the case, its end is lost in the eternal current of time. We would have nothing left to speculate about had it not crossed paths with the Blue Ridge Mountains. Its temporary existence left a permanent pass in this ridge, and a way for things to get from one side of it to the other. It is gone, but it will never leave the ridge it once knew.

Looking eastward from V128, flying from CRW to IAD. If you want to look closer, the coordinates are approximately 38° 29' N, 78° 42' W.

Some millions of years before, that mountain ridge started skyward. Mountains climb when we're not looking. They grow like children, who stay the same day by day but somehow get bigger and bigger by the year. We grow like mountains, shaped by the forces that surround us, made distinct by what we cross paths along with along the way.

Sometime this growing process is tumultuous and chaotic. It is always disruptive, going from what is to what will be. That's why it's called growth. It also happens when we're not looking, or happens too slowly for us to see. We humans are almost as good at not seeing things that are there as we are at seeing things that aren't.

Sometimes the forces we encounter during that growth leave us a bit twisted. Where we are twisted, where the stresses and strains occur, we also end up the tallest.

Some of those we cross paths with cause scars. Those scars, like everything, may seem permanent, but they are no less subject to the erosion of time as anything else. They may seem more solid, more fixed, but their permanence is only temporary.

Handled well—and we all have to handle them—they become a better part of our character. The moon has craters, scars from impacts it suffered long ago with bodies long gone; they are what make it a beautiful fixture in the night sky instead of a plain bright ball. The Grand Canyon draws people from around the planet to drink in its immense, rugged beauty, yet is a scar left by the Colorado River. One of its most endearing features is that as the river carved its way through the plateau, it revealed the layers that are present underneath our feet, yet would never be seen any other way.

Almost yesterday, in geologic time, ice covered much of North America. The ice's day was as temporary as it was recent, but as it made its abrupt retreat, it gouged out permanent scars in the landscape of New York State. These long scars became a beautifully parallel set of lakes: the Finger Lakes.

Those scars are evidence that something's presence—and now its absence—was at one time important. It is the essence of the temporary given permanence.

Not everyone, however, is that important to us. Some pass through our lives like power lines cross mountains: unflinchingly straight while not even scratching our surface.

Others, like this sunset, are even more transient and temporary

yet leave us with a permanent memory of the spiral of light they caused to dance on the ceiling for a few brief moments before they passed on.

Some leave dry passes within us as a trace that they were once there. Others stay with us, filling up and flowing through those passes, and we shape them as they shape us.

And for those whose lives we pass through temporarily, perhaps the best hope we can have is to bring them a rainbow on their cloudy day; a bit of glory in their gloom.

We contain mountains within us, and from the top of those mountains flow rivers that shape others. Unlike mountains made of stone, however, we are made of stronger stuff. We can choose our response to the forces around us and change what kind of water springs from our tops. Only by doing so can our temporariness have a permanent impact.


The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a FAASafety Team representative and Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

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Flying the River Visual into Washington National

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The Washington Monument, the White House, the Capitol Building, the Lincoln Memorial and its reflecting pool, the Watergate Hotel, the Pentagon, and the world's most unintentionally violated prohibited airspace... all of these are only one short flight away. Only one short illegal flight unless you're a scheduled airline, that is, thanks to the "enhanced" security around Washington, D.C. after September 11, 2001.

Fortunately, we have flight simulators. Flight simulators let us practice old skills, acquire new ones, and rehearse approaches for free in a not-for-keeps environment. We can record our own videos and instant replays (I have a short video on that on the Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel) to go back an analyze what we did well and what we still need to improve on, and we can do it without fear of failing because no one is judging us except ourselves.

Nonetheless, probably one of most fun things about flight simulators is that we can use them to go places we'd never be able to go, whether it be because of time, money, or, in the case of flying into Washington-National, it being prohibited.

So I did just that recently. Although my daily life as an airline pilot has me based at Washington-Dulles, I have to fly in through DCA pretty regularly when all the direct flights to Dulles are full. As a happy coincidence, while I was planning my videos on flying the River Visual to 19 at DCA, I ended up in the cockpit jumpseat on a day the crew was flying that same approach in real life.

I was pleased to see that they flew it in real life the same way I had planned it in flight simulator. The first video goes into the details of planning it: laying out the route, picking navigational aids (in this case, a VOR) to help verify we're flying the route we planned, determining a good descent rate to use on the way in, etc.

Reader Bonus: Here's a tip I didn't have a chance to put in either video due to time constraints of the Five Minute Flight Lesson format: when planning descents in a 172, a rough rule of thumb is that you'll get about 100 feet per minute for every 100 RPM of throttle reduction. For example, if you're cruising at 2400 RPM and want a 500 foot per minute descent, set the power to approximately 1900 RPM. When you reduce the throttle, the nose will naturally lower on its own to maintain the airspeed you had it trimmed for Let the plane seek it—don't hold the nose up unless you're trying to slow down! Every plane has its own rough guide, so experiment with your particular aircraft and see what its power/descent ratio is. With just a little experimentation you'll make your flying life much easier!

In the second part, we get to enjoy the fruits of our labor and actually fly the plan. Along the way, you get to see some pictures I took while the crew took care of the flying.

Naturally, the second part has more views. In actuality, though, the first one is more important. Sure, the second video has a well-executed approach and has more pretty scenes, but it went so well (and, like almost all my videos, it was done in one take; no trying over and over again until I got it right) only because of all the work that went into planning it. Everything in the first video enabled the second video to take place. Peak performance comes from prior planning.

In flying, and in life, plan your flight and fly your plan!

The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a FAASafety Team representative and Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.

The Hairy Ball Theorem: Guaranteeing a bad hair day somewhere

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(This week's post was inspired by a small bit in one of Dan Lewis's excellent "Now I Know" daily trivia pieces. Head on over there and sign up for his free newsletter!)

There will be weather for approximately 1 billion more years from next Thursday. Since you will have probably stopped renewing your medical certificate by then, that means you'll have to deal with weather for as long as you fly.

Why will there be weather for a billion years? Simple: the Sun is what causes weather. Through the unequal heating of the Earth's surface by sunlight, air masses are warmed at different rates, causing warm air at the equator to try to flow to the colder area at the poles and vice versa. On its voyage, it runs into a bunch of different processes that combine to create the crazy dance that is the weather (and which prevent it from ever actually completing its journey). Bill Nye, someone else whose name happens to also fit the "[Name] the [noun] Guy" pattern, has the most awesome demonstration of this flow I've ever seen, and in less than two minutes:

Why only a billion more years and not forever? Simple: the Sun will eventually make it impossible for weather to exist. Like most of us, as it ages, it expands around the waistline. Eventually, it will expand so much on its way to becoming a red giant that it will engulf the Earth. Before then, it will strip the Earth of its water and atmosphere as it boils everything off the planet. This will make the California drought look like the Amazonian rainforest, and being below the surface of the Sun will make density altitude calculations even harder for student pilots to figure out than they already are.

The Sun guarantees there will always be weather, but it doesn't say whether that weather will be bad or good. That's where the Hairy Ball Theorem kicks in.

The Hairy Ball Theorem may sound like something best not solved with an Epilator (perhaps Occam's Razor would be more help), but it's really a simple idea with profound consequences. It's actually why it is a mathematical certainty that there will be somewhere on the planet with absolutely no wind at all. Watch this video by the brilliant guys at Minute Physics to get a quick grasp on it:

What's the significance of having no wind somewhere? Besides, doesn't that happen all the time? When it's really nice out and the skies are a beautiful shade of blue, there usually isn't much of a breeze at all. That's because there's a nice high pressure system parked over top of you, and you're at the center of its circulation, where there is little to no wind. Take a look at this picture from Wunderground and note how the nice weather over the middle of the country is being brought by some high-pressure systems (like the one by north Texas and the Oklahoma panhandle and the one in northwest Nebraska):

The blue Hs are high-pressure systems, and the red Ls are low-pressure systems.

There are two sides to every coin, and if there are places with high pressure, there must be places with low pressure. By the same token, if high pressure brings nice weather, we can expect low pressure to bring bad weather. By looking at that map, we can also see that that is generally true: most of the bad weather and rain is accompanied by big red Ls.

There's more to that map, though. Look to the center right, and notice there's a L off the coast of Virginia. It doesn't look like much now, but here's what it looked like less than one day earlier:

Photo from NASA via Wikipedia.

That looks like an awfully angry low pressure system, and it is. It happens to be 2015's first named storm, Tropical Storm Ana, as it made its way over North Carolina. Unfortunately, Ana doesn't have a well-developed eye, but that's what is at the core of the most intense form of low-pressure systems: a hurricane.

While hurricanes are known popularly by their destructive winds covering thousands of square miles, at their core is a small area called the eye. In the wall of that eye, conveniently called the "eyewall", the most intense winds are found. And at the center of the eye is... no wind. (Or hardly any wind, at least.) It's a major cowlick on the planet that—unlike the one on top of your head—moves around. The Hairy Ball Theorem says that "every cow must have at least one cowlick," and that's an enormous one.

Hurricane Andrew barreling toward Florida in 1992 on its way to becoming one of the most destructive hurricanes in United States history. Note the well-defined eye at the center.

The Hairy Ball Theorem is not—I repeat NOT—why there is no wind at the center of a hurricane. In fact, in the big bucket of meteorology, it isn't even a drop as far as importance. There are many, many complex reasons why storms are the way they are, and the Coriolis Effect is the major one that makes Hs cycle clockwise and Ls go counter-clockwise. The Hairy Ball Theorem says nothing about the "cowlick" or where it will be; its relevance is only that it guarantees that there will be at least one place like this somewhere on Earth.

Well, actually, it doesn't limit itself to Earth. We've found tornadoes on Mars, the Great Red Spot on Jupiter, and here's a picture of a storm on Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft:

And a cowlick on the head of Uranus is even visible on the left side of this picture taken by the Hubble Space Telescope:

There is a neat 2-minute movie also available for free at NASA's Hubble site.

But after all that, do not tell your flight instructor, science teacher, the person who administered your private pilot written, or anybody else that cyclonic rotation happens because of the Hairy Ball Theorem, because it doesn't. The Coriolis Effect does that, so keep your fuzzy balls to yourself. The Hairy Ball Theorem is good for two things: 1. Guaranteeing there will be a spot with no wind and 2. Making topologists giggle. That's all.

Now I'm off to eat read about the Ham Sandwich Theorem before the No Free Lunch Theorem gets in my way. See you next Wednesday!

The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a FAASafety Team representative and Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy one-time or recurring donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.

Being an Airline Pilot, one year in: Pro Pilot Ponderings

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This is the last formal post in the Becoming an Airline Pilot Series. We've come a long way together, from interviewing and getting ready for the big class date, crushing ground school and getting crushed in the sim, learning to guide a 22-ton airliner through some of the world's busiest airspace, and connecting people despite Mother Nature's best efforts.

Now that the series has come to an end (until I upgrade to Captain, that is), there will be more of the mix of oddball, funny, beautiful, and practical posts that those of you who have been following Keyboard and Rudder for a long time have been used to. While the Part 121 world has let me see how the "other half" lives, it hasn't diminished my love of flying for flying's sake.

The previous entries in the series were detailed week-by-week accounts. However, this one wraps up four months of activity since the last one, so it is a melange of observations and short anecdotes about what's happened since then.

Although I've been doing the job almost a year, I'm actually liking it more, not less. With any job, the better you get at it, the more enjoyable it is. And with any job, the more you do things, the more they become routine. However, unlike most jobs, flying may become routine, but it never becomes boring.

There are people—invariably those who have never flown for a living—who look down on First Officers because they haven't tacked on that fourth stripe yet. Those people don't bother me at all; in fact, I'm always a little embarrassed for them because they have no understanding of the dynamic in the cockpit between a Captain and a good FO. A skilled First Officer makes a flight run much more smoothly and makes the Captain's job easier. Until I had about a hundred hours under my belt, I'd often end a day's flying feeling guilty about being as much an impediment to the smooth operation of the flight as a help. As I've learned to do my job well, I've begun to be able to anticipate what the Captain will need before they need it, and now more often than not when I'm asked to do something, my answer is, "Already done."

I try to anticipate what will be needed because now that I've gotten good at my position, I can make an effort to not only understand the flight from the perspective of my own duties, but through the Captain's as well. After all, I will be in that seat someday, and the more I learn now the better at it I'll be when I get there. It also helps me to become the sort of FO I'd want to fly with when I'm on the other side of the cockpit.

I've flown with bad Captains and outstanding ones, and they all have one thing in common: I've learned a lot from all of them. If even the great Bob Buck said he learned something on the last flight of his celebrated, multi-decade career that spanned from DC-2s to 747s, then I'd better be learning something every day, too.

The bad ones are lessons in how not to behave as a Captain, and fortunately there have been way fewer of them than ones who are great examples. All of the bad ones share one characteristic: every single one of them think rules are things that only apply to other people, not them. And almost every single thing I've seen them do that was downright stupid wouldn't have happened if they had simply followed the rules.

I got an e-logbook for Christmas and spent the winter month overnights transferring 1200+ entries from the paper ones to it. It gave me something to do while cooped up in hotel rooms waiting for the weather to break, and now I'm always up to date on the logbook because I can easily update it with the day's activity on the van to the hotel.

I got a line in January. Reserve times here are short, as I spent just over 3 months on reserve. Reserve is never fun, but it's not as bad as it could be because reserve FOs here fly a lot, so there isn't a whole lot of sitting around twiddling thumbs. I actually timed out because of all the hours I flew on reserve in December: I hit the 190 hours in 28 days FDP (flight duty period) limit, the 60 hours in one week FDP limit, and got to 98.2 out of 100 flight hours all at the same time and ended up getting pulled off the last day of a 4-day.

The upgrade times here are fast. In fact, people in the class six months ahead of mine are upgrading, which would put my upgrade at 16 months. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that can continue, because the pilot shortage has really started to become a major issue in the last six months. We're getting to the point where we're so short on First Officers that I may have to wait to upgrade due to a lack of FOs behind me to replace me. If you're a pilot looking for a job, now is an incredibly good time for you!

Commuting is by far the worst part of the job, and is the only part of the experience that I can say I seriously dislike. We have some commuter clause perks they added to our contract in 2014 where we get 4 free hotel rooms a month at the beginning of trips so we can fly in the day before, but all that does is reduce the stress of getting to work by stealing half or more of your last day off. We don't get penalized (except for the loss of pay) if we can't make it in as long as we have 2 flights booked, which is pretty standard among airlines.

I've had to leave the flying club I was a part of due to lack of time. The wife thought I should stop racking up $100/month dues when I don't have time to fly for fun anymore, and I agreed with her. On the other hand, I miss the old 172 terribly and want to fly it. There are some pilots here who either still fly GA aircraft or would like to, but unfortunately the majority lost interest in their roots once they end up flying for a living.

Look below the wing of the Dash-8 ahead of us. See anything?

How about now? Yes, that IS a 172 mixing in during the morning push at Washington-Dulles! I want to be that guy someday.

One cold but beautiful Sunday morning in Charleston we were getting ready for the flight back to Washington-Dulles. I was heads-down programming the flight plan into the FMS and I heard a 182 taking off. I was too busy to look up, but I was thinking, "Man, I wish I was up there like that enjoying a beautiful Sunday morning flight just because."

But the envy was short-lived because even though I was flying someone else's airplane on someone else's schedule, I still had it good because I was getting ready to fly one of the few airliners left that hasn't had all the stick-and-rudder challenge engineered out of it. The people with Shiny Jet Syndrome may look down on Dash-8s, but the way I look at it, turbine time is turbine time, and if you can handle a Dash, you can handle the big iron. You don't know what a V₁ cut is until you've had one in a Dash-8.

Nonetheless, going through the logbook during the e-logbook conversion made me miss the entries like "Sunset over Sandusky Bay" or "Lunch at Put-in-Bay" or just "Puttering around with wife", which I'd like to continue to do someday.

However, those entries are hard to make when you're too busy making ones like one from 12/23/14 at IAD: "One of the last planes to make it in this morning before airport shut down. ILS 1C: Used the 'approach lights in sight, continue-to-100-above' rule for first time. Wx 150 feet, vis 3/4; IAD dropped to 100 and 1/8 shortly afterward and airport closed." (A nice feature about the e-logbook is that I can make the comments as long as I want.) In my GA days, if the Terminal Area Forecast was that bleak, we just wouldn't go. That's obviously not an option anymore when you're working for a scheduled carrier, and now any TAF better than 300-3/4 makes me yawn.

Another entry from a couple weeks later as one of many winter storms rolled through the Northeast: "So much turbulence on the approach that two passengers threw up. Neither of them were in the cockpit. Landing was forgettable, but any safe landing in conditions like that one is a good one."

And one from 1/26/15: "We were the ONLY airplane to make it in to State College today because of Winter Storm Juno. Heard the [airline name edited out so they won't get jealous] ahead of us on NY Approach decide to divert. Those Canadian engineers know how to build a bird that isn't afraid of a little snow and ice!"

The State College, PA ramp that day. Not a single shiny jet to be found, but the Dash-8 ate that approach for lunch.

In Toronto, where DeHavilland (now Bombardier) builds the Dash, ice is just a little sky bling, and brakes are for planes without a prop-beta range. The DHC-8 isn't the most elegant aircraft ever built, but it does things an airliner isn't supposed to be able to do. Canada must have felt so guilty about unleashing Justin Bieber that they gave us Rick Moranis, the movie Strange Brew, and the equally-quirky yet amazingly-capable Dash-8 to make up for it. Throw in some maple syrup and it's not a bad trade.

And with that, the Becoming an Airline Pilot series draws to a close. Next week it's back to Keyboard & Rudder's normal programming, starting Wednesday with a post on what hairy balls have to do with flying. Seriously!

See the series index.

The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with a DHC-8 type rating, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a FAASafety Team representative and Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program. He is on Facebook as Larry the Flying Guy, has a Larry the Flying Guy YouTube channel, and is on Twitter as @Lairspeed.

It takes hours of work to bring each Keyboard & Rudder post to you. If you've found it useful, please consider making an easy donation via PayPal in any amount you choose.