Godspeed, Goddard

Words have lost much of their impact these days. The word "extreme" was one of the first to go. At one time, it meant something serious or overpowering. Then it got taken over by marketers, truncated to "Xtreme" and applied to a flavor of Mountain Dew that absolutely nobody asked for.

"Epic" came in to fill the void left with the watering-down of "extreme", but it sadly fell to the hyperbolist hordes as well. It used to mean something like Beowulf and slaying dragons, then it went on to describing something very impressive like pulling off a 1200 on the drop from the helicopter on the drop to snowboard down the Matterhorn, but then in the span of about a week it went from that to celebrating the "epic achievement" of eating an entire bag of Doritos in one sitting. Dude, that's sooo epic!

"Passion" used to mean an intense, almost overwhelming desire. Now every unoriginal job seeker has "I'm passionate about synergistic cross-contextual gerbil herding" or some other such nonsense on their résumé. Let's be clear: I'm passionate about my wife; that means I love her intensely and I couldn't live without her. I'm passionate about flying: I love it intensely and I couldn't live without it (mainly because I'd starve, although at this point it might take a year or two). No one is "passionate" about gerbil herding; at best they might be vaguely interested in it and frankly not all that good at it.

The word "legend" gets thrown around in the same way, but in this case, Dick Goddard was an actual legend of the old school meaning. He passed away yesterday at the age of 89. Unless you're from the Cleveland, Ohio area, that probably doesn't mean a lot to you. Around Cleveland, though, he's a legend for many reasons.

First, he was a TV meteorologist in Cleveland for over 51 years, making his career longer than anyone—including the Weather Channel. His career was so long that when he was in college, weather satellites didn't even exist! The first successful weather satellite would launch a month before he graduated from Kent State in 1960. By the time he retired in late 2016, he had seen forecasting go from static, laboriously-crafted, hand-drawn paper maps to real-time interactive Ultra-HD animations.

Although he and I never met, he was a small ripple in the cosmic current that led to me becoming a pilot. When I was a child, there was no cable TV yet. Cities generally had their own NBC, ABC, and CBS affiliate stations plus a few truly local stations. The network affiliate stations played content provided by their affiliates most of the day, but there were several hours that the local station provided their own programming.

This included the local news. The news hour was much less bland, sterilized, and standardized than it is today. Every city had its own specific flavor to its journalism, and the nightly news teams themselves had different characters. TV personalities back then who delivered the news, sports, and weather weren't interchangeable, generic talking heads whose names you don't bother to remember because they'll only be around until someone cheaper graduates from broadcasting school, they were interesting individuals.

If you want to see a young George Carlin in a suit and tie give three examples of what I'm talking about (plus several mock commercials), watch this video. You can even see an early Al Sleet, before Carlin added one of his funniest lines ever ("Tonight's forecast: dark. Continued mostly dark tonight, turning to widely scattered light in the morning."):

Dick Goddard, even by those standards, had a clear personality. He was a sincere, direct, intelligent soul. Long before animal activism was a thing, at the end of his segment he would sometimes feature dogs, cats, or other animals that were in the local shelter looking for a forever home. (When Ohio recently implemented stronger anti-animal abuse laws, it named the bill "Goddard's Law".)

Other times, he would give mini-classes on air during his weather report. Sometimes it would be something as simple as explaining what an Alberta Clipper is while blaming it for the frigid cold to come. Or it could be simply explaining the difference between "partly cloudy" and "partly sunny". (Partly cloudy means more sun than clouds, and vice-versa. Pretty basic stuff, but I thought it was cool technical weather arcana back when I was 10 or so.) He not only loved the weather, he loved making you love it too. (A few years ago, I found a copy of his book Six Inches of Partly Cloudy: Cleveland's Legendary TV Meteorologist Takes on Everything--and More and devoured it in one day because his enthusiasm is still there.)

He helped kindle my life-long interest in the weather and a connection with what was going on up in the sky. Observing the atmosphere for so long made me want to swim in it, so it was inevitable that I would become a pilot someday. I didn't know when, and I didn't know how, but I knew that I would.

Even though we never met, he was a part of that. I'm sad that we never met because there was a yearly opportunity to do so. He created the Woollybear Festival, a one-day town fair in Vermilion, a pretty little place only about 15 minutes away from me. Each fall, I said I wanted to go, yet each year, when the day came, I said I'd do it next year instead. Now he won't be there next year except in our hearts and the chance to meet him is gone forever.

So do the thing you want to do while you can; see the people you want to spend time with now because there will inevitably come a day when you can't.

I'll close with this video that sums up the man and why he is such a legend in only two minutes:

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When being "stupid" is the smart thing to do

I have accomplished many things during my COVID-19 time off. The clutter is slowly going away (do I really need that book on Unix written in 1998?), I'm almost done with my project of reading all of Warren Buffett's letters to shareholders, and my basement is looking better than ever. Soon I'll be able to get that home gym set up the way I've wanted it for years so I can skip workouts by not bothering to walk downstairs instead of not getting in the car to not drive to the gym.

However, getting a Ph.D. in epidemiology isn't one of the things I've done in the last 32 days. I don't expect doctors to tell me how to fly my plane, and I don't tell doctors how to do their job. As much as I miss flying (I had a dream the other night that we were going to restart service but due to the lower loads were going back to my old aircraft, the Dash-8), and as eager as I am for things to get back to normal, I'm willing to wait until that is safe to do. I know enough to know that I don't know enough to know when that is.

As an example of how something that seems simple actually has a lot going on behind the scenes and how those unseen things make a difference, I'd like to take the simple, routine flight we do from Syracuse to Newark.

It seems easy enough: a quick 169 nm flight southeast:

SYR-EWR as the crow flies, 169 nautical miles.

However, the way our flight plans are made, we first fly 35 nm southwest, then hang a hard left, then go southeast for about 120 nm, then make a hard right to go south-southwest again. Seems stupid, doesn't it?

SYR-EWR as a drunken crow would fly, 215 nautical miles.

If you don't take into account the complexities of getting all the other airplanes lined up into New York's airspace, you'd think that that's the most idiotic way of getting between those two points. You might think our dispatcher doesn't know what they're doing and they need to be fired. But the reason we do that is because we fly an orderly, prearranged arrival path that fits into the much bigger ATC system; in this case, it's called the FLOSI 4 RNAV Arrival.

In the bigger system, what seems stupid is really only a way of making things work the best we can. There are dozens and dozens of airplanes trying to use this little chunk of airspace all at the same time and if everyone did what worked for them without regard for anything else, it would be chaos. The ATC system would fall apart and no one would be able to use it.

Instead, we have procedures to put all of those ducks in a neat, orderly row. Those stems off the little tree above are almost guaranteed to not be the single most efficient way for any of the airplanes on that path—in fact, it lengthens our SYR flight from 169 nm to 215 nm. We have to go what seems a bit out of our way in order to get there at all. Sometimes, we have to go a bit backwards to go a long way forwards. And sometimes what seems like stupidity is simply understanding at an expert level instead of an amateur level.

One of the common themes Warren Buffett refers to in those letters to shareholders referred to above is the idea of remaining within one's circle of competence. He often gets asked why he doesn't invest in x, y, or z, and he just says that he doesn't know enough about those sectors to know whether or not those stocks are good investments. He is also famous for saying that the key to investing isn't to make brilliant decisions, it's to avoid making dumb ones. Remember, this is one of the best investors in history and one of the richest men ever to walk the planet, and even he is willing to admit there are things about investing he doesn't know enough about to have an opinion on.

Often, the most important thing you can know is how much you don't know. Just like fatigue is surprisingly hard to detect because the same brain that's too tired to make a smart call is the one that is supposed to make that call, not knowing how much you don't know leads to the infamous Dunning-Kruger Effect. As Mark Twain once said, it's better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt.

An old joke goes, what's the difference between a pilot and God? God doesn't think he's a pilot. In this case, I'm just going to twist an old Star Trek quote: Dammit, Jim, I'm a pilot, not a doctor. Stay safe by staying at home until you can stay safe without being at home.



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How to get better when you can't get better

One of the memes that went around recently was the pilot working from home:

While I can't fly an airplane right now, I am fortunate that I am senior enough at my airline that I was able to avoid getting furloughed. Instead, I'm sitting at home on long-call reserve, getting paid to hurry up and wait. If airline flying picks up, I might get called in to do some flying that gets added back. For April and May, I'd estimate the chance of that happening as about .01%.

Like many, I've been wildly successful in handling this bounty of extra time to do things and wildly unsuccessful as well. One of the problems with being off for at least two months is that it's so easy to say, "Ehh, I'll just do that tomorrow," because there are so many tomorrows on the calendar now. I've certainly frittered away a lot of time already as "I'll just watch one episode on Hulu" becomes five episodes.

Nonetheless, I have been able to catch up on some of the "I'll get around to that someday" things as well. One of those things is catching up on reading research papers. While reading the scintillatingly-titled "Higher Landing Accuracy in Expert Pilots is Associated with Lower Activity in the Caudate Nucleus", I came across this passage that stood out:

In terms of expertise, there were differences between the two groups in flight experience and age. As expected, more hours of total flight experience, overall t (12)  = 2.61, p<.05 and more hours of flight experience in the past month, t (11)  = 2.62, p<.001 were associated with higher expertise. In addition level of expertise was associated with younger age, t (18)  = −2.25, p = 0.045).

In other words, how many total hours you have and how old you are have approximately the same impact on how well you would do in this study, but what is even more important by a large margin is how many recent flight hours you have.

This is particularly relevant in a time of social distancing and flight schools/FBOs being closed to help prevent the spread of coronavirus. (If your flight school isn't closed right now, IT SHOULD BE.) It's not exactly Earth-shattering news that your skills get rusty; everyone knows that. What struck me about that passage is how much more of an impact currency had on task performance than any of the three significant factors (total hours, recent hours, and age).

This is not the place to get into detailed statistical theory, so I'm going to try to make it as simple as possible by comparing only the p-values. There are much more sophisticated ways of analyzing the data, but a p-value is one of the most basic: it attempts to measure the probability that the result came about by dumb luck. In general, less than a 5% chance is considered acceptable; this would be p < .05. The researchers' values for these three were

• Flight hours last month: p < .001
• Age (younger): p < .045
• Flight hours total: p < .05

By comparing p-values, current flight hours was 20x more important than total hours! [Again, if you're looking for a mathematically-rigorous statistical treatment, don't follow my example. I'm a pilot because I'm too dumb to be a statistician. This is just a way to demonstrate the impact.]



What's important to take from this is that while you're enduring a forced lay-off from flying, you need to be doing things to stay engaged with the cockpit to stave off rustiness. I'm certainly in favor of flight simulators: they are the most active way to practice and therefore will keep your skills sharper for longer.

In fact, if you use your time right, you can come out on the other side with skills you didn't have before, but in order to do this, you have to use the sim to do more than just replicate what you're doing now. As the saying goes, if you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got.

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses: things they're good at and things they're not good at. It's easy to practice the things you're already good at—after all, they're easy because you're good at them. What you need to do is figure out the things you're not good at and create scenarios in the sim that target those.

For example, let's say your home field is 5,000 feet long. Chances are you're not very good at short field landings then because you don't have to be. In that case, find a 1500-foot field and practice going into it. Since you're in a sim, there's no worry about bending metal: the only danger is a bruised ego the first time or two. Eventually, you'll think that 1500 feet is more runway than a 172 needs.

You'll find that the real benefit of this isn't just in being able to land at a short field. After all, in real life, you may still not have a short field near you to land at. However, you'll find that you've become a sharper pilot in other important ways that count every day. Your airspeed control will be much better because you can't add an extra 10 knots for the wife, 10 knots for the kids, 10 knots for the dog, and 10 knots just because. Your ability to gauge without looking at the altimeter whether you're too high or low will improve. Your feel for the relationship between power, pitch, and airspeed will improve. You'll develop better sensitivity for appropriate control/throttle inputs, and so on.

What's important is that you maintain what you have and use that as a base to build on. If you do it right, once you're able to climb back in the cockpit you'll have even more confidence than you did before!



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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. 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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Taking the long way due to coronavirus

It's Sunday, March 22, 2020, and I'm fat, dumb, and happy in my seat 33,000 feet in the air. I'm staring aimlessly out the front window, enjoying a nice view of Norfolk and Virginia Beach off to my left as I leave a contrail over the East Coast, doing seven miles a minute from Washington-Dulles to Jacksonville, Florida.

Suddenly, I'm fat, dumb, and less happy as I hear ATC tell an aircraft that was going the other direction, to LaGuardia, to contact their dispatcher and file an alternate outside of New York Center's airspace. So many controllers had called out sick today that they were going to have to shut down a large section of New York airspace. I heard a phrase I'd never actually heard spoken on the radio before: New York Center was going "ATC zero".

This was a bit of a concern for me, as after we got to Jacksonville, we were going to be flying to Newark (also in NY airspace) half an hour later. One of the few good things about the collapse in air travel this month (on this last four-day trip, I flew less than 100 passengers combined in all four days!) is that fuel is no issue. With almost nobody on board, we can fill the tanks as much as we want and never have to worry about being too heavy.

So that's just what we did: we took about 30% more fuel than we needed in case we had to hold for a long time or had to go somewhere else. We got lucky: with the exception of a few S-turns to create additional spacing en route, we were able to make it to Newark as scheduled. The reduction in airplanes in the sky in general probably helped—after all, shutting down a lane on the freeway doesn't matter as much if no one is driving anyway.

After we got to Newark, all we had left was a quick flight up to Albany, NY for the night. Although due to the reduced staffing they were spacing takeoffs 8 minutes apart instead of the normal minute or less, on the way out there was only one aircraft ahead of us in line so we still made it out early.

However, the next morning, we were going from Albany to Dulles, and we did get impacted directly by the coronavirus-induced ATC staffing issues. A large section of the airspace was shut down: a chunk that we normally fly right through. However, instead of the direct route, we ended up going far to the west, all the way to central Pennsylvania, in order to avoid that closed sector before we turned toward the airport.

Taking the long way around NY's airspace.

This is what that same flight looked like a week before, when things were still relatively normal:

Just a week earlier, in more normal times.

Fortunately, again, since we were able to load up on gas because we had exactly 4 (yes, four!) passengers on board the entire aircraft, we ended up getting off the gate 10 minutes early and getting to Dulles on time.

I hope you and yours stay safe and stay in!



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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. 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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I did it! (Revisiting a childhood favorite game)

When I was 12 years old, one of the most impressive simulation games ever to come out for the Commodore 64 was released: MicroProse's Gunship. I spent months and months and hundreds of hours flying missions in it, trying to get the game's highest award: the Congressional Medal of Honor. [Yes, I know it's actually just "Medal of Honor". The game refers to it as the Congressional Medal of Honor, so that's how I refer to it in this post.]

Winning the ultimate medal was actually secondary to just flying it and having fun flying. It was one of the hardest games ever on the Commodore because it wasn't a shoot 'em up; it was an actual simulation. It strove to pack as much realism as possible into a platform that had a 1 MHz processor (approximately 4000 times slower in raw clock speed than just one core of a 4 GHz 8-core processor) and 64 kilobytes (not megabytes, not gigabytes, kilobytes) of RAM, and it wasn't afraid to be complex and intimidating to learn. The graphics were very, very good for the time (1986), but nowadays the closest competition is Minecraft.

All those hours playing Gunship turned out to have a major impact on me learning to fly; not just in kindling my interest in it but in invisibly burning piloting concepts into my head without me realizing it. It simulated things like ground effect, translating vertical components of lift into horizontal ones in a bank (meaning if you wanted to lose altitude quickly, you could go into a tight turn), trading altitude for airspeed, and so on.

I came across a copy of it the other day and figured I'd spend a half hour or so revisiting it just to see if I could remember how to play. At first it was a little rough just remembering all the keys for the controls, but not long in, it came back to me. Although I hadn't played this game in over 30 years, once I got the hang of the controls again, I was actually better at it now than I was then!

In large part, that is because I have 6000 hours of flight time behind me now, whereas I hadn't even been in a small plane then. That actually helped a lot because my instrument scan is automatic now. It takes so little of my cognitive resources to keep track of what the aircraft is doing now that I was able to devote much more of my mental effort to devising strategies, carrying out assault tactics, and performing evasive maneuvers when those didn't work.

Way back when, I struggled like hell to get that Medal of Honor. Very few who played it managed to do it, but after hundreds of hours, finally, FINALLY, I managed to become one of the few who did. Of course, not knowing the criteria for receiving it made it even harder to get; I just took the approach of shooting everything that moved and never returning to base with ammo left over.

(Remember, this was long before the web had a hundred walkthroughs for every game, YouTube had a thousand playthroughs, and there was no Google to get you through the hard parts. Most games didn't even have paper strategy guides—and there was no GameStop or Amazon to buy one from even if there was one. It turns out that there actually was a book written about Gunship... which I found out 34 years later when researching Gunship medal criteria!)

As it turns out, that approach is pretty close to what it takes to get the CMOH anyway, but Richard Sheffield's Gunship Academy lays out the criteria:

The question most frequently asked of the game designers at MicroProse is "What the heck do I have to do to earn the Congressional Medal of Honor?" Well, it's really quite simple. All you have to do is

• Score 5000 points
• Complete both missions
• Shoot down at least two Hinds
• Get wounded
• Live and don't get captured
• And do all that in less than 22.5 minutes

What I had intended to be only a quick stroll down memory lane turned into me playing several missions in a row. After a few hours, I managed to do something that took me hundreds of hours back then: I actually won the Congressional Medal of Honor again!

The mission that won me my second Congressional Medal of Honor in Gunship, only 33 years or so after the first one.

The coveted medal in all its 8-bit glory.

Probably one of the reasons I had a hard time getting the medal back then was because I tried to avoid getting into dogfights with the enemy helicopters (the Russian Mi-24 Hind-D) because their cannon could tear you to pieces quickly and ruin the whole mission. If I encountered one after completing both objectives, I'd run back to base as fast as possible instead of engaging it. I didn't know that bagging a second one was a requirement because, well, no one knew that, least of all me.

One of the things the list above leaves out is that you have to have won a campaign ribbon from all four theaters first. There is some debate over whether you have to win all the lower medals first. All I can say is that I had a mission where I fulfilled all the criteria and I had all the medals, but I didn't have all the ribbons. (I skipped straight to the fourth theater because the first three were too easy.) I was not awarded the CMOH for that mission, but when I did receive it, it was for a mission with a lower score after I went back and picked up the first three campaign ribbons. You can see what I'm talking about below, where I didn't have the CMOH at 5460 points but did get it at 5190 later:

That's a full salad bar in Gunship.

That's a nice way to start a new year, and unlike Forrest Gump, I didn't have to get shot in the buttocks!



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The author is an airline pilot, flight instructor, and adjunct college professor teaching aviation ground schools. He holds an ATP certificate with ERJ-145 and DHC-8 type ratings, as well as CFI, CFII, MEI, AGI, and IGI certificates, and is a Master-level participant in the FAA's WINGS program and a former FAASafety Team representative. 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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