Coincidental Floss: Egocentric

Mike – We Have a Guest! We are NOT Going to Taco Bell!

Thu, 22 May 2008 19:56:46 GMT

“If you’re ever in the Bay Area, you should head out to the Nut Tree and say hello to Duncan Miller … he’s been around a long time … still flies, and has hangars full of interesting stuff. If you’re lucky, you can sign his guestbook like about 4 million other people.”

This bit of advice came, more than once, from my friend and former colleague Marty Blaker. (Marty – if you’re reading this, “Hey.”) It came most recently about a week ago on a trip that found me in said Bay Area with a bit of extra time on my hands.

Now, I’m a gregarious sort of fellow – after all, one doesn’t become the single best Flight Simulator Community Evangelist in a company the size of Microsoft without being a bit of a people person. But I already know a lot of people, and I’m inherently skeptical when anyone says “Oh, you have to meet so-and-so”. Given that, my knee-jerk response to such a suggestion is to want to simply smile and nod, say “I’ll be sure and do just that” while gingerly filing the whole thing under “I’m really just being polite.”

(Besides, the last time I went to the Nut Tree, a roadside fruit-stand turned fly-in restaurant and mini-theme-park, I had a soul-shatteringly terrifying experience involving a miniature train and a scarecrow; was I really ready to go back to that area, only 36 years later?)

Thankfully, I have two knees, and, in this case, the second one jerked and reminded me that Marty wouldn’t steer me wrong, not to mention the fact that I’m a connoisseur of interesting stuff. So, like George Costanza ordering a chicken salad on rye, I decided to give it a go. I called Marty and asked if he would call his friend Duncan and give me an introduction.

Marty’s response filled me with the opposite of confidence when he said “Oh, he won’t remember me at all! Just show up, and tell him that you heard that, if you’re into old airplanes, you have to stop and say hello to Duncan. It’ll be great!”

So … I was not only expected to just walk into some stranger’s hangar and say “Hello”, I was supposed to do it entirely unannounced. With a jaunty “why not?”, I set out to do precisely that. And I would have made it, too, if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids at the TSA who decided to erect fences and security gates around this little airport in a fit of post-9/11 spending. Thanks to those precautions, I arrived at the airport and found myself peering at Duncan’s hangar and what I could see of his airplane collection, clutching at the chain link fence like a Dickensian orphan or a really easily deterred terrorist.

A few minutes after I gave up, I saw someone circling in front of the hangar on a bicycle, took my chances and waved them over. As he coasted to a stop, I asked if he was Duncan Miller, by any chance.

“I am,” he said.

“Well … my name’s Hal, I’m an old airplane guy, and I’ve heard that, if I’m in this area, I have to stop by and say hello. So … hello!”

Duncan sized me up for half a beat, then said “Head down to the gate over there. The code is and I’ll meet you back at the hangar.”
When Duncan said “hangar,” he may well have said “museum,” or, simply, “home.” I walked in past the Lockheed PV2 and the Grumman S-2 Tracker parked on the ramp and saw two beautiful restored Stearmans, two vintage Fords, and a spotless Piper Cub, all surrounded by photos and parts and memorabilia, the seeds of a thousand stories. Duncan got me a soda from his refrigerator, and we sat in an air conditioned “ready room” in the corner of his hangar. One of his hangars, that is.

There’s an unspoken ritual when pilots meet, especially those of us with a penchant for the old and unusual. It’s something that my friend Jim called “authentication,” and he was spot on. In this case, I was the interloper, the stray punk off the street who may or may not have been selling something, so the burden to authenticate was clearly mine. This process usually, and often very subtly, involves answering three questions in the course of a conversation: “Do you know what you’re talking about?”, “What have you flown?”, and “Who do we both know?”

My authentication took the form of interested commentary on some of the pictures on the walls, and then we started leafing through one of Duncan’s sixty-five overstuffed photo albums. He pointed at one picture and asked if I recognized the location—I did, it was Reno/Stead. Other pictures came and went, each with their own stories, spun quickly and handed off by a man who has been flying nearly every day since 1939. I mentioned flying Tiger Moths and growing up with a “Bamboo Bomber” (a 1944 Cessna T-50), and, naturally, Duncan used to own one, back when he started a non-scheduled airline flying C-46’s out of Boeing Field near Seattle, which reminded him, did I know so-and-so, oh, great, he thought I might …. The connections were found and forged almost synaptically, and before I knew it, it was time to go.

Time for Duncan to go, that is. He had to run an errand, so I started to take that as my cue to leave, but he asked me to stick around. He gave me the keys to his other hangars, reminded me about the refrigerator, asked me to sign his guestbook, and told me to make myself at home. I’d clearly been authenticated. Wandering through his hangars I saw Stearmans and T-28s and more classic cars and even a Vultee BT-13, not to mention countless more bits of aero-ephemera. I was like the proverbial kid in a candy store except that nothing was for sale and there was no risk of diabetic coma.

After about thirty minutes, some kind of 70s Oldsmobuick docked itself outside, and a guy named Mike hopped out.

“Hello there. If you’re looking for Duncan, he went to get a part and said he’d be right back,” I offered, helpfully.

“Oh, hi … yeah, Duncan told me he was going to go get a part, and said he’d be right back” said Mike.

With that superfluous redundancy out of the way, Mike and I sat down for a chat. He’s based in Alaska but had come down to stay for a few weeks and fly the BT-13 to a few air shows. I never did get Duncan’s age, but Mike is 86 and adamantly identifies himself as the younger of the two. They’ve been flying and working together for a long time, at least as far back as the early 50s, and, when Duncan got back, the three of us settled in for a marathon of story-swapping and a few more test questions for me, though all in good fun.

There was an unobtrusive wooden sign on the wall that read “Pals Forever.” It seemed a little trite at first, frankly, but, in talking with these two guys, the cynicism ebbed. Sometimes, people actually do say just what they mean.

Between the two of them, I’m fairly certain that they’ve flown everything and been everywhere. We talked about the handling of the BT-13 compared to the Harvard, we talked about Moths and Bamboo Bombers and Beech 18s, about one of their friends who flies a DC-3 out of a 700-foot grass strip. Duncan talked about ferrying an RP-63 King Cobra during WWII, and how heavy it felt with the additional armor plating. It seems the R model was used for gunnery practice— not as a remotely piloted drone or towing a target but as a manned target that fighter pilots shot at with plastic bullets, their hits scored automatically by what the pilots called the “pinball machine” inside the cockpit.

Lousy work, if you can get it.

Duncan had mentioned earlier that he was going to show me “something that Churchill gave back.” When I reminded him, he responded with a question, another test:

“Do you know what an AT-19 is?” he asked.

The wheels turned, the gears ground…. AT was the U.S. Army Air Corps designation for “Advanced Trainer.” Our very own Cessna T-50 was known in some guises as an AT-8 or AT-17, for example. In addition to those, I could identify an AT-6, AT-9, an AT-11 …. Then something clicked, and a picture snapped into my head.

“Was that the gullwing Stinson? The V-77?” I asked with what I’ll call “confidesitancy”.

As it happened, I was right, and that seemed to be the last of the tests. Duncan asked if I wanted to go and look at one, and I replied with something articulate like “well, duh!”, but before we got up, Mike interjected.

“Wait. What was the AT-19? Did we figure it out?” he asked.

“Yes, Hal got it. It’s a gullwing Stinson. Where were you?” Duncan replied.

“I was busy trying to remember what the hell an AT-19 was!” Mike responded.

“Don’t you remember? You crashed one!” said Duncan.

“I crashed? Are you sure? I don’t remember … “ Mike said.

Duncan gave an exaggerated eye-roll and I said something about hoping to live long enough and spend enough time flying that I’d someday not be able to remember something as dramatic as a crash. They both laughed, and then Duncan said that it was great to see that the younger generation was taking an interest in these things. Having accidentally turned 40 a couple of days ago, being referred to as “the younger generation” was surely the best present I could hope for.

As promised, Duncan took me to look at the Stinson, and, as expected, it was absolutely gorgeous. Of the 500 or so built, about 380 of them went to the UK as part of our Lend-Lease agreement and this was one of the aircraft that was given back—truly lent, rather than leased. This example looked factory new in British Royal Navy colors, ready to patrol the seas on the lookout for enemy Unterseebooten. It’s for sale, too; a fact that I immediately tried to forget.

At this point, something like six hours had flown by, and I started to politely make my exit, not especially looking forward to the 90-minute drive to my hotel with a stop at a restaurant where some fancy waitress with big hair and fake nails tries and fails to find a polite way of saying “Oh … just one of you tonight?” Then, mercifully, the idea of the three of us having dinner seemed to spontaneously suggest itself. I agreed to join them, but only if they were sure I wasn’t intruding, and if they’d let me treat.

It was then that Mike suggested Taco Bell, and Duncan shot him a look filled with what I’m fairly sure was mock indignation and said:

“Mike! We have a guest! We are NOT going to Taco Bell!
We… are going … to Denny’s!”

And so we did, Mike and I shrugging and shaking our heads while every waitress in the place cooed and giggled with Duncan, all but sitting on his lap to take his order. Duncan must be somewhere around 90 and belies the old adage about there being no such thing as an “old, bold pilot.” If he ever does leave this world, heaven forbid, the odds are it won’t be in an airplane, or in a hospital, but at the hands of a jealous husband. God bless ‘im.

After dinner, we (and by “we” I mean Duncan) got one of the waitresses to take a picture of all of us, after she had several taken with him, of course. While we sat smiling for the camera, I heard Duncan whispering something. It wasn’t “cheese,” it was something that sounded like part toast, part mantra: “Pals forever, pals forever.” There was obviously a story behind it, but it seemed private, and I was perfectly happy to just take it at face value.

And so it is that I’ve found another home-away-from-home, a reminder of the kinship of aviation, where just a few key pieces of trivia are a viable shortcut to a very real friendship. And all I had to do was trust somebody I already trusted anyway, and then simply show up.

Pals forever, indeed.

So, here’s a bit of advice. If you’re ever in the greater Bay Area north of San Francisco, California, and you like old airplanes, you just have to stop in and say hello to Duncan Miller. And if you go out to eat, don’t settle for Taco Bell.

Recent Feedback, Part 2: The Jaw-Droppingly Peculiar Kind

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 04:07:10 GMT

Note: Anything in the following that might remotely resemble an opinion is mine and mine alone, and reflects neither the stuff nor the things of the Microsoft Corporation, its subsidiaries, associates, customers, antitrust investigators, or anyone who ever has or has not actually heard of the company.

So.

A while back, somebody sent us a fax. Faxes, or facsimile transmittals, for the cognoscenti, all go to one place at Microsoft, and are then routed individually thanks to the tireless efforts of our crack team of certified faxographists. If a fax isn't specifically addressed to an employee by name, sometimes it takes a little while to find the right person, but, eventually, they get there.

(Postal mail works the same way ... the customer who sent back their boxed copy of Combat Flight Simulator 3 to "Microsoft" with a piece of paper taped to it that read "won't download" with no other identifying information would be happy to know that it arrived on my desk just about one week after it was sent. This timeliness is appreciated on my end as well, since the sooner something like that arrives, the sooner I can start spending weeks and weeks frowning at it, wondering exactly what it is I'm supposed to do about it.)

Anyway, so I got this fax from someone who identified themselves as a pilot and Flight Simulator customer who had some questions about our latest release related to an upcoming book that he'll be self-publishing and selling out of a van down by the river. Click the thumbnail to see the actual fax, censored so I can take the moral high ground and avoid a lawsuit.

I made the call, and it was answered promptly by a reasonable-sounding gentleman who seemed glad that I was able to make the time to contact him.

He was right, it was brief. Of his promised 3-5 minutes, he spent three of them berating me for the fact that a company as high-tech as Microsoft had to rely on something as archaic and "totally 1975" as a fax. He was wondering why he hadn't been able to simply reach us directly by phone, a method that I didn't point out is archaic and "totally 1876". I did, however, suggest that he could have gone to our website and clicked the link to send us an email, something that might be charitably referred to as "fairly 1995 or so", at which point he changed the subject.

The subject to which he changed was a question of realism. He said a few kind things about our products and the time and energy he presumed we spend on details and things, but said that there was one gigantic, glaring error.

My first thought was "Only one? You're not paying attention!" My second through fifth thoughts were quick guesses as to where we had failed this particular pilot-author. Stalls and spins? SIDS and STARS? Winds aloft? No yaw string on the glider?

I could have been precisely none more wrong.

"Now, I got my numbers straight from the FAA - you can check them yourself", he said. "According to their statistics, only 2% of all the commercial pilots in the US are <edited> or women. In FSX, though, when I look at the exteriors of the airplanes and see the pilots inside, they're 25% <edited> or women. My book is about how political correctness is ruining this country, and I'd like to know whose idea it was to make this one area so unrealistic? Is it company policy, just somebody's idea, or is it part of your settlement agreement with the government?"

Wow.

Never mind the fact that I dislike political correctness more than most, personally (though people like this make curmudgeons like me look squishily sensitive and fanatically open-minded.)

Never mind the fact that we sell Flight Simulator all over the world, so US-only statistics are bogus to begin with.

Never mind the fact that we sell many times as many copies as there are pilots in the world, so, if the appearance of the figures in the cockpits were to reflect anything, it would be our customer base.

Never mind the fact that the makeup of the characters modeled in FSX was all but random - if there was an edict, it was something like "Let's show more than just middle-aged white guys flying the airplanes", and it would have come from retired FS artist and middle-aged white guy Jason Waskey.

No, let's set all that aside.

Let's also forget terrorism, high gas prices, sub-prime mortgages, the falling dollar, our own apparently anti-competitive tendencies to charge too much money for some things and too little for others, people with mullets, war, and the impending return of the Camaro, and pretend that political correctness is the thing that's actually ruining this country.

Having swept the elephants in the room under a rug, I'm left with one question:

Is there anyone, anywhere who actually thinks that some textures wrapped around a handful of polygons and viewed through a virtual camera system that doesn't let you get that close anyway could actually influence anything?

Well, okay, yes.

There's one.

And he's writing a book. A book that I, on behalf of Microsoft, declined to support, with Herculean politeness.

I won't mention his name here, tempting as it is. But I will say that when one ~~Googles~~ performs a Windows Live Search for his name, it turns out that he runs a consulting company that trains sales people by modifying their thoughts and institutionalizing behaviors to help them better connect with their customers.

I wonder if he teaches a section on what to do when you get a fax from someone like him?

Recent Feedback, Part 1: The Good Kind

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 02:18:39 GMT

Not too long ago, I published a few million words on FSInsider about my role demonstrating Flight Simulator X to His Royal Highness Prince Philippe, Duke of Brabant, Prince of Belgium. For those of you that read me here but not there <Hi, Donna! - ed.>, here's a link to the article:

http://www.fsinsider.com/team/Pages/UsetheHatSwitchtoLookAround,YourHighness.aspx

This particular article was, I report with happy confusion, quite well received. So much so, that a number of people were compelled to comment via electrical mail. In order to keep my perpetual vanity machine well lubed, I thought I'd share excerpts from two of my favorites here.

The first was from a gentleman in Germany, who said:

Gentlemen,

I'm a (mostly silent) fan of the Flight Sim since Version One was released on 5,25" disk, later swapped to the Amiga and returned to the MSFS with version 4.

Normally I prefer to stay silent but Hal's very honest and subjective report about this incident is really a rare PR stunt with more benefit for the company (MS) than a few millions of normal (and likewise stupid) advertisement for those, who can't read anyway...

Hal, I bow deeply and "Chapeau" for this great article!

As someone who knows a thing or two about stupid advertising and PR stunts, all I can say is Vielen dank!

My other favorite came from an actual Belgian, who wrote:

As a Belgian resident I can safely say that Hal Bryan’s ”A tale of a Royal visit!” is by far the funniest FS related story I have ever read. BTW, in Belgium the prince is also known as <no need to reprint it here - ed.>, but let us not be too disrespectful (anyway, he prefers to be called <skipping this one too, just in case - ed.> ).

Also, Hal forgot the “accent aigu” in chargé d’affaires - but otherwise not bad for a ‘yank’ ;-) And his Dutch is excellent – “eenvoudige missies” indeed, “te eenvoudig zelfs!” :)

Best regards!

For the record, it was Sharepoint Designer <no need to reprint my occasional nicknames for it here - ed.>, that stripped the accent aigu, but I should have caught that and fixed it after the fact. Excellent eye, safely anonymous Belgian customer! Excuseer me en Dank u!

Which American Incompetence Envies Afghanistan - Smallpox or Facebook?

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:18:37 GMT

I spend a lot of my workday these days tinkering with web stuff. I'm no stranger to the mysterious vagaries nor the vague mysteries of dynamic content roll-up queries and the like, nor am I an expert. I know just enough to get it wrong three times, then right on the fourth try. At least one of the three tries finds me cursing the designers of a particular software tool we use occasionally, though I tend not to do so loudly, as there's at least slim chance they'll overhear.

Anyway, I've noticed every once in a while that Slate Magazine's headline listings on the MSN home page get munged together in wonderfully senseless ways. If I happen to see an instance of this first thing in the morning, I'll stare at it angrily for a minute or so, as if the downward pressure of my eyebrows will somehow squeeze that part of my brain that is certain that, while it agrees that what I'm reading should make sense, just shrugs and returns only a gruff "...can't help ya."

Then, happily, I remember the immortal words of Francisco d'Anconia--"Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong."

Of my premises, I'm not sure if "Things on the Internet must make sense" or "Software people don't make mistakes" is the faultiest.

Regardless ... here's my current favorite. Don't stare too long, it won't get any better.

Sometimes, You Just Obey the Box

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 02:38:15 GMT

The other day, someone on the Flight Sim team sent around a screenshot of an early version of FS, side-by-side with a contemporary shot from Acceleration. This started a lot of us stumbling down amnesia lane, sending screenshots and other reminiscences of versions we remember. Such are some of the slightly curmudgeonly joys of working on the longest-running consumer software franchise we know of. There are people on the team, myself included, who've been customers since Version 1.0 for the IBM PC ... and there are others who haven't even been alive that long.

Then there's our own Dave Denhart, who worked alongside Bruce Artwick in the earliest days of Flight Simulator, even before Microsoft got involved. Dave loves to enthrall the team with colorful tales of those heady times when you had to whittle your software by hand, with only a rusty buck knife, a bag of pistachios, and a healthy dose of determination to see you through. Then sometimes he starts to spit a little bit, his voice goes up an octave or two, and he explains what's wrong with the government and that he can prove that Steve Jobs is monitoring his thoughts while we mutter excuses and sidle out.

Anyway, as more people started jumping on the thread, seizing the chance to surf the web and reply all (what we call "pulling a Hudson"), I did a bit of reminiscent waxing myself, thinking back to what was, technically, one of my very, very first flight simulators. It may not have been hand-carved, but it did predate software, at least in our house. It was produced by Schaper, a company that was blissfully unashamed to refer to itself as "the Cootie Company", and it was called, simply, "U Fly-It".

And I did.

So much so, in fact, that it might have been called "U Fly-It and Then U Fly-It Some More Did I Say U Could Stop?", "U Fly-It And Ignore Your Parents, You Can Always Eat Tomorrow Besides We're A Big Corporation And U're Just a Four Year Old Kid So U Should Do What We Say", or "U Fly-It Because If U Don't U'll Get Cooties."

Thanks to the miracle of space-age Ethernet technology, U can can actually watch the original "U Fly-It" TV commercial, delivered straight to your face in conveniently pre-encoded data packlets, courtesy of the good people at Like Television. Give it a look - I'll wait:

Even though this brings back a flood of childhood recollections, I should probably point out that, unlike the kids in the commercial, I was listening to the Beatles and not to the soul-numbingly repetitive instrumental strains of what sounds like a bad Fifth Dimension cover band and I paid regular visits to both barbers and dentists. And, most importantly, never, not once, have I ever goofed a landing.

Amazingly, about this same time, my dad actually built me, in effect, a life-sized (kid life-sized, anyway) "U Fly-It" as part of an elaborate scheme to get me to go outside and make my mom nervous. It was a pedal-plane of sorts that ran on a wire what seemed like miles up the hill from our house, ending with a carrier-style landing on our back deck. Unfortunately, I don't think any pictures have survived over the years, but I'll ask the family archivist over the upcoming holiday.

After the "U Fly-It", it was a pretty steady progression to the Vertibird, then Star Wars, then Flight Sim, and, finally, girls, where the aforementioned haircuts and dentistry suddenly seemed even more relevant.

All the People That Come and Go Stop and Say Hello

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 04:53:41 GMT

Well, perhaps not all of them; I've never been particularly good at hypobole ... But a number of visitors to this edge of the Internet do take a moment to post a comment or send an email. More often than not, it's a race between my undeservedly good friends Owen Hewitt and Francois Dumas to see who can be the first to offer some undeservedly good feedback on whatever I've just published.

Other times it's just a word or several from someone that I don't know, but who happens to have enough time on their hands to say something nice to a stranger. Every once in a while, that something nice ends up being a request for tech support, but those are uncommon and surprisingly polite. (A quick note to anyone who sends feedback or questions via the "send a message" link rather than posting them as a comment - please make sure to include your email address, because most of the time when I try to respond, it's rejected because of your privacy settings.)

And then there are the Spambots, which are exactly the opposite of being as cool as they sound. The term conjures images of great tin behemoths with rounded corners and impossible expiry dates, lumbering through cities leaving only destruction and sticky bits of jellied pork shoulder in their wake. Instead, they're just software, malevolently irritating little snippets of code written by malevolently irritating little snippets of people, repeatedly smearing what we used to think would be called cyberspace with their ineffectual grimy nonsense.

The prolificacy amazes me; I have to wonder if anyone, ever, at all, in the once and future history of words on the Internet, will read an article I've written here, see the comments posted below it, and actually buy some Viagra?

And then there are the corrections, which are often my very favorites. In my post Inattention to Detail, I publicly thanked a reader called Tom who pointed out that I had made a well-intentioned mistake of astronautical import. In reviewing my comments the other day, I came across not one, not three, but two such comments that I'd overlooked. Both of them involve my unwittingly reckless and flippant abuse of the German language, and deserve to be addressed.

The first, from someone called "derMicha", referenced a post in which I asserted that the word helicopter is the same in both English and German. derMicha's comment reads as follows:

"You're wrong about "helicopter". "Helicopter" in german means "Hubschrauber". Sometimes people just use the english word "helicopter" for some reason. More and more the german language gets destroyed by stupid anglicanism."

To derMicha, I offer my standard but sincere entschuldigung, bitte - I was only going by what I heard, but I enjoy your language far too much to participate in its dilution. Believe me, I'd never lazily skate by with helicopter if I knew that I had the opportunity to use a word as much fun to say as Hubschrauber! (And, since I know you're reading this, your Most Reverend and Right Honourable Dr. Rowan Williams, 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, I am quite certain that derMicha meant Anglicization, not Anglicanism. Mea culpa, Your Grace.)

The second correction came from returning visitor Heiko Bröker. In the past, Heiko has helped keep my translation skills sharp by posting entirely auf Deutsch. I enjoy reading those posts, almost as much as I enjoy not admitting how long it actually takes me to understand them. This time, though, Heiko wrote in English, and caught me in the one of the best kinds of mistakes: the misheard lyric.

From the ubiquitous classics, like Hendrix singing "'Scuse me, while I kiss this guy" and Creedence's timeless "...there's a bathroom on the right", to my own insistence that Mike Hill of the Dave Clark Five was ordering "...a huge egg salad and tall steak soup" in the song The Name of the Place is I Like it Like That, a title nearly as ponderous as this dreadful run-on sentence, people have been practicing the time-honored tradition of mis-hearing lyrics nearly as long as they've been hearing them.

Anyway, thanks to Heiko, I know now that the song I learned in high school German class (and wrote about here) was not, in fact, Bude Jacke, but Bruder Jakob. When translated, it does seem to make a great deal more sense to sing "Brother Jacob, are you sleeping?" rather than asking the same question of something called a "booth jacket".

My ongoing thanks to people like Tom, derMicha, and Heiko for paying attention, and keeping me honest.

It's never too late to get it right.

It's Been a Long, Cold, Lonely Winter

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 00:55:28 GMT

And it's only November ...

This particular winter started, as near as I can tell, about the end of July, when Gerry Beck was killed in a landing accident at Oshkosh. Then, three pilots - Steve Dari, Brad Morehouse, and Gary Hubler - died in crashes at the Reno Air Races. Most recently, pilot Phil Kibler and skydivers Ralph Abdo,Landon Atkin, Michelle Barker, Casey Craig, Cecil Elsner, Bryan Jones, Hollie Rasberry, Jeff Ross, Andrew Smith were killed when their Cessna Caravan crashed in the Cascade Mountains.

Beck was a friend of two very dear friends of mine, Morehouse died about a hundred yards in front of me, Kibler was a friend and student of one of my closest friends and colleagues, and I'd even logged time in N430A on more than one occasion.

None of that matters, at least not much. The aviation world is small enough that nobody ever seems to be more than a degree or two of separation from anyone else - when a pilot is lost, it's uncommon to not be able to find some connection. While those connections inevitably make incidents like these a little more personal - I'm the first to confess that I react a bit differently to the news of an airplane crash than I might to some other tragedy, all else being equal - of course the losses of life aren't suddenly more tragic just because I find myself somehow connected to all of them.

So, we mourn a bit, more for some than others, then square our jaws and steel our gazes and try to learn from it - most pilots will shamelessly beg, borrow, or steal whatever lessons they can from the misfortune (or even near-misfortune) of anyone else. In that vein, then, you could call it continuing education in risk management. Or you could simply call it coping; regardless, it beats the alternative, railing helplessly against Fate or what have you, insisting that these things just shouldn't happen.

But that doesn't change the fact that we wish they didn't.

One incident like those I've mentioned is too many. More than one, five in an as many months in this case, then, is ... what? More than too many? I don't know, but here's hoping that this long, cold, and lonely winter, as it were, lets up.

Now, anyone who looks to this site for the odds and / or sods that I publish hereon with a frequency greater than, say, hexannually, may have noticed that it has been utterly silent since my prologue at Reno in September. If there were any among you that were unusually charitable, you might say that it's simply been carefully preserved in that time, but my writing doesn't tend to attract the charitable.

Some of you, in reading this piece, might surmise that there is a connection between this unusually tragic flying season and my unblemished recent history of failing to publish.

There isn't. At least not in any kind of direct or tangible way.

This series of crashes does, however, serve loosely (and, perhaps, with unintentionally poor taste on my part) as a sort of public-facing metaphor for the things that have held my attention lately. Tumult, upheaval, chaos ... all of it very, very personal, and none of it, thank goodness, ending anywhere nearly as tragically as the crashes I've used as such callous and costly euphemisms.

I don't stay away lightly, or haven't in this case, anyway, but life came first. As it sometimes needs to, and always should.

Which brings me to my first, and likely only point: I'm not a relativist, at least not when compared to the next guy, but once in a while it's perfectly acceptable to stop, take a breath, and let the phrase "it could have been worse" provide my oft-mentioned "quantum of solace".

Okay. So, things in my world could have been worse. Much worse. But they weren't. Now what?

It's obligatory, certainly, but, first, I'll dig some clichés out of the closet, blow the dust off, and begrudgingly admit that they've lasted this long for a reason: "Life is short", "Carpe Diem", "Family comes first", "Each day is a gift", "Buy low, sell high", etc., etc., etc.

Next, as the coming day slides into what I now refer to as "our" or "American" Thanksgiving, given the number of people close to me that celebrate it in Canada a month "early", I'll be a little extra grateful for friends, family, health, red wine and brown gravy. And even more than those things (even, I daresay, the gravy), I'll be grateful for the fact that ... none of it was worse.

And finally, I'll stand up, shake it off, and get back to it. Enough is enough.

Yes, it's been a long cold lonely winter ... but it's a fool who plays it cool by making his world a little colder. Here comes the sun and the Sun King. Good day, sunshine, good morning, good morning. Take a sad song and make it (I've got to admit it's getting) better there beneath the blue suburban skies somewhere in the black mountain hills of Dakota ... well, you get the idea.

P.S. As I was finishing this and getting ready to throw it over the wall, a friend sent around a link to a news story about two airplanes involved in a mid-air collision about 30 minutes south of here. One airplane landed at a nearby airport, the other went into the water ... but everyone is okay.

What do you know? It could have been worse.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/340425_aircrash21.html

Coincidence? This Time, That Just Makes Me Worry About What's Next ...

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 21:01:45 GMT

Ian Fleming's classic James Bond novel Goldfinger is divided, like most fiction has been since there was such a thing, into three acts. Taken from a line of dialogue spoken by the book's eponymous villain, they are Happenstance, Coincidence, and Enemy Action. In reference to his second encounter with Bond, he states that unexpected meetings like theirs follow a pattern: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."

With that, then, I'm left to wonder nervously about the next time I encounter any sort of vending machine (or "sales robut", if you prefer) that chooses to present me with choices drawn from a senseless lexicon.

Last time, it was a stamp machine in Minneapolis, suggesting that I offer up some mojay - a particularly surreal flavor of happenstance, but happenstance nonetheless. This time, a gas station, considerably closer to home, gave me cryptic instructions demanding that I remove the nitrogen dioxide before filling my tank.

Did I have any nitrogen dioxide? It is a by-product of the internal combustion engine, but how could I say for sure? And, most importantly, how could I remove it?

And, of course, worst of all is the fact that this takes care of happenstance and coincidence, so whatever the next sales robut tries to tell me, it won't be pretty.

Mr. Mojay Risin' ...

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 18:31:29 GMT

In today's world of mod cons like cell phones, electric mail, and constant messaging, I never buy stamps. On those rare occasions that I actually need them, I simply make my own, thanks to the miracle of blank labels, ink-jet printers, and the trusting folks at Stamps.com.

On my recent trip, however, I decided to send a postcard to a friend of mine in Canada - "Having a wonderful time, wish you were paying for it", that sort of thing. I found a postcard, but had surprisingly little luck finding stamps until I was given surly and patronizing directions to a vending machine at the airport in Minneapolis. Given the attitude of the woman at the newsstand, I'm apparently the only person in all of western civilization who doesn't know that there's a stamp machine between gates C1 & C2, in a hallway just past the sign that reads "Beware of the leopard", and the tree that says "I'd turn back if I were you."

Anyway.

I found the machine, put in some money, and bought a 60-cent stamp (in my head, I pronounced it "sitty cent").

That isn't true.

I paid for and requested a 60 cent stamp.

What I actually got was 60 one cent stamps. As tempting as I was to just cover every bit of the postcard in said stamps, including the banal greeting I'd scribbled, that seemed to defeat the purpose.

Now, anyone who has read my posts here over the past week or so knows that I've been busy, tired, exhilarated, and simply "on" all day, every day. I don't think I ever got more than 4 hours' sleep, so, by the time it was over and I was flying back, I had nothing left. Not a single ounce of extra energy to cope with anything outside of my fragile routine.

So, I muttered something rude, fished another dollar out of my pocket and fed it to the machine. The machine accepted the bill, and that's when I noticed the response. I stared at the screen, convinced that I must have misread it. I even blinked a couple of times, but nothing changed. If I'd had a bottle of whiskey in my pocket I'd have tossed it aside, swearing it off like a cartoon bum, but I didn't. So I just stared, the last threads of my sanity burning away in the glare of green phosphor.

Then I stared some more. Then I frowned, and looked around the room to see if anything else weird was going on. Then, still frowning, I took my phone from its holster and took a picture. Its not a great picture, because its a phone with not a great camera built-in, but it was enough to capture the evidence, and allow me to escape with proof:

Somehow, I resisted the temptation to fall to my knees and have a nervous breakdown then and there, even when faced with this final and irrefutable bit of proof that the world no longer makes any sense at all.

I ultimately got the right stamps, affixed them to the postcard and put it in the mail drop, though I certainly won't be surprised if the postcard ends up in Hackensack, Atlantis, or Cydonia Mensae instead of its intended destination in the greater Toronto area.

In the meantime, if you're in Minneapolis and need stamps, bring plenty of mojay - the machines don't take cre@it cards.

A Delicate Sound of Blue Thunder

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 00:47:10 GMT

Have I no shame?

Actually, I do, but I'm about to squander the last of it away like Jack giving away his cow, without even some magic beans, much less their subsequent beanstalk, to show for it.

I collect DVD's, and have a weakness for certain types of movies and television shows. Sometimes, my standards can actually be fairly high, tending toward well-written dramas, comedies-of-manners - "Careful there, Vicar", "Very droll, Bernard", that sort of thing.

This isn't one of those times. Not even close.

No, in this case, I'm admitting to enjoying something terrible. Why? Well, because it has a rather surprising amount of good flying in it. Before Michael Bay gave us Pearl Harbor, before Tony Bill gave us Flyboys, flying scenes in movies and television shows were usually real, and, thus, good. If scenes weren't shot for that particular title, then you might see stock footage. If it was faked, it was usually faked so horribly with models that it was worth watching anyway.

In short (though it's already way too late for that), even the worst production can still have some disproportionately good flying bits ... Audiences may forgive bad actors, writers, and directors, but aircraft will almost never forgive bad pilots.

Which brings me to my confession, naming something I've been trading a bit of sleep for the past few nights: Blue Thunder: The Television Series.

I know that some of you are saying "No, no ... Blue Thunder was a movie! You're thinking of Airwolf, with Jan-Michael Lizardskin!"

(Those poor souls among you who found this post on my site when Googling "Finland" are saying something like "Hän olen I tähän? Nyt kuluva says ei ensinkään jokseenkin Suomi!" To them I say, with all sincerity, "Me puolustella ajaksi epäkäytännöllisyys.")

Sadly, I'm right. Blue Thunder was a television series, spun off from the movie of the same name. Difficult as it may be to believe, of the Blue Thunder-inspired helicopter shoot-em-up series, Airwolf was ... the good one.

For those that are just joining us ... The original Blue Thunder film, released in 1983, starred Roy Scheider as LAPD pilot Frank Murphy, Daniel Stern as Richard "JAFO" (Just Another F****** Observer) Lymangood, and Malcolm McDowell as Col. Cochrane, clearly a villain because he dressed well and spoke with an accent. The plot followed Murphy and Lymangood getting assigned to fly the titular chopper, portrayed by an aesthetically modified Aerospatiale SA.341G. In the film, the new helicopter represents a dramatic shift in thinking for police air support: in addition to the usual Nightsun spotlight and near-useless PA for yelling at people, it is armor-plated and armed with a 20mm cannon that shoots something like 6,000 rounds per minute. In addition, there is a lot of real-sounding surveillance equipment, a massive onboard computer - some kind of aerial ENIAC, and magic switches that can make the helicopter go really fast, and make the rotors really quiet in "whisper mode".

The movie follows Murphy and Lymangood as they put the helicopter through its paces, blowing things up, dogfighting with the bad guy, and, naturally, using whisper mode to spy on the nice lady in the high-rise apartment who does her yoga without wearing any clothes. Once the token nudity is out of the way, all the cool flying is done, and there's nothing left to blow up, Murphy has a crisis of conscience. He discovers that the cannon on the front of this helicopter is not simply designed for crowd control at the upcoming Olympics, rather, it's meant to actually kill people! Naturally, he destroys the helicopter, thereby saving Los Angeles from turning into a fascist mini-police-state.

Fast forward about six months, and here comes the television version. In the series, a second helicopter has been built, and is being operated under the auspices of some kind of shadowy government organization called APEX or something similar that I didn't really care about. Skillfully ignoring the pesky ethical and political issues raised in the film, the second Blue Thunder is used in the show by and with the LAPD for the sole purpose of blowing things up.

The pilot this time is Frank Chaney, played by James Farentino, and JAFO (now a "Frustrated" Observer) is Clinton Wonderlove (8 years before the president of the same name was first elected here in the US), played by a pre-Saturday Night Live Dana Carvey. They're supported on the ground by a unit called "Rolling Thunder", which is a big van that seems to have nothing in it but a slightly smaller camouflaged truck, and two ex-football-players-turned-cops played by ex-football-players-turned-something-like-actors Bubba Smith and Dick Butkus.

Every episode is exactly like every other episode, and, in turn, just like every other show in the mid-80's from the likes of Stephen J. Cannell and Donald P. Bellisario: Bad guys that you saw most recently on either The Love Boat or Fantasy Island or both do bad things. The hero, a chip-shouldered iconoclast with a check-kiting ego wants to go after them, but he's held back by bureaucracy, pencil pushers who want it all done by the book. He follows his gut, goes after them anyway, and blows them up, and his bosses begrudgingly admit that he was right all along. Everyone grins, plucky JAFO gets turned down by the pretty blonde behind the desk yet again, and ... freeze frame.

So what makes it worth (and I use the term carefully) watching?

Well, as it happens, Blue Thunder returned to the LAPD just in the nick of time - suddenly, everyone who commits any sort of crime, somehow finds a reason to use an armed (and fairly unusual) aircraft. Whether it's bank robbery, smuggling, assassination, kidnapping, or some kind of shady mob accounting, a dogfight is inevitable, once a week. I've seen Blue Thunder shoot down an F8F Bearcat, an OV-10 Mohawk, a couple of Long-EZ's, an F-86 Sabre, the late great Art Scholl's Super Chipmunk, and a van full of clowns.

Unlike the airplanes, the clowns, naturally, had it coming.

But good flying is good flying, and, I'm forced to admit, in this case it is largely well shot. The fact that the producers spent all of their money on avgas and Jet-A and none on writing is almost forgivable, if only to an airplane geek.

The show only lasted eleven episodes - so far, I've lasted four. I'll most likely make it all the way through to the end, unless I get distracted in the meantime by my boxed set of Air America: The Series.

Blue Thunder - The Television Series is awful, really. Go buy it.

Inattention to Detail

Tue, 12 Jun 2007 21:11:19 GMT

Is unlike me. Details are really all I have.

In the second episode of one of my personal favorite television shows of all time, Futurama, characters in the year 3000 rediscover the original Apollo 11 lunar landing site while visiting the moon.

I was disappointed, however, that they showed the LEM as it was on landing with the ascent stage still attached. The ascent stage was, as one might surmise, the bit that ascended ... it's how Neil and Buzz got back up to rendezvous with Michael Collins in the Columbia Command / Service Module.

In other words, the silly cartoon people got it completely wrong, making me feel slightly smug, but also a bit disappointed that an otherwise surprisingly intelligent bit of programming would stumble like that. Thankfully, at that time I had just about 30 years' experience being disappointed by television, so I felt prepared.

Then, something remarkable happened. Just as I was about to wave my hand and dismiss the whole thing as rubbish, putting the "mental" in "judgmental" as I am so often wont to do, they cut to a scene inside the lander ...and I realized that I'd been completely and utterly had.

You see, there was a sign in the background, a blink-and-you'll-miss-it plaque that read "Lander returned to this site by the Historical Sticklers Society."

I loved that they caught it, acknowledged it, and even sympathetically pegged me in the process. They got me, and I've loved the show ever since.

How poetic (and by "poetic" I mean "unforgivable") then, that I, of all people, would make an Apollo-related mistake in an article posted here (and elsewhere).

Thanks to my new friend and fellow Historical Stickler (and I mean that in the best possible sense) Tom who pointed out my mistake when he sent me the following mail this morning:

Good day and a great job on FSX !

(I found your blog via its articles)

A quick point regarding your post of April 12, 2007 "The Feeling is Mutual" :

Bill Anders was the LMP on Apollo 8 (though sometimes credited as the CMP.)

Frank Borman was the CDR, and Jim Lovell was the CMP.

This in no way is meant to diminish the nature of his contribution to mankind's first voyage from the Earth to the Moon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_8

Regards,

Tom

I'd blithely branded my friend Bill as the Commander of Apollo 8, which was clearly incorrect - as Tom points out, graciously, Bill was the Lunar Module Pilot. I'd like to think this sort of oversight to be out of character, but I'll leave that for others to judge.

Needless to say, I've corrected the original post and will do the same with the other copies that are floating about.

My sincere thanks to Tom for straightening me out, and apologies to Bill and the rest of his crew for the inadvertent reassignment.

Mea Maxima Culpa!

Happy 30th, Apple II

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 18:01:51 GMT

My friends (and bonus extra family) the Flints were early adopters of the idea of being early adopters. Among the many ways they changed my life when I was wee, in addition to showing me the first VCR I'd ever seen (and condemning me to a lifetime of obsessive movie collecting), they also gave me my first hands-on experience with the electrical thinkin' box known as the personal computer.

It was, naturally, an Apple II. It ran at 1MHz, had 4K of RAM, and graphics resolution of 40 x 24, showing two colors. No matter how many orders of magnitude more powerful personal computers (and game consoles and cell phones and refrigerators and watches) are today, nothing in my lifetime has quite equaled that jump from nothing (no computer) to something (a computer) - from zero to one, as it were.

It's extremely difficult to believe that 30 years have gone by. I have friends that are younger than that. Real, dear friends, not just kids that are barely driving and sporting letterman jackets with embroidered graduation years that make me scowl, but actual thinking adults with their own credit cards and keys. The first generation that has never known a life without personal computers. The best that they'll be able to do is dimly recall the dark ages when their computers weren't all connected to each other.

I remember being completely, pardon the pun, transported by the hours we'd spend exploring space and blowing up Klingons (sometimes called Klarnons for legal reasons and represented in near photo-realism by the letter "K" in a grid) in AppleTrek. These were the days long before hard drives, even before diskette drives, when you had to load programs using a cassette drive. Cassette drives used regular audio cassettes - small plastic boxes with gears and about 8 miles of fragile magnetic tape that were normally used to record music. They were just like blank CD's, except for the moving parts, poor quality, and the fact that they sounded progressively worse with every play.

Anyway, cassette drives allowed users to store programs and load them on demand, provided that one could anticipate that demand about 45 minutes in advance, 90 minutes if it was important enough to try again if it didn't work the first time. It was eventually proven that using a cassette was actually slightly faster than simply rewriting the program every time you wanted to use it.

As it happened, the long load times were actually one advantage I had to not owning one of these machines myself. All I had to do was make a phone call - "Erik - I'll be there in an hour. Start loading AppleTrek now. Yes, now!" - and that was that.

By the time we got computers in school (originally reserved for those of us in a special class), I was already off and running - I had a head start on the head start. I had so much experience under my belt that I actually dared suggest that one of the games we'd play in class, Lemonade, was boring! I may have been the first slightly disaffected computer geek in all of western Washington.

A year or two later, we got our first computer at home, an original IBM PC, followed almost immediately by my first copy of Flight Simulator, and it's been there ever since. But it all started with the Apple II, and a supremely generous family. A lifetime of interest was born, like so many of the best things, out of the smoldering wreckage of a Klingon (or Klarnon) battle fleet. Or at least a series of blank spots formerly occupied by the letter "K" ...

Check out eWeek's article on this bit of history.

Going Solo

Wed, 23 May 2007 03:43:03 GMT

Regular readers and astute photo album perusers will recognize my ongoing love affair with old airplanes, in particular, the de Havilland Tiger Moth.

This is not the story about how, after more than thirty years of wanting, I found my way into a circle of friends-turned-family who who got me up and flying in Moths, then a full-on checkout. That story is coming. This is simply a slice of breaking news.

I'm in what a dear friend refers to as "my belov'd southern Ontario" as I write this. Before I came on this latest trip, I got my US pilot's license validated by Transport Canada, in effect giving me a Canadian licence as well. This means that when I go up with my friends here, and they let me fly, I can be pilot-in-command.

And, as the title (stolen with all respect from Roald Dahl) suggests, just a couple of hours ago, in the last light sky before sunset, I flew a 1941 DH82C through a couple of circuits as sole occupant.

And I didn't break anything.

Here's to the dreams that don't end in disappointment.

The Vernacular of the Technorati

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 15:08:00 GMT

Apparently, by simply posting the following link here:

Technorati Profile

I can "claim" my blog on Technorati.com, increasing my traffic, making a million in real estate with little or no money down, and finally getting that check from the Nigerian Finance Minister's widow ...

We shall see!

The Feeling is Mutual

Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:19:36 GMT

Last week, my job drug me, not kicking and with an utter lack of screaming, south for a week in sunny San Diego. Among the things I failed to miss at home was some surprise April weather, which left a dusting of about 1.5 inches of partly cloudy on the ground.

The reason for the trip was my third visit to the annual Mutual Concerns of Air & Space Museums seminar, sponsored by the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum, hosted this year by the impressive San Diego Air & Space Museum, hereafter referred to as SDAM. This event is described perfectly by its rather weighty sobriquet (though they announced that next year's event will be a conference as opposed to a seminar, whatever that means) - air and space museums from around the world get together for a series of meetings and presentations in which they discuss concerns that are, as one might expect, mutual.

There are presentations throughout the event on topics like "Designing Effective Interactives", "Appropriate Selection and Treatment of Aircraft Fabric Coverings", and, my personal second favorite, "Building Education Systems in Museums - Pimp Your Outreach".

My first favorite, naturally, had to be "Put Your Visitors in the Cockpit", as it was presented by yours truly, along with Mike Singer, and an ex-Navy fighter jock called Snake, which was one of the main reasons I'd made the trip in the first place.

Last year, another colleague, Mike Lambert, and I gave a similar presentation when the event was held in Washington, DC. It was a bit tentative at first - normally, only those people directly representing museums are invited to speak, while commercial interests setup vendor tables to show their wares between presentations. In addition, there was some question on our end about the value of making the trip. However, it turned out to be an unqualified success - our presentation was lively and very well received, we made innumerable and valuable contacts, and found ourselves wholly welcomed into the air & space museum community. So much so that we were invited back, and this year's presentation was a worthy successor, if I do say so myself. Which I did.

In addition to highlighting a few representative Flight Sim installations at museums around the world, we spoke about the Missions system in FSX, and showed a customer-created video that highlights the viability of an add-on loaded Flight Sim as a visualization tool. As I told the ~~audience of screaming fans~~ assembled group of professionals, I'm not an expert of exhibit design, goal-based experiential displays, education, or personal hygiene, but I'm just smart enough to know a good and useful tool when I see one. It was, as always, a singular pleasure to watch a room full of very bright people start thinking at a million miles a minute after we planted a simple seed or two.

The highlight of our presentation for me, aside from every second I was in front of an audience, was when Snake, a docent at SDAM, took the room on a quick virtual flight around the San Diego area. Snake demonstrated the 5-minute intro lessons he gives to kids several times a day on the museum's impressive cockpit / projector setup. I managed to watch a number of kids use the sim on my trip - it's fantastic to see an installation like theirs that's accessible, but still teaches, and isn't just a free-for-all. The look on kids' faces walking away from the cockpit having successfully landed the Piper Cub is a heartening reminder of why, along with the huge buckets of cash, I do this job.

Much of the event was held at the 32-acre Town and Country resort - presumably so named because "Sprawling and Utterly Unnavigable" wouldn't fit so well on the Lucy-and-Ricky-era signage out front. The staff was courteous and helpful - each time I got lost (which correlated directly to each time I left my room), one of them would invariably offer me a ride on one of their peculiar golf cart train contraptions. Given the fact that I was far too embarrassed to admit where I'd been and where I thought I was going, I always turned them down.

One full day of presentations was held onsite at the SDAM, which is impressive to say the least, starting with the Convair F2Y Sea Dart mounted out front - the product of an unrelentingly optimistic era when aviation innovation could still be described in short brainstorm phrases - "Let's take a jet fighter, and put it on water skis!" Other highlights include the Ryan X-13 Vertijet ("What about a jet fighter that stands on it's tail!"), a 1911 Deperdussin, and the Apollo 9 command module.

That evening, there was a banquet in the museum's rotunda - anyone who has never had dinner underneath a PBY and a Ford Trimotor is really missing out. The speaker was Wally Schirra, the only astronaut to have flown missions in the Mercury, Gemini (pronounced Gem-i-nee), and Apollo space programs, quite a trip from his birthplace of Hackensack. Schirra is 84, but doesn't look a day over 60, and stands about fifteen feet tall. His talk was engaging, and his wit is almost too sharp to keep up with. Shaking his hand afterwards was a rare honor.

Dinner that night was also a great chance to catch up with some of my friends and colleagues from the last year, as well as meeting some new people. The entire universe turned upside down and inside out for a moment when I heard someone say "Oh, I need to go say hello to Hal!", and turned to see Maj. General Bill Anders USAF (Ret.) coming to shake my hand. Bill was the Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 8 (and the photographer of the most-reproduced photo in history), a test pilot, the CEO of General Dynamics, and a warbird collector and pilot who flies his Mustang and Bearcat with the USAF Heritage Flight and the Navy Tailhook Legacy Flight, respectively.

I, on the other hand, make my living by sitting in the corner of a large room playing video games and messing about in Photoshop, so it's only natural that Bill would be so excited to come talk to me.

The other big dinner was held at a semi-private museum in El Cajon (Spanish for "The Cajon"), on the Gillespie Field airport. Known as the Allen Airways Flying Museum (home of the world's most understated website) it consists of a couple of oversized hangars housing the immaculate and brilliantly-displayed collection of Bill Allen, Jr. Bill has done something that most of us pack-rats in the world will never manage - he's gone pro, successfully navigating the path from enthusiast to collector, skating effortlessly past wild-eyed-lunatic-obsessive and landing gently at "Curator". With a a half dozen airplanes, and 10,000 additional artifacts, Bill's collection is inspiring, and, at times, staggering. In addition to loaning artifacts to the Smithsonian for display, Allen has published a book consisting of a number of aviation-related posters (the heart of his collection) which is highly recommended, as is a trip to the museum itself, if you can manage an invitation.

My membership vows in the two-bit writers club demand that I trot out a hackneyed bromide about how hard it was to "come back down to earth after a week with artifacts, aviators, and astronauts", but I just can't do it, so I'll just say that it was a great trip and leave it at that.

Note: Many of these photos are courtesy of (read: stolen from) Brett Schnepf. Here's a few more pics from the trip that didn't seem to fit.

Where do you see yourself in five years?
With my patented system ...

Forget that Chivvy Three-Fitty - I'm
droppin' a J58 in my Jagwire!

If there's a Tiger Moth to be found, I'll find it.

This is the worst thing ever created.

Red Eye

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 23:08:43 GMT

Since I can't seem to get that other post written to my satisfaction, I've decided to write this one instead.

So ... last night, my wife and I numbed our brains for 106 minutes (6,360 seconds, if you're keeping score) and watched the movie Red Eye. (Which, sadly, is not a sequel to the 1978 Battlestar Galactica episode, The Lost Warrior.)

This movie is what I would describe as "zero sum", as if I'd walked into a bank with five 1$ bills and walked out with one $5 bill. Unless I were carrying a Costanza wallet and space was at a premium, I'd be exactly no better and no worse off than when I started.

To summarize the movie, then: It starts, things happen, it stops.

To an airplane geek, however, there's a bit more to it. Most of the film takes place on an airliner, that, in the tradition of every movie that makes any reference to commercial avation, is painted in a fictitious livery, and magically transforms itself several times.

Actually, unlike the classics, such as Trans Global, Columbia, and Oceanic, the fictitious airline used in Red Eye ... isn't. They chose the name Fresh Air, which is a very real airline started in Nigeria in 1998.

The choice of names was clearly coincidental, compounded by the fact that the real Fresh Air flies 737's, sort of like the one they used in the movie.

Their 737's, however, don't change paint jobs (magically becoming United airplanes), sizes (the double-aisle 2-3-2 seating and saftey cards that read "Boeing 767" clearly identify the interiors as those of a ... Boeing 767), and manufacturers (the 737 becomes an Airbus A-319 a few times, for no adequately explored reason.)

I think there was going to be a point to this, but it's lost in a sea of multi-tasking.

The Biggest Double-Brainer in the History of Earth

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 07:29:11 GMT

Forgive me for a moment while I bash a hole in the fourth wall and violate the first rule of snarky inside references and actually explain the title of this particular post.

There's a company that advertises on a number of radio stations that I will hypothetically call "Lenox Financial", since that is their actual name. As part of their pitch to sell mortgages, they suggest that choosing their offerings, coming as they do without up-front closing costs, is, and I quote: "The biggest no-brainer in the history of earth." Now, I love a good bit of hyperbole every bit as much as a billion-trillion other guys, but does refinancing a mortgage with no (and by "no" they really mean "deferred") closing costs really rank higher than food, shelter, heat, and procreation in the pantheon of the absurdly obvious?

Bad jokes, like so many things, just get funnier the more laboriously you explain them. Right?

Now that we have that out of the way, what exactly is a "Double-Brainer', other than a friendly nod to my old pal Uumellmahaye? Well, I'll come to that before long, so read on, or don't.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the welcome privilege of speaking at Seattle's Museum of Flight, as part of an event that Microsoft cosponsored in conjunction with the Museum's sadly temporary exhibit celebrating the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci. I opened the talk by convincing my audience of my expertise on the subject by casually using terms like "codex Madrid", and explaining that Leonardo da Vinci is Italian for "Leonardo of Vinci." After that, I went on to make two main points. Actually, I made three, since I always make three, but I only remember two, and I'm really only interested in discussing one here.

Da Vinci was the archetypal Uomo Universale (literally, the Universal Man), or Renaissance Man, defined as one who tried to embrace all knowledge. Renaissance Men, like da Vinci, were artists and engineers, poets and scientists. In other words, they made equal use of their creative right-brains as well as their logical left-brains. And, of course, no Renaissance Man ever paid closing costs on a mortgage.

Da Vinci, of course, was a painter, an engineer, a sculptor, a scientist, and a writer. And, perhaps most importantly, he wanted to fly. One of his most famous quotes, in fact, is about flying:

For once you have tasted flight you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return.

As I see it, da Vinci's right brain wanted to go, and he knew that his left brain could be the thing that got him there. Tragically, he was a few centuries too early, but his surviving sketches prove that he had a number of the right ideas. He showed a lot of interest in human-powered ornithopters which have yet to be proven feasible, but most of his designs show excellent proportion, and basic structural methods - like wood ribs and fabric covering, for example - that proved to be key when pioneers like Lilienthal and the Wright Brothers really figured things out some four hundred years later.

It occurred to me some time ago that one of the things I love most about flying is the fact that it does appeal to both sides of the brain. The physics, the engineering, the constant flow of input-analysis-decision-response, the delightful minutiae of detail all keep the left brain ticking along with ruthless contentment. The right brain, on the other hand, err, other brain, is free to enjoy the view, to wax poetic (probably badly poetic) about the shift in perspective, to feel the thrill of aerobatics, or the quiet and gentle finesse of a perfect three-point on a grassy meadow in an airplane old enough to be a grandparent.

So, are all pilots "double-brainers"? No, apparently not. Richard Bach, in his classic collection of stories A Gift of Wings, published a piece entitled "Aviation or Flying? Take Your Pick". In it, he speaks of the aviator as someone who wants their airplane to be fast, comfortable, and efficient - a rational and sensible tool for transportation. A flyer, however, is interested in the sky itself, and the airplane that gets them there. At least loosely speaking, the aviator has left-brain motivations, while the flier's interests are predominantly right-brained.

I've known a number of pilots of both stripes. For example, I met a U.S. Naval aviator who flew F-18 Hornets and then, when he retired, never gave flying or airplanes another thought, because he knew he'd never fly anything that fast again. And I've known a number of ultralight pilots, for example, over the years who live only to go up and then come back down.

But the pilots that I've admired most have always been a bit of both. My father, who flew airliners with Vulcanesque logic and efficiency for more then 30,000 hours, is also a painter, and possesses a sense of humor that is so painfully awful that it has to be indicative of some kind of creative genius. My temporal alter-ego and dear friend, the writer, budding computer geek, and amateur student of brain chemistry who flies antique biplanes with supernatural finesse. My honorary sister, the actress, writer and dancer who is rebuilding her own several-decade-old airplane for a solo flight across Canada. My dear friend the champion gymnast turned gifted sculptor who retraced his famous grandfather's footsteps across the Atlantic 75 years after the fact. My friend the astronaut with more than 5,000 hours in space who is now restoring a 1946 Ercoupe that will fly just about exactly 175 times slower than the space shuttle, at altitudes measured in feet rather than miles. A software engineer, airline pilot, and flight instructor who can return anything, and I do mean anything, to Circuit City for a full refund, and convince them that he's their best customer in the process. (Trust me - this is an art.)

As it happens, some of my favorite double-brainers aren't even pilots, or not exactly, though they'd all make good ones. The philosopher and writer who is also a software expert and test scientist. The guitar-playing book-collecting chemical engineer who does PR for video games. The historian toy collector who is a Major in the Army, and his brother, the video engineer who writes music and strange answering machine messages and never met a sequitur he didn't loathe. The list, like my writing, goes on and on.

In a broader sense, all I need to do is walk the halls at work to find more examples - a visually lush and ridiculously complex product like Flight Simulator needs developers, engineers, artists, writers, designers, and testers, and there's a lot more crossover in all of those professions than people realize.

Thankfully, while no one in my world would claim to be a da Vinci, and only a few would even admit to reading The Da Vinci Code, there are a number of double-brainers in my world. It's nicely irrelevant that some of them are women, too - I don't particularly care for the sound of "Renaissance Person", but Populus Universale has a nice ring to it. Maybe I'll make some shirts. Whatever I call them, if anything at all, I'm lucky, as there are few things I enjoy in life more than a great conversation with someone whose mind refuses to stick to one side or the other, and prefers to hop all over the map.

As for me, do I consider myself a Renaissance Man? While I've been labeled as such once or twice, and I enjoyed it rather more than I cared to admit, the method to this branch of my madness is far simpler. Frankly, I'm just one who uses his myriad interests to try to stay at least three steps ahead of anyone who actually expects me to be good at something.

And I paid closing costs on my last mortgage, I'm sure of it.

There Are Hungry Children in the World Who Don't Even Have Offices!

Wed, 24 Jan 2007 00:14:17 GMT

So you won't find me complaining about the fact that I've moved to a new spot in our building, a converted conference room that has been subdivided in what I'm forced to admit is a respectable manner. not cubes, but not quite separate rooms either.

As soon as Brett learns to whisper on the phone, or I go deaf, it will be surprisingly peaceful up here on the second floor. We (the community team, in order to form a more perfect union ... ) have our own conference table right in the middle, which is nice. There's even a picture of us in our first official meeting:

I'm the one with the evil goatee and the RCAF shirt. Also pictured, from L to R: other people.

In other news, we're talking a lot more about Train Simulator these days, at least out loud. I won't be working on it directly - in fact, we're looking to hire a "Train Sim Hal" - but it's nice to see the franchise revived.

As far as FSX is concerned, work on Service Pack 1 continues apace, and the early performance benchmarks have me feeling cautiously optimistic. Why cautiously? Because I spent 8+ years as a Test Engineer, and 7 years as a police officer before that, which means I don't trust anyone or anything at all ever.

(com)Promising Transitions

Fri, 19 Jan 2007 01:11:46 GMT

(From the archive - 5/25/06)

Posting here after two and a half months feels a little like coming home after a vacation and discovering that you left your front door open . . . there's just so little actually here!

That should change, for the better, here pretty soon. It seems I'm leaving the ranks of the Flight Sim Test team after 8 years. To see what I'm up to now, and to get a hint about one of my first tasks in my new role, head over to: http://www.fsinsider.com/Community/From-the-Team/

I'll be doing a lot of writing over there (if it isn't obvious, I've already written a piece or two) and then, if my new boss has his way, I'll head back here to make fun of what I wrote over there.

Or something like that.