Easily Deployable Weapons for use against rogue states that sponsor terrorism.

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Spit

Carmel reminded me of this:

Life before 50 is kinda like spit. While you're there, while it's part of you, it's just fine, everything is as it should be.

But once you get away from it, it's like spit that's spat. No way are you going to take it in again.

Passed my instrument written.

FAA instrument exam flight adventure #2

lesson learned #1--copy all the figures, especially the DP and approach plates. There is NO way you can figure this out while flipping thru the book.

Whenever I try to create the formula for figuring the distance travelled in an arc, I get half what it should be.

circumference = 2(pi)r
distance for one degree of arc = (2(pi)r)/360
distance for so many degrees = degrees * (2(pi)r)/360

Substituting 1.5 for pi, I get degrees * 2*1.5*r/360 = degrees*3r/360 = degrees*r/120

It's supposed to be degrees * r / 60

FAA instrument exam flight adventure #1

Notes:

Copied: 2 of each Flight plan figures & trip log pages.

Flight#1 Grand Junction Walker Field to Durango-La Plata County and back

I see that this information is given in the questions, so I copy it to my planning notes.
FT 12,000 18,000
FNM 2408-05 2208 -21

Total usable fuel on board 68 gal.
Average fuel consumption 15 gph
wind & velocity at 16000 2308-16


Answer to number one:
Groundspeed. Those are winds aloft numbers. There will have to be an interpolation for the altitude. In real life I usually have to interpolate between different winds aloft forecasts, too. I wonder where FNM is in relation to my route. Checking AirNav.com, I can't find KFNM airport. OK, it makes sense to assume these are winds aloft in the area of the flight.

I go to the flight log to fill in groundspeed, distances, times and fuel.

The times that they have inserted in the flight plan are double what I'm figuring. 35 miles at 174mph ground speed is 12 minutes. Right? Right??! Why do they have ::24:0 in the box??? I'm penciling my times in the box for the time being.

When I do the times on the return flight log I get the 14 1/2 minutes for the first leg, which matches the time inserted in test version of the flight log. BUT this doesn't include taxi & climb-out. What are they thinking here? And how do you figure time for the descent? Missed approach? This looks like something I should know, but I don't. I'm noticing that the test flight log has put 18 1/2 minutes for descent to Durango and 12 minutes for descent and landing to

There's an answer only one minute off from my answer. OK. I'll take it. I'm not checking my answer with the test. I'd like to work through all seven and then check answers. It's pretty obvious I'll have to refigure it all when I do.

Question 2
Question 2 gives a scenario about not being able to land at the Durango destination, how much time can I hold before returning to the starting point (as the alternate airport). Well. That's going to depend on the time it took for the first one. Without checking any answers yet, I can see (from the information they give in the problem) that at least we're on the same track about one thing. The interpolation I used for wind speeds is the wind speed and direction that is given in this problem.

I'm taking my times from the flight logs I filled out. I assume that what has already been used is the amount I'd figured for enroute--15 gallons. Now I add the total figured for the return trip. Enroute, reserve, missed approach is 37 gallons, and subtract all that from my starting fuel of 68 gallons, which should give me 16 gallons to spend holding at Durango. At 15 mpg the whiz-wheel says I can hold for 65 minutes.

Looking at the possible answer for the test, the book has 1 hour 33 minutes, 1 hour 37 minutes and 1 hour 42 minutes. (Sigh). I look back over my numbers above, checking for simple addition & subtraction mistakes. Nope. It's got to be in HOW I figured all that time and fuel. I glance at the rest of the test questions and decide to slog on before getting help. I record the closest answer (since on the FAA test it's better to put anything than nothing), but I know if it's right it's only the luck of the draw.

Question 3 What fuel would be consumed on the flight between Grand Junction & Durango assuming the avg fuel consumption is 15 mpg? Well, I do have an answer for that, and it's only one gallon off from the least answer on the test. I mark it down.

Question 4 This is a map interpretation question about the highest MEA. There's a flag at Grand Junction for the crossing altitude, but that doesn't apply, and I don't see any other hard-to-notice notations, so I'm taking the number beside the airway. (not the starred one, which should be obstruction clearance). It is one of the possible answers.

Question 5
A scenario for lost communication wants to know what radio frequencies to attempt to contact Denver Center. I look on the En Route Low-Altitude Chart segment provided with the test and find two frequencies in the info box for DENVER ARTCC. One of these is one of the answers on the test. However, isn't that the frequency that had been in use and was lost? I see from the nearest VOR there is an underlined frequency, which I interpret to mean you can listen, but transmit. This would be a possible frequency to try next. So is the emergency frequency 122.1. I'm choosing the answer that says transmit on emergency and receive on the nearby VOR. Whatever aviation strong points I may have, radio navigation is NOT one of them, so I really want to see how this turns out. But not yet.

Question 6
This is easy. It just wants to know where the changeover point is. Whew!

Question 7
MOCA? Minimum obstruction clearance altitude. That's the starred altitude that I looked at before. Ka-ching!

All right. I've spent 2 hours on all of this, which is similar to how long it takes me to plan a VFR trip in a familiar area. I could have looked it over and learned the answers in a much shorter time. I feel really SURE about only three of the answers. I expect three of them to be wrong. But now I'm ready to check my answers and read the discussion. I have a lot of questions of my own to answer, and hopefully the discussion will be enlightening.

Putting on my peril-sensitive sunglasses, I go to check my answers and.....I have gotten questions 1 and 5 wrong, and the others correct.

Question one is the one about time enroute. It's not a difficult question to answer if you just take what's given already, figure the one part that is missing. They have given the first and last leg legs (which I questioned and decided to do myself). OK. I'm not going to find out the answer to HOW they figured the climb-out and descent. All I need to know for the test is that they did figure it. What I needed to do was take the wind direction and velocity, convert it to magnetic, figure ground speed and time enroute for that middle leg and add it to the time enroute they'd already figured. I'll do it now. " 230º at 8 kt becomes 216º magnetic. Airspeed is taken from the flight plan filed, course from the flight log, distance from the enroute chart. There it is. Simple answer. "Piece of cake," as Martha says.

Now I'm going to work question two again, before I look at the answer discussion. I got it right by luck, since my figures weren't even close. I work it again, even with what I've learned, and I still get close to the same answer. By my figures, I can hold for a little over an hour. By theirs, it's.....an hour and 33 minutes. Checking with Dr. Gleim, I've got flight logs filled out for both trips, and he has laid out the figures in his discussion. The difference is....

...I had added some time for a missed approach. Dr. Gleim and the FAA do not. I am surmising now, that this is not necessary for planning, but there is a box for it on the form. Missed approach must come out of the reserve. I'll see what they do with the other scenarios, I guess.

I check the other questions, even the ones I got correct, because I might have done it by luck, right?

The second question that I missed was the scenario about losing contact with ARTCC. The correct answer would have been the first one I considered and discarded--to contact DENVER CENTER on the Denver Center frequency. I'll be able to remember that one for the test, for sure.

Thinking through the scenario, though, it's interesting to see what other things I erroneously considered possible. The emergency channel sounded plausible, and even though I've never used it, if I was not able to contact the people I needed, I'd do that, I think. What Dr. Gleim explains, though, is my complete misconception about the underlined frequency on the VOR information. I was thinking that the underline would let me receive on the VOR channel and transmit on another. This is NOT the case. The underline means there is "no voice capability, i.e. there would be nothing to receive." This is a detour I'm happy to take here on the ground rather than in the air.

I'd love to work these kinds of questions with an instructor and other students, but that's not a situation I find myself in. I consider it time well spent. Now I'm going to review the approaches and departures, fire up X-Plane on the computer and see whether I can fly this baby.


Sim notes: I'm probably 10 nm short of MANCA, but I'm hitting Pause on the sim to regroup.
I transferred my flight plan to an IFR Flight Plan that one of my instructors gave me. I figured for current winds

I got a Piper Malibu PA-4630P that I thought would be fast, but actually it's not much different that a C-152 on speed. I've not flown it before. It's got good instrumentation for this work. HSI (which I've never flown before, but I like). VOR, DME, ADF.

I love X-Plane, but there's one feature I can't get a handle on, and that's the pitch trim. I spend 85% of my attention trying to get some semblance of trim for pitch, bounding around up and down most of the time. Other people don't seem to have this problem, but I can't figure what it is that I have set wrong. At least I know a real plane is MUCH easier to fly than this. I was constantly having to fight to gain altitude, which might have been authentic, as this is in Colorado, 15,000 ft.

I did check my groundspeed after crossing the 2nd fix, and updated my plans accordingly.

The flight plan doesn't have a clear space for your fix information, and I made a big mistake that I tried to correct while flying. I neglected to write in the VOR frequency that defines the other end of the V187 segment that I'm following. Little detail. Ordinarily it would be on the chart, but I'm flying from a testing copy ("not for navigation" ) and that bit of information must be off the edge.

So I'm parking the sim, finding out my information, and checking my flight path, and while I'm stopped I'll review that approach some more. Not ready for prime time, here. I don't know how to ident in X-Plane, and I'm going to see if I can't find that out before I resume.

FAA instrument exam

When I started cramming for my FAA Private Pilot written test, I followed some pretty good advice and after doing each Gleim Test Prep chapter once or twice, highlighted the answers to just read them to learn the correct answers. That was really good advice for about half of the test--but I was sorry to have done it for those things that I didn't understand and needed to work on for understanding. Once you mark the answer, you can't make yourself do the logic like you can with it unmarked.

So this time, for instrument, I'm not highlighting yet.


I've been slogging thru the chapters, going through once doing each question, looking checking answers every page, then going back the next day (or that evening) to do the whole chapter of questions again, several times until I know all the answers and understand that chapter. Score of below 95 means do it again.

I just got to the last chapter of the Gleim Instrument Pilot Test Prep book, and I am surprised by what I found. There are six instrument flights on the FAA test to plan out and answer questions about. Since there's so much I don't know, and learning it in flight or with an instructor is SOOOOOO expensive, I'm going to take the best advantage of this that I can. I'm copying off the figures for planning sheets (they are partially filled in), and I'm going to take the information and plan the trip. THEN I'll see what the Q&A on the test will be. I'll have Dr. Gleim's discussion to review. I'll do one trip at a time. THEN I'll fly the trip on X-Plane.

Amy graduation

Master of Arts in Community Arts Education

snippets from Harvard Comencement speakers

Tuesday

About endowments:
Accountability.
Endowments carry forth the wishes and evaluations of the past. They probably ought to conflict with the political present

Endowments have created a system of higher education that is the envy of the world.

"custodians of civilization"

Families of students with incomes of less than $60000 will not be expected to pay any of the cost of tuition at Harvard. (partial payment for incomes somewhat higher)

---------
JK Rowling

video here: rtsp://128.103.142.142:80/qtmedia/Media/0605-JKRowling.mov
(link from mugglenet.com)

nervous. Just pretend it's a great big Gryffindor reunion.
2 things: Benefits of failure and benefits of imagination

Failure:
Parents wanted her to do something practical, but she escaped into classics.

There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction. The moment you take the wheel you are taking your own responsibility.

Poverty is not an ennobling experience. It is ennobled only by fools.
Failure is a stripping away of the inessential .
Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt.
Life is difficult and complicated beyond anyone's power to control.

Imagination:
Worked at Amnesty International

The willfully unimaginative see more monsters and are more afraid than others.
Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

Last hope: friends
Seneca: As is a tale, so is life. It's not how long it is, but how good it is that matters.

pilot's logbook

Now, this is more like it! Two Sundays in a row.

5/24/08 Pa-28-121 EKX-Hoopin Holler--EKX First time the two of us have flown over home and taken pictures or anything like that. Air was like glass and it was Frank's first time in the Warrior.
5/1/08 LOU BAK LOU First PIC trip in a C-172. Everything worked, even radios. Straight&Level to BAK. Biscuits and gravy (next time just dessert!). Quick trip home. Few cumulus clouds. Spiraled up above the layer to travel at 5500 ft. Then up to 7500 to get over a little row of them. We must have been moving fast up there, because immediately we were in sight of JVY and Bowman. We spiraled down (next time it's a sideslip). No issues with anything. Nice trip. Reminded me of Mike B. days.

Online articles--Instrument rating

AOPA's instrument rating page has a bazillion resources.

Iron man? No, Rocket Man.

tips for instrument checkride

Brief approaches on the ground before takeoff.
Get weather from ATIS or ASOS before entering the approach.
If you "peg the needle" (fully deflect) on approach, you MUST abort.

-Jim G

Classroom activities in meteorology University of Illinois

song

What is is that we do when we're writing songs? Eight tones in a scale, comfortable chord patterns, moon-June-croon rhyming? Shouldn't all the combinations have been used up by now?

How is it? So many thousands (millions?) of songs have been written and shared, and yet each time a song is written it is an intensely personal, intensely public expression of a particular here-and-now. Each song dances the yin and yang of individual struggle for understanding, for notice, for meaning, for life.

Is it just happenstance that the majority of songs are love songs? No. Can't be. Biology, which humans rightly suppress for its violent tendencies, asserts its fundamental right to evaluation here. In a love song, "what is best" is crystalized through the lens of discernment of survival of the fittest. Isn't it this crystallization that forms the foundation of dreams & hopes--valued for its clarity, returned to in memory for guidance when vision becomes murky and tangled again?

Songs are always a link to the past. The distilled voices of humankind contribute to the form, shape, and content of a song. And, true to its most ancient function as a medium of storage and transmission of information, each song adds to the web of long-lasting communication in which all members of culture swim.

Future sense is present as well. By its public nature, by the innate understanding that it will be sung for an audience, even an audience of oneself, song invariably carries hope. There WILL be a future for which the message has meaning and importance. At least that. At the very least.

At most? How far can it go?

The ancient psalms celebrate civilization and the city interchangeably and indistinguishably from God. Twenty centuries of hymns document the transformation of a distant God who can be addressed only with hope and faithfulness to a proactive understanding that "we are God's hands" within the personal interactions that form and maintain community.

Strong as the symbol of the natural world remains, the promise of life's potential is hard-pressed to fit in nineteenth-century-style paintings of religious entities surrounded by clouds and rays of the sun. In century twenty-one, the elemental forces of energy that hold stars in their courses are being stolen from their work to snapshot bits of ourselves and all that we value and love. In an explosion of communication, older linear progressions of knowledge are being reformed by the breaking of finite bonds of material transmission--all to enable the ability to encapsulate these cherished bits of humanity-turned-digital.

Each photo and blog entry stores an evaluation by one person that THIS is important right now. Of all the directions I can point my camera, THIS one is the one that matters. Of all the issues I can comment on, THIS one is the one I choose. Of all the songs floating around the audio world, THESE are the ones that speak my message. From the state of my heart, this is my song.

Time is that human invention which enables memory and vision, but its power comes at the expense of trapping humanity in its linearity. To the practical mind, time is a fundamental limiting factor, but thank goodness humans are not always practical. To the poet, songwriter and scientist, time is not immutable. In fact, the, the linearity of time has been constantly challenged by exploration, by love, by religion and by hope. This challenge is sung as the promise of new life, of undying love, of resurrection and redemption. As the challenge grows, the promise grows.

And the medium for the promise has grown. Song, while retaining at its core the intimacy of the lullaby, has amplified its reach to the concert hall, to top-10 radio, to mass-produced CD's to vibrant internet musicfile-sharing.

As Flikr and MySpace evolve into a fluctuating primordial digital soup, can anyone predict the new life that will coalesce from the myriad time-linked, people-linked photos, observations, and reminiscences? Could there have been any advance prediction that the tiny sea-creatures of Earth's ancient seas would be carried forth (long after the seas had changed their composition and their inhabitants otherwise extinct) as the blood and lungs of a newborn infant letting loose his first cry?

Will the life-force of the future recognize the humanity of its roots? How can it not? Perhaps someday instead of elemental particles of neutron, proton and quark, the qualities of the world will be labeled "cherish," "melody," and "kinship."

It's a given. From a currently-unattainable but foreseeable position outside the infinity of time, Alpha and Omega share a point in space-time. Resurrection, just like love, just like community, just like hope, exists where it always has, in the singing of the song.

Boeing 777 being built

Ed Williams' BASIC programming for aviation

This link has aviation formulas and calculations in BASIC.

I found it when I was looking up information on pressure-pattern navigation.

KBRY, Bardstown, KY

I was on the phone with David Hall, who started reminiscing about the airfields in and around Bardstown, KY. Dave's dad ran KBRY in the 60s. He remembers his first flight, at age 3 or 4, and being in his daddy's lap.

Dr. Steely had a Navion. He had adventures: Taking off quickly, raising the landing gear immediately, not being in flight yet and skidding on down the runway. Came to the end of the runway, rolled up between some cars belly sidewards, left wingtip 6 inches from the ground. Also travelling at 200 mph across the tops of the buildings in town.

The area used to have a number of airports. The original Bardstown airport was about 500 ft off Dixie highway, on the Colesburg Rd.

There was a grass field on Boston Rd.

Short Combs had a strip on his farm.

After WWII, Donald (?) had 25 airplanes and a hundred students, doing flight instruction in PT13s and PT26s (offshoots of P51s).
In 1962 the current Bardstown airport, KBRY, was built, largely to the efforts of the Coca-Cola company. Green County parachuters were at a different grass strip near there (maybe). They used C180s and DeHaviland Beavers.

pilot's logbook

Holding Patterns:
1. Find intersection
2. Where am I? (put a dot on the map or chart)
3. Where will the pattern be?
4. Always turn the shortest distance to the outbound course.

The first turn to the intersection or nav-aid can be direct to the intersection (not necessarily follow the racetrack shape if it doesn't make sense to do so."


Listen to the radio calls, writing them is a distraction.

C (clearance)
R (route)
A (altitude)
F (frequency)
T (transponder)

Sunrise & Sunset times for any date

I just found this website that has sunrise and sunset times for any day. One hour before sunrise is "night," requiring that the pilot be have 3 takeoffs and landings to a full stop at night within the past 90 days in order to carry passengers that early in the morning. This could make a difference in planning departure times and/or needing to take night currency flights.

Four thousand American soldiers have died in Iraq. This is the true story of how one of them came home.

This article starts with my longtime business (funeral liturgy), looks like it is going to be about my new business (aviation), and then turns out to be a close, intimate portrayal of everyone's business if they/we are aware of who we are in this world and the far-reaching effects of our lifestyles.