Air Guido

I got more flying in this last weekend than I did all winter.

For starters, for staying current with my instrument rating I need to fly six approaches every six months (and do a hold). I suspect this is the bane of most instrument pilots -- if you're not making your money from flying, you're unlikely to do more than one or two approaches in actual instrument conditions in an entire year, much less one a month.

So, practically speaking, every six months you need to go up with a safety pilot or instructor and practice some approaches, which is what I did on friday. I went with Manuel, who is building time for a commercial pilot job, and I flew two approaches on friday afternoon and one saturday evening. Together with the three I did a couple weeks ago I am now current.

In addition, I did some air taxi "work" this weekend. Zach has some relatives in Fresno that he wanted to visit, so saturday morning Joahnna and I flew him out to the Fresno-Yosemite airport and dropped him off at a maintenance shop there. It's a little odd flying into a commercial airport because they don't really know what to do with you -- they generally don't have a GA parking area, you have to stop at one of the businesses on the field. They charge a ramp fee for parking, but usually if you're just picking up or dropping off passengers the employees turn a blind eye.

On sunday I flew back to pick him up while Joahnna was working a trade show at Valley Fair. After completing the run-up we were cleared for takeoff on 29 left (the shorter of the two runways), and as we taxied into position I elbowed Zach and said "Check that out" -- as we were taking off, an Air Guard F/A-18 was taking off from the parallel runway.

Don't get to see that every day.

Winds in the News

Later found out that high winds caused problems all over the bay area. When I got home I found out that the winds had knocked off several of the plastic drain pipes from the gutters. It also knocked over a big rig on the freeway and caused numerous power outages. San Francisco airport reported gusts up to 41mph

This article reports many of the problems.

Windy Day Flying

Yesterday, I flew up to Lincoln to visit an old friend. We had set up the trip the day before, and the forecast for the time was a nice day with partial clouds. Sure enough, when I got up yesterday it was a bright sunny day with a few scattered clouds. Unfortunately there was also a minor matter of wind.

For flying, we rely greatly on current weather observations at airports, called METARs. When I took off, the weather reports looked like this:

KRHV 141747Z 29015G25KT 10SM SCT040 12/02 A2995
KLHM 141910Z 29020G24KT 10SM SCT070 BKN080 OVC090 13/M03 A2981

For those unfamiliar with decoding these little gems, KRHV was the airport I was flying from and KLHM my destination. The second part is the date and time of the observation, and the third part is the wind. For this one it means that my winds taking off were from a 290 heading, and observed as 15 knots with gusts of up to 25 knots. The runway heading at RHV is 310, so this was about 20 degrees off runway heading.

Takeoff went fairly smoothly, I pulled the plane up into the air once the wheels felt light and immediately turned into the wind. Once off the ground we climbed FAST. We dodged a couple clouds at 4000' on our way up to cruise altitude (that would be the SCT040), and then settled in for a short, bumpy flight to the Lincoln airport.

The winds at Lincoln look pretty similar to RHV -- from 290, 20 knots with gusts to 24. However, the Lincoln runway heading is 330, which makes these winds a full 40 degrees off runway heading. For a 20 knot wind, that gives an effective crosswind of 13 knots.

On my first approach to the airport I did not set up well for the landing. I neglected to take the crosswind into account when turning from base to final, and so instead of turning out lined up with the runway, I did a big skidding turn that blew me past the runway and then to fight my way back into alignment. The approach stayed ugly all the way down to the runway, at which point I scratched the landing and went around to try again.

The second approach went much better. I turned earlier towards the runway, got myself lined up much better, and then transitioned into a good crosswind landing (right rudder, left bank) prior to touchdown. I also think the winds were lighter on the second approach.

Had a good lunch and chat with my friend, then headed back to the airport. For the return trip, I was looking at:

KLHM 142230Z AUTO 03016KT 10SM BKN100 13/M01 A2980

While the winds were lower, they were now perpendicular to the runway instead of at an angle, which didn't make my life any easier (effective crosswind 14 knots). I had to wait for a helicopter and a water bomber that were using the bad winds as good training to make a hole, then again made an uneventful takeoff.

The weather when I finally got back to Reid-Hillview was:

KRHV 142247Z 28017G25KT 10SM SCT040 15/01 A2993

Life hasn't gotten any better back here. I get myself lined up correctly the first time this time, end up touching down near the runway threshold and I am off the runway by taxiway Bravo without even braking hard (Alpha is at the beginning of the runway).

I have mixed feelings about this flight. On one hand, it was good training for dealing with high-wind conditions, and all my (completed) takeoffs and landings went well. On the other hand, I'm not sure if I should have been up in the air in the first place. The takeoff and landing at LHM were both close to the maximum crosswind for my plane (16 knots, I believe). My motivation to fly was about equal parts get-there-itis (I had cancelled on my friend twice before due to weather) and a desire to push the envelope out some on weather I was comfortable flying in.

Replacing the Paperback

I just read this article talking about how the Amazon Kindle could be even better. He has a telling comment on the economics of the Kindle -- how many books you need to buy to make a Kindle pay off.

As an early adopter of the Sony eReader, I can say that the Kindle has a long way to go, because it hasn't really resolved the fundamental problem the eReader faces, which is that it isn't better than a book.

It's different than a book, and has some advantages and disadvantages, but different is not going to make people change their ways. It's not cheaper than buying paperback books, it's not the right format for replacing hardback books, it's fragile (when was the last time you broke a book?), it can run out of power. Against that you have the convenience of being able to order books wherever you are and reducing the storage requirement of books.

And there are business-model differences, too -- once you've read a book on your Kindle, it isn't worth much, but a physical book can be loaned to a friend, resold, or traded in. So, intrinsically, an electronic copy of a book is simply worth less than a physical copy, but typically they cost more than a standard paperback.

I think there are markets for an electronic book, but it's not really a consumer market right now. A larger-format (8x11") e-book oriented towards college students would be a much better device -- if students can buy their textbooks for $25 instead of $50, the device would pay off in a couple quarters, not to mention getting rid of 50+ lbs of books they have to tote around. But I don't see your day-to-day paperbacks getting replaced by e-books until they get a lot more cost competitive.

The End of the Fighter Era

A well-written argument by Lewis Page at The Register on why so many people hate the F-35. It's not that it's a great fighter, it's that it's good enough to put a lot of the competition out of business, and that it's good at doing the unglamorous things that modern militaries actually do -- mainly beating up the forces of small nations equipped with second-rate surplus Russian designs, rather than going head-to-head with large numbers of state-of-the-art aircraft.

But to be honest, to an outsider it looks as though this sector could really stand to shrink quite a lot. The militaries of the West, it appears, continue to plough far too much of their straitened funds into exotic combat jets designed for unlikely wars, and not nearly enough into bread-and-butter infantry, surveillance platforms, helicopters, transport planes and so on.

The F-35 has some of the industry worried not because it's a waste of money, but exactly the opposite -- they fear that it could become the Model T Ford of combat aircraft (available in any color you like, as long as it's grey) and wipe out the competing manufacturers.

I still believe even the F-35 is far more expensive than what we need today. A second production run of A-10s would do a lot more good for today's military actions than any new fighter on the market.

Walking While Brown

Yesterday Zach had an encounter with the Santa Clara Police Department. While walking around looking for a nearby park, he stopped and asked an older woman for directions. A few minutes later an SCPD police cruiser rolls up on him and he is stopped and questioned for a while and then released.

A few details may make this a bit more clear:

• It was broad daylight -- around 4PM
• The woman was white
• We live in a predominantly white neighborhood
• Zach is half-Pakistani, but looks Hispanic to most observers

Joahnna called the police and complained about this, and in the ensuing discussion, it turned out the woman Zach asked for directions thought that he looked "suspicious" and called the police.

Joahnna and I are at a loss as to what to tell Zach if he wishes to avoid being periodically stopped and checked. It seems as if the bar for "suspicious" is suspiciously low.

Can't Wait for the Weekend

I'm in Israel this week for a business trip, and that means that for me the week ends today (Thursday). Tomorrow evening I fly back to the U.S.

It has been an odd time to travel to Israel. The airstrikes in Gaza had been going on for a week or so by the time I left, and the ground war started as I was flying over. A number of people asked if it was safe, and I said that I believed so, since the action was confined to the Gaza strip.

In many ways the feeling here reminds me of 2003, just after the war in Iraq started. People were concerned about it, but simply went on with their daily lives. The feeling I get here is similar, but the discontinuity is more pronounced -- it's very odd to get in your car and drive to work, realizing that people are fighting and dieing not two hours drive away.

I Told You So

It would be nice to read articles like these that validate things I have said before, if it weren't for the fact that the validation takes the form of drought and water shortages.

"The demand for water has gone up," Christy says. "The demand has skyrocketed in places like California and New Mexico because they've tried to grow crops in deserts."

Unclear what we will do about it. The farm lobby is very powerful in California, but they can't create water from thin air.

“Given that agriculture accounts for about 80% of Delta water consumption, no economic, environmental, or policy assessment can be complete without a serious examination of agricultural water withdrawals from the Delta,” said Heather Cooley, senior research associate at the Pacific Institute (original article)

Maybe rice and alfalfa aren't such great crops for California after all?

Where My Tax Money Goes

I often have discussions (or perhaps gripe sessions would be a better term) with Jon and others about where all my tax money goes. With sales and income taxes that are both among the highest in the nation, and property tax to boot, it feels like we're getting dinged at every turn.

So, after a little coffee-time debate at work, I decided to harness the power of the internet and find out. What I found were these links.

First, a study of the California total tax burden versus that of other states concludes that while we pay more than the national average in taxes, it's not a lot more (11.5% versus 11% average for the nation). This article on wikipedia argues that prop 13 has had a disruptive effect on the state economy by making it more advantageous to hold on to your property than to sell it, thus chilling the housing market in many areas.

As for where the money goes, the Governor's budget office has a nice income/expense graph. This shows that, for all their complaints, schools get about 41% of the state budget, with the next biggest item being health services at 25%. Bond funding isn't shown on this graph, elsewhere I found a figure of $4.4B, which would put it at around 3% of the budget. Corrections is also a big chunk of the budget at 7.3%.

However, all of this may be moot if the legislature can't break the deadlock and come to some agreement on the state budget for next year; otherwise the budget for everything will be zero.

Goodbye Performance Review?

Article by a professor and management consultant that performance reviews are counterproductive. Given the way they are run at most companies I've been in, I'd have to agree -- the good managers I had either glossed over the performance review process or ignored it entirely.

Around the Bend

Joahnna and I flew up to Bend, Oregon over the weekend to visit her Aunt Vicki and Uncle Jim. The weather was exceptionally nice for this time of year -- clear skies and calm winds all the way up and back.



We flew up saturday morning, arriving at 2PM after a three-hour flight. They gave us a tour of the area, including a nice upscale mall in Bend, and a quick drive out to Mount Batchelor. On sunday we drove out to a nearby ranch, owned by a friend of Jim's, who breeds Clydesdales for competition. They are apparently very friendly and docile horses, which is good to remind yourself of when you're next to one, because they are huge.


After visiting the horses, we had a quick lunch at the local brew-pub. I didn't get to sample the brew, naturally, but Joahnna had a sampler, and afterwards we launched off into the wild orange yonder. We took off at around 3pm but the sun was already beginning to set behind the clouds.


On the way hope we took a slight detour and flew over Crater Lake, which was quite pretty. We got some nice reflections off the water and I flew a few s-turns so Joahnna could get some good photos.

After that we watched the sun set as we neared Redding, and wrapped up another hour of flight for a nighttime touchdown.

Postcard Shot

Joahnna and I flew to Santa Barbara on tuesday to celebrate my grandfather's 93rd birthday. We had some low clouds coming out of San Jose, and Joahnna shot the photo above as we were flying south in the morning.

Flying Prius

Well, it won't be made by Toyota. In fact it may not be made by anyone, but a company called Falx is working on a hybrid tilt-wing design with a gasoline generator powering two electric motors.

It's a pretty cool looking aircraft, but browsing through the website shows that they're still at the early-concept stage (as in, "We have cool ideas, give us money and they might turn in to a product"). Maybe they could build it out of Buckypaper.

How To Run an Election

It seems funny that the U.S. should look to another country about how to run an election, but Brazil seems to have a pretty good handle on how to do a trusted election on electronic voting machines.

The article details how the hardware is provided by a private company (Diebold), but the software is written by the government election office, and is then reviewed and digitally signed by members of both political parties.

This is, in my opinion, the right way to run an election -- the process of how the election is run is completely under the control of the government and monitored by the affected parties. Colluding to fix an election would require the involvement of three parties, one of whom would presumably be harmed by the result.

Santa Barbara Approach

Joahnna and I flew down to Santa Barbara on sunday to visit my grandparents. We had a quick trip down courtesy of a strong tailwind that set my current speed record for the Comanche (178 knots over the ground). We had an interesting landing as the tower worked us in between a bunch of Air Tractors spraying mulch on the hillside.

Spent the afternoon chatting with my grandparents and Uncle Gregg, who was in the area, then headed back to the airport for the flight home. Joahnna slept all the way back, which was a bit longer since we were now fighting the winds that helped us down, and doing 125-130 knots most of the way.

Touched down at sunset, in what were forecast to be gusty winds but were calm for the moment I landed in. We did hear an ominous call from the tower as we were taxiing in, though -- it seems that one of the planes that landed just behind us crossed over an invisible line in the air, and was told to "taxi to transient and call air traffic control about a possible airspace deviation".

That'd be the equivalent of seeing the flashing blue lights behind you.

Bailout or Subsidized Stupidity?

The proposed bailout didn't sit really well with me when I first heard about it, since it felt like rewarding people for making bad decisions, and it didn't help the people that are really feeling the pain -- i.e. the people getting kicked out of their houses.

This is not to say that I think people should get rewarded for buying a house they couldn't afford, but if you're trying to prop up the economy by dumping government money into it, I'd much rather it went to people whose worst mistake is not being able to do math than people who intentionally engaged in high-risk investment and then covered it up with an impenetrable paper trail.

But what do I know -- my expertise is in getting chips to work, not finance. A lot of commentators are blasting congress for not immediately giving Paulson the $700 billion blank check he was looking for, but recently economists are singing a different tune.

Politico summarizes the reaction of a number of economists, and a wide spread of economists signed this letter.

Luigi Zingales summarizes how I feel (with better credentials):

For somebody like me who believes strongly in the free market system, the most serious risk of the current situation is that the interest of few financiers will undermine the fundamental workings of the capitalist system. The time has come to save capitalism from the capitalists.

His full paper is here.

Engaged!

Last weekend I flew to to the Mariposa Airport along with Joahnna and Zach as part of a Tradewinds fly-in to Yosemite. Dave, one of the pilots, organized the whole outing, including figuring out the logistics of how to get from the Mariposa airport to Yosemite.

This ended up being a cab ride from the airport, with three trips to get all 11 of us to the Mariposa visitor's center where the YARTS bus stops.

The bus ride in took around two hours, and we ended up in Yosemite around noon. We grabbed a quick bite to eat and I pushed for the waterfalls hike. Once on the hike we split up into two groups, with the three of us as well as John S. and his girlfriend Cathy outpacing the rest of the group.

On the way up the stairs to get to the Vernal fall, the group started flagging a bit. John and Cathy turned back and I egged on Joahnna and Zach to keep going for the top. The steps to the fall are reasonably steep, so it's a pretty good workout to get there.

Once at the top I gave Zach a quick briefing on what I had in mind, then posed for a "photo" with Joahnna. Before the photo was taken, I said "just wait a second, I have a question for you" and pulled the ring out of my pack. I gave my proposal on bended knee and, fortunately, it was accepted.

Joahnna bubbled for a bit while I grinned, and passers-by congratulated us. We talked to one couple that said that they had proposed at this spot ten years ago, which we thought was a good sign.

After that we started back down, since time was short and we weren't sure if we would be able to make the bus ride back. We pushed down at an aggressive pace and managed to make the 3:30 bus with a minute to spare.

Joahnna napped for part of the bus ride back and spent the rest of the ride playing "I Spy" with Joshua, the grandson of one of the other pilots. We received another round of congratulations from the pilots in the Tradewinds group. Back in Mariposa, we woke up Zach, everyone piled out and we caught the first taxi shuttle back to the airport.


I took the opportunity to gas up the plane with the cheapest avgas I have seen recently ($5.07) while the taxi shuttled in the other two groups, and then we posed for a quick group photo before taking off into the evening sun. We landed just as sun set, at 7pm.

Afterwards we invited Joahnna's family over to our house for drinks and chatted a bit before heading to bed. After a full day of flying and hiking (plus a couple of gin and tonics) we slept very, very well.

Defconomy

This link is an article about 5 steps (modeled on the "DEFCON" system used by U.S. strategic command) from situation-normal to Great Depression-style economic meltdown.

The steps and descriptions come courtesy of Nouriel Roubini, a professor of economics. The interesting thing about this article is that it was originally published in february, and at the time of writing we were at Defconomy 5. Now we're somewhere around 3 or 2, and it's played out almost exactly as described.

Emergency Preparedness

I spent some time over the weekend preparing a survival pack for my car and updating the one in Joahnna's. Partially this was just an excuse to go poking around in Steven's Creek Army Surplus, which always has lots of odd and entertaining military gear to look at mixed in with their outdoor stuff. But it's also that it seems rather short-sighted to live in one of the most geologically active regions of the world and not take at least some minimal preparations.

What I was aiming for is a version of the 72-hour urban survival kit, the idea being it just has to get you through the time from the earthquake hits to when FEMA gets their act together. Note that, after seeing the Hurricane Katrina performance, this may end up being more than 72 hours. Towards that end I bought a 5-gallon jug of water for the garage. We normally have a bunch of bottled water around the house, but Murphy's law says that the quake will hit just as we're about to go to Costco for more.

What ended up in my pack was:

• 6 16oz bottles of water


• Folding knife


• Beef jerkey (although I later read on the site that trail mix would be better)


• Plastic canteen survival kit (has a few useful items, including poncho, survival blanket, whistle and matches)


• Water purification tablets


• Hydrogen peroxide


• Trauma bandages (2" to 6" thick gauze pads)


• Hand-crank flashlight


• Duct tape

By my quick estimate, this cost me about $65, although some items are hard to tell (the trauma bandages I split across 3 different kits). The most expensive item was the canteen survival kit, at $15. A used backpack to store it all in was also included, which was about $12.

Hopefully I'll never need it, but since California has a 99% chance of having a major quake in the next 30 years, it will probably come in handy at some point.

Unusual Names

I've always felt that unusual names add a bit of flavor to one's personality. Partially it's personal bias, since "Guy" is at least a moderately unusual name in the U.S. (although I'd fit right in in France or the U.K.). But there is such a thing as taking it too far.

And the parents in New Zealand who named their child "Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii" arguably have gone that far, and then some. A judge sensibly allowed the child to change her name to something more reasonable.

Also entertaining from the article were some of the other names that people have attached to their offspring -- my favorite is "Number 16 Bus Shelter."