Keyboard and Rudder: A blog on the Art of Flying

Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Off to see the eclipse!

By the time you read this, the Great American Eclipse will already have happened on Monday. I'm taking a 9-hour road trip with one of my best friends this week to see it at the point of greatest totality just south of Carbondale, IL.

Image from The Weather Channel.

Guess who else will be in Carbondale? Everyone's favorite weather disaster man, Jim Cantore of The Weather Channel!

Since I'm on the road the next few days enjoying this rare phenomenon, that's all I have this week. See you next Wednesday!

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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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Wednesday, August 16, 2017

The first aviation weather forecast

It has been over 113 years since the Wright Brothers' first flight. Like most big events, we see the flashy accomplishment but don't see or appreciate all of the small steps and important details involved in getting there. In fact, celebrities, businesspeople, Nobel Prize winners, and other well-known people often say something like, "It took 20 years to become an overnight success."

The Wright Brothers went to Kitty Hawk several times before 1903's first flight, and the plans and work that went into pulling that off started even before they first left Dayton. In the years before December 17, 1903, they spent hours that led to years of their time laying the groundwork. After all, if you're planning to do the impossible, it pays to do your homework.

One of the elements of their preparation was finding a place that had the sort of weather that would allow for testing the model and the final aircraft. While today we have hi-definition radar maps on our smartphones, reasonably accurate forecasts a week from this afternoon, and Jim Cantore getting blown off of beaches all around the country on the Weather Channel, weather forecasting was still in its infancy back then.

Even what data and forecasts we did have at the dawn of the 20th Century tended to be in generalities over time spans of months and seasons, not the hour-by-hour "It will be 74° with a 17% chance of rain at 11 a.m. on Thursday" forecasts we take for granted. But that was just fine for the Bishop's Boys who just wanted a place that was windier than Ohio during the late fall/early winter, when their bicycle shop tasks wound down for the season.

To this end, Wilbur casually tossed off "one of the most remarkable letters in the history of science" to Octave Chanute on May 13, 1900—three and a half years before the first flight. The penultimate paragraph notes

My business requires that my experimental work be confined to the months between September and January and I would be particularly thankful for advice as to a suitable locality where I could depend on winds of about fifteen miles per hour without rain or too inclement weather. I am certain that such localities are rare.

Chanute's answer to the weather question:

The two most suitable locations for winter experiments which I know of are near San Diego, California, and St. James City (Pine Island), Florida, on account of the steady sea breezes which I have found to blow there. These, however, are deficient in sand hills, and perhaps even better locations can be found on the Atlantic coasts of South Carolina or Georgia.

Wilbur also pored over tables of data from the Weather Bureau (the predecessor to what we know today as the National Weather Service) and, based on the wind speeds and weather they contained combined with the presence of the sand hills that Chanute suggested, narrowed down his search to what would eventually be the final decision of Kitty Hawk.

Once that good candidate was found, he then wrote a letter to Joseph Dosher, who worked the Weather Bureau station at Kitty Hawk. His reply came 117 years ago today, August 16, 1900, and is the first "aviation weather" forecast:

[T]he beach here is about one mile wide clear of trees or high hills, and islands for nearly sixty miles south. Conditions: the wind blows mostly from the North and Northeast September and October which is nearly down this piece of land. Giving you many miles of a steady wind with a free sweep.

They took his word for it and were not disappointed. They spent several seasons testing their aeronautical ideas on gliders at Kitty Hawk during the winter months, then would return to Dayton for the rest of the year to tend to the bicycle shop and to take what they had learned in North Carolina, refine and improve it, and bring their newest ideas back to the beach during the winter. The amount of work they did in Dayton is why Ohio deserves to be called the "Birthplace of Aviation" even if North Carolina did get the first flight.

Calling this the "first aviation weather forecast" is a bit in jest. The first "real" one wouldn't be until almost 15 years later, as the National Weather service notes:

On Dec. 1, 1918, the U.S. Weather Bureau issued its first aviation weather forecast. It was for the Aerial Mail Service route from New York to Chicago. On May 20, 1926, Congress passed the Air Commerce Act, which included legislation directing the Weather Bureau to "furnish weather reports, forecasts, warnings, to promote the safety and efficiency of air navigation in the United States."

See you next Wednesday!

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Wednesday, August 9, 2017

Wilbur Wright to Octave Chanute

Text of Wilbur Wright's letter to Octave Chanute, Dayton, May 13, 1900. All images from the Library of Congress.

For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man. My disease has increased in severity and I feel that it will soon cost me an increased amount of money if not my life. I have been trying to arrange my affairs in such a way that I can devote my entire time for a few months to experiment in this field.

My general ideas of the subject are similar to those held by most practical experimenters, to wit: that what is chiefly needed is skill rather than machinery. The flight of the buzzard and similar sailers is a convincing demonstration of the value of skill, and the partial needlessness of motors. It is possible to fly without motors, but not without knowledge & skill. This I conceive to be fortunate, for man, by reason of his greater intellect, can more reasonably hope to equal birds in knowledge, than to equal nature in the perfection of her machinery.

Assuming then that Lilienthal was correct in his ideas of the principles on which man should proceed, I conceive that his failure was due chiefly to the inadequacy of his method, and of his apparatus. As to his method, the fact that in five years' time he spent only about five hours, altogether, in actual flight is sufficient to show that his method was inadequate. Even the simplest intellectual or acrobatic feats could never be learned

with so short practice, and even Methuselah could never have become an expert stenographer with one hour per year for practice. I also conceive Lilienthal's apparatus to be inadequate not only from the fact that he failed, but my observations of the flight of birds convince me that birds use more positive and energetic methods of regaining equilibrium than that of shifting the center of gravity.

With this general statement of my principles and belief I will proceed to describe the plan and apparatus it is my intention to test. In explaining these, my object is to learn to what extent similar plans have been tested and found to be failures, and also to obtain such suggestions as your great knowledge and experience might enable you to give me. I make no secret of my plans for the reason that I believe no financial profit will accrue to the inventor of the first flying machine, and that only those who are willing to give as well as to receive suggestions can hope to link their names with the honor of its discovery. The problem is too great for one man alone and unaided to solve in secret.

My plan then is this. I shall in a suitable locality erect a light tower about one hundred and fifty feet high. A rope passing over a pulley at the top will serve as a sort of kite string. It will be so counterbalanced that when the rope is drawn out one hundred & fifty feet it will sustain a

pull equal to the weight of the operator and apparatus or nearly so. The wind will blow the machine out from the base of the tower and the weight will be sustained partly by the upward pull of the rope and partly by the lift of the wind. The counterbalance will be so arranged that the pull decreases as the line becomes shorter and ceases entirely when its length has been decreased to one hundred feet. The aim will be to eventually practice in a wind capable of sustaining the operator at a height equal to the top of the tower. The pull of the rope will take the place of a motor in counteracting drift. I see, of course, that the pull of the rope will introduce complications which are not met in free flight, but if the plan will only enable me to remain in the air for practice by the hour instead of by the second, I hope to acquire skill sufficient to overcome both these difficulties and those inherent to flight. Knowledge and skill in handling the machine are absolute essentials to flight and it is impossible to obtain them without extensive practice. The method employed by Mr. Pilcher of towing with horses in many respects is better than that I propose to employ, but offers no guarantee that the experimenter will escape accident long enough to acquire skill sufficient to prevent accident. In my plan I rely on the rope and counterbalance to at least break the force of a fall.

My observation of the flight of buzzards leads me to believe that they regain their lateral balance, when partly overturned by a gust of wind, by a torsion of the tips of the wings. If the rear edge of the right wing tip is twisted upward and the left downward the bird becomes an animated windmill and instantly begins to turn, a line from its head to its tail being the axis. It thus regains its level even if thrown on its beam ends, so to speak, as I have frequently seen them. I think the bird also in general retains its lateral equilibrium, partly by presenting its two wings at different angles to the wind, and partly by drawing in one wing, thus reducing its area. I incline to the belief that the first is the more important and usual method. In the apparatus I intend to employ I make use of the torsion principle. In appearance it is very similar to the "double-deck" machine with which the experiments of yourself and Mr. Herring were conducted in 1896-7. The point on which it differs in principle is that the cross-stays which prevent the upper plane from moving forward and backward are removed, and each end of the upper plane is independently moved forward or backward with respect to the lower plane by a suitable lever or other arrangement. By this plan the whole upper plane may be moved forward or backward, to attain longitudinal equilibrium, by moving both hands forward or backward together. Lateral equilibrium is gained by moving one end more than the other or by moving them in opposite directions. If you will make

a square cardboard tube two inches in diameter and eight or ten long and choose two sides for your planes you will at once see the torsional effect of moving one end of the upper plane forward and the other backward, and how this effect is attained without sacrificing lateral stiffness. My plan is to attach the tail rigidly to the rear upright stays which connect the planes, the effect of which will be that when the upper plane is thrown forward the end of the tail is elevated, so that the tail assists gravity in restoring longitudinal balance. My experiments hitherto with this apparatus have been confined to machines spreading about fifteen square feet of surface, and have been sufficiently encouraging to induce me to lay plans for a trial with [a] full-sized machine.

My business requires that my experimental work be confined to the months between September and January and I would be particularly thankful for advice as to a suitable locality where I could depend on winds of about fifteen miles per hour without rain or too inclement weather. I am certain that such localities are rare.

I have your Progress in Flying Machines and your articles in the Annuals of '95, '96, & '97, as also your recent articles in the Independent. If you can give me information as to where an account of Pilcher's experiments can be obtained I would greatly appreciate your kindness.
Yours truly,
Wilbur Wright

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Wednesday, August 2, 2017

I would kill to learn to fly

Fortunately, today we don't have to be willing to kill to learn to fly. However, in 1893—ten years before the Wright Brothers would make history in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina—a suggestion was made to that effect. Enjoy this little snippet from the Proceedings of the International Conference on Aerial Navigation, which took place in August of 1893:

Discussion by Professor Todd, of Amherst College.

A friend suggest that criminals, in lieu of treatment by hanging or electrocution, be detailed for duty on flying-machines for the common cause of science and humanity. A man convicted of slaughtering his wife, for example, instead of being forced to edify a handful of curious onlookers with the ghastly spectacle of capital punishment, might be permitted first to receive the coaching of some expert in aerodromics; then, on the day set for public exhibition, if both machine and aviator go to smash, well and good—the criminal would have had to suffer death anyway, and the builder of the machine would feel compensated by the opportunity for testing his device; while if the trial succeeded, the gain to the art of flight may be enormous, and the culprit will come down presumably frightened enough to choose a life of virtue forever thereafter.

Next week, I'll go into "one of the most remarkable letters in the history of science" as the unknown from nowhere Wilbur Wright drops a line to the eminent and already-successful Octave Chanute, beginning a rich and fruitful relationship. See you next Wednesday!

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Wednesday, July 26, 2017

Smart people do stupid things in emergencies

The BBC had an interesting article recently called "What not to do in a disaster". In it, you can find stories of some of the stupid things people do in disasters, like taking selfies while fleeing a burning plane or trying to save bottles of alcohol during the devastating 2011 earthquake in Japan:

Surprisingly, plenty of other people in deadly scenarios don’t act fast enough to save their own lives. From arguing over small change while a ship sinks into stormy water, to standing idly on the beach as a tsunami approaches, psychologists have known for years that people make self-destructive decisions under pressure. Though news reports tend to focus on miraculous survival, if people escape with their lives it’s often despite their actions – not because of them.

"Survival training isn’t so much about training people what to do – you’re mostly training them not to do certain things that they would normally think to do," says John Leach, a psychologist at the University of Portsmouth who survived the King’s Cross fire disaster in 1987. He estimates that in a crisis, 80-90% of people respond inappropriately.

It goes on to list several things you should not do in an emergency:

Freezing
Inability to think
Tunnel vision
Staying stuck in routine
Denial

It then abruptly wraps up what you should do in a just two paragraphs:

For [disaster management specialist James] Goff, surviving a natural disaster is about having a plan. "If you know what you’re doing in advance and you start early, you can usually get away from a tsunami," he says. "But it might be a bit hairy."

Leach has years of experience training the military to escape an eclectic mix of chilling scenarios, from hostage crises to helicopters which have crashed into water (top tip: stay in your seat until the fuselage has flooded and turned upside down, then slip out at the last minute to avoid getting caught in the still-turning rotor blades). He knows that the best way around the mental fallout is to replace unhelpful, automatic reactions with ones that could save your life. "You have to practise and practise until the survival technique is the dominant behaviour," he says. [Emphasis mine; weird British spelling the BBC's.]

That last sentence is the important take away. You need to have a plan and practice that plan until it is automatic. When you're confronted with an emergency is not the time to come up with something. You need to have come up with that something from the comfort and peace of your own home, then drilled it until it becomes automatic.

This is why I recommend reviewing your Pilot's Operating Handbook's third section periodically. What's the third section? Naturally, the emergency section. (In 1975, the General Aviation Manufacturer's Association issued Specification No. 1 standardizing the layout of the POH, so you'll probably find the emergency/abnormal procedures in Section 3.)

This index from the manual for a Cessna 172R is in the standard format.

Go through the procedures and make a small goal of memorizing one every week or two. It's actually pretty easy to accomplish. Simply make a flashcard with the procedure you're memorizing and put it on your nightstand. When you lay down, go over it a few times. Then—and this is very important—close your eyes and visualize yourself doing each of the steps.

With your eyes closed, see yourself pitching for 65 knots. See the attitude out the window and feel yourself trimming the plane to hold that. See yourself touching and pushing in the fuel shutoff valve. See yourself touching and looking at the fuel selector valve to ensure it is on BOTH. And so on.

The visualization process is critical to making your response automatic. One of the two reasons I recommend doing this just before bed is that you won't feel silly laying in bed with your eyes closed. The second reason is that piles of scientific research have shown that what we study just before bed is what is stored away the strongest.

Much research has also shown that visualizing the process in your mind activates many of the same regions of the brain as actually performing the task does. In this way, you get almost as much practice benefit as if you were actually in the aircraft.

The goal here is automaticity. You want to make the process so ingrained that it requires little to no thought to respond correctly. This eliminates three of the "not to do" bullet points above: freezing, inability to think, and tunnel vision. By making your emergency procedures automatic, you won't freeze; you'll just do what comes naturally. You don't want to have to think about what to do because your cognitive ability shrinks dramatically in an emergency, and you won't have to worry about tunnel vision.

Now that we've talked about how not to kill yourself in an emergency, next week will be a short post about killing yourself to learn to fly. See you next Wednesday!

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Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Half a hundred, Part 1

I spent a good portion of the beginning of the year going over goals: what are good goals, why you need them, and so on. One of the things I mentioned was that goals need to be realistic yet challenging. Unrealistic goals tend not to be unattainable; instead, they are reachable goals but given entirely too little time to achieve them.

One of the goals I set this year was actually set for me by someone else: the 100 Workouts Challenge at my gym. This is a nice example of a good goal: 100 workouts in a year is a bit of a challenge, but still doable with moderate effort. It's less than a workout every three days, but that's only if you break it down over the entire year.

It's just past the halfway point of the year, and that means there's been sufficient time to see how things are going. How am I doing? Well, see for yourself:

At the halfway point, I'm half way done. Not bad considering I didn't start until six weeks into the new year! How have I done it? Simple.

I did 1% of the total 50 times. That's it.

Since the tracking sheet is in a binder with everyone else's, as I try to get to mine I inevitably come across a few others before finally getting to the right one. This means I see how others are doing whether I want to or not. It's interesting to me to see how others are doing on their goals. I don't judge those who haven't made them; after all, everyone has their own reasons for showing up or not. I'm more concerned with how I am doing against my own 100 workouts goal than judging others who aren't. Besides, there are already a handful of people who have already beaten the 100 Workouts Challenge, so I'm not the Superman to judge anybody else anyway.

What I do want to know is why those who aren't going to beat this challenge aren't going to. My observations are twofold:

1. They set themselves up for failure with unreasonable expectations. Many of the date goals weren't reasonable. Many of them were set for May or June, meaning they would have to work out 5-6 days a week every week. Unless you're already working out almost all the time, you're not suddenly going to go from sedentary to being at the gym all the time.

Going to the gym is a habit, but not going to the gym is ALSO a habit. Setting a goal that requires you to be there almost every day just isn't realistic because you have to break the habit of not going and replace it with a habit of going, both at the same time! Doing one or the other (i.e., breaking a habit or building a new one) is hard enough; trying to do both is just asking to fail.

One of the dates that was set was less than 100 days from the begin date. That's basically impossible, but reflects the second important reason most people who aren't on track aren't:

2. They underestimate the amount of change, effort, or resources involved in attaining that goal. If your goal requires adding something to your life (rather than removing something, like eating less sugar, for example), that's going to require time. Since you are living 24 hours a day already even if you're doing very little in those 24, that means you're going to have to take time that you're doing something and reallocate it to that new thing.

If you're not already doing something with your 24 hours that pass every day already, then finding something to do with an hour or so is easy. But how many of us can say that their schedule is empty? After all, being too busy is one of the biggest complaints most people have. That means that if you want to attain this new goal, you're going to have to take something you already do and replace it with something else; you're not going to magically have a 25th hour in your day.

This is one reason that a lot of people start off strong and then fade. I see a lot of date blocks filled in in a row with little gap between dates, then the gaps get bigger, then bigger... At first, it's new and fun, and it's easy. Then as a week or two goes by, some of the other things that used to occupy that time start giving reminders of the "old" times as they get neglected. That leads to decision time: do I go back to what I used to do or do I stick with the new thing now that it's not the "new thing" anymore?

Since the old habit was probably around a lot longer than the new habit, the old one tends to win out in the end through sheer familiarity and comfort. Since it takes a month or more for working out to start having a real effect, the old ways have an even easier battle. It's easy to go back to the couch when it seems like the new working out habit isn't doing anything.

The realization of the amount of work and/or disruption this new habit involves also contributes to the easy victory for the old habits. That's why instead of looking at the challenge as [big, deep announcer voice] THE 100 WORKOUT CHALLENGE, I look at it as a hundred 1-workout challenges. Each time I fill in a date box, I've won that challenge. All I have to do is 99 more. Then 98 more. And so on. It's just like the old question, "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."

How has it worked for me? Well, this (the only workout selfie I've ever taken) was taken not even 90 days in, and I've gotten even better since then:

What does this have to do with flying? Well, next week I'll apply these lessons to an aviation setting. See you next Wednesday!

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Wednesday, July 5, 2017

A month with David

Last month, I switched from my old Bose X headset to the David Clark DC PRO-X. Now that I've had them for a month, how are they performing?

Outstanding, in short.

The active noise reduction (ANR) is superb. The first time I turned it on was a bit disconcerting, as the noise level with the engines running dropped to quieter than the noise level with the plane shut down without the headset on!

While that was impressive, I really gained an appreciation for just how well the ANR works when the batteries finally died in flight. The noise level shot up so much so quickly that I was startled for a second or two as the sudden noise of rushing air (the noise the headset had been canceling) made me initially think we had lost pressurization.

My eyes shot to the pressurization display and it was holding at 0 FPM (meaning no change in cabin pressure), so I pulled one of the sides of my headset off my ear. There was no change, which meant the batteries had finally worn out. (I knew it was going to happen sometime soon because the battery indicator on the headset control had been blinking red instead of the normal green, which is a warning that the battery is low.) I intentionally was letting the battery run all the way out to see how long it would last, and I got about 25% more life out of it than I did with the old Bose X: 4 weeks instead of 3.

Before, at the end of every flight, as soon as the shutdown checklist was over I used to rip the Bose X headset off right away. I've noticed that there have been a couple of times that I've forgotten to take the PRO-X off until it was time to leave the plane because they are so much more comfortable that they're not constantly reminding me that they're sitting on my head. I also don't tend to try to readjust it one or more times a flight like I did with the Bose X. Once it's on my head, it doesn't slide forward or backward or need readjusted.

Some of that has to do with how much lighter the PRO-X is and how its design does a better job distributing the clamping force that keeps the headset over the ears. Much of that, however, has to do with how much more comfortable the ear cushions are. Since the PRO-X cushions are much smaller and only cover the ear opening instead of the entire ear, my ears are much cooler than they used to be.

Another factor in that is how much more comfortable the material used for the cushions is. The Bose used a cheap-feeling, thin layer of soft material over a large spongy material. In the summer, this outer layer would absorb sweat, get soggy, and start flaking off in a couple of months. Once enough of that material flaked off, the sweat would then wick into the thin fabric material behind it and eventually into the spongy material underneath. After a while, this would start to cause the cushions to smell like unwashed gym socks. (Yes, it is as unpleasant as it sounds.) Trying to get rid of that smell with Lysol wouldn't do much but make the headset smell like Lysol + gym socks, and it would cause what was left of the cushion to dry out and peel apart even faster. Alcohol wipes had the same result.

And if that wasn't enough, if the Bose headset didn't fit exactly perfectly on the head, meaning absolutely no angular displacement, once the cushions got soggy they would start to warp at an angle and at the same time start to gradually lose their sponginess.

Although it's only been a month, the ear cushions for the PRO-X still look brand new and have no evidence whatsoever of wear or loss of support. The leatherette material also feels less cheap and more like real leather.

One of the knocks I've heard about the PRO-X from those who considered it was that it feels and/or looks like it's not very rugged. I've compared it with the Bose X by tapping on it, and the plastic parts actually feel more solid on the DC than the Bose. I think one reason it may look a little flimsier is the matte finish DC uses on the magnesium parts makes the metal look dull like plastic. And the way the PRO-X folds up (which the Bose didn't) makes it sit in my case in a way that makes it less likely to be damaged.

Nothing is perfect, though. However, the only thing I've found so far that I don't like about the PRO-X is one that is easily remedied: the light that flashes to tell you it is on is obnoxiously bright. At night in a dark cockpit, the power light reflecting in the side windscreen is annoying. I solved that by simply placing a piece of electrical tape that covers half of the light.

After I did that, I found out that the DC has a feature that the Bose didn't: you can actually turn the power LED off without turning off the headset! By holding the Power + Bluetooth buttons down, you can turn off the blinking altogether! And as another nice touch, if the battery gets low, the power light will start blinking red to let you know even if you turned it off.