Coincidental Floss

“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.

“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.

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?

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!

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.

Being called Hal, spending so much of my life intertwined with computers,  and having been born in 1968, the year that the film version of the now late Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey was released in theaters, it was inevitable that people around me would associate me with the fictional HAL9000 computer. I meet a lot of people in my line of work, and it seems that about half of them get a self-satisfied conspiratorial sort of twinkle in their eyes as they suggest the connection - "Oh, Hal ... and you work in computers ... have you ever seen ...?" A few take it a step further, confiding authoritatively the old myth that HAL was so named because he was one (letter) better than IBM, alphabetically speaking. If I don't like the person, which is pretty rare, I'll point out that HAL was actually an acronym for "Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer", usually pushing my glasses up the bridge of my nose and spitting a little on the S's to complete the image of irretrievable geek.

The one connection I've found most entertaining is the one that no one has pointed out to me but me: In the mythology of the various books and films, HAL9000 was first activated in 1997 (1992 in the first film) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The very first iteration of what would become Microsoft Flight Simulator was born there, too. Original developer Bruce Artwick graduated from UI in 1976, and his company, SubLOGIC, was based in Urbana-Champaign, releasing the first version of Flight Simulator for the Apple II in 1979.

Maybe that's too much of a stretch, for most people, and I should simply attribute any connection with my not-quite-namesake to my extraordinarily placid demeanor and my constant stubborn refusal to open any pod bay doors, anywhere, at any time.

Regardless, I've been a fan of Clarke's writing, and, to an even greater extent, an admirer of his mind, for as long as I can remember. He had a permanent spot, now sadly vacant, on my list of people I'd have loved to have met. As it happens, there weren't that many degrees of separation between us - you can even find both our names on the same page of supporters of the X-Prize Foundation here. (You'll find mine towards the bottom, due south of the important people.) Last summer I was lucky enough to meet and spend time with Rob Godwin through a close mutual friend. Rob is the CEO of Apogee books, one of my favorite things about Burlington, Ontario. Clarke was a friend of Rob's family and a supporter of his business. Rob has posted a touching memorial page here.

As Rob said, we have lost far, far more than an inventive and well respected writer, we've lost one of the truly great minds of our time. I leave it up to the likes of Kira, Kiersten, Annika, Quentin, Charlotte, Garrett, or any of my other honorary nieces and nephews as yet unmet (or even unborn) to grow up and help fill the gap.