The day before Dancing with the Freeborn County Stars

It’s a busy day at BeeBear Acres. It has been a busy week. Next week, I hope not so much.

Tonight is the dress rehearsal for the annual Red Cross event, Dancing with the Freeborn County Stars. Cathy and I are co-chairing the planning committee this year. She has been working pretty much full time on costumes; she has done most of the women’s costumes and one of the men’s. Her work is truly amazing. It is going to be a great show; we have a super group of dancers this year. The even better news is that we are doing great on fundraising and it looks like the event will be a sellout. I am hoping that today will be the calm before the storm – if we have done our jobs, everything should be complete . . . but there are always last-minute issues that pop up.

We ordered a New iPad, and FedEx reports that it’s on the truck for delivery today. This will be a new experience for us, and we’re checking it out as much for Cathy’s folks as for ourselves. They are scheduled to have fiber pulled to their house shortly, so they will be able to avail themselves of good (and hopefully cheap) Internet access. Their access to exploits of grandkids is secondhand now, and it may be that something like the iPad is just the thing for them. The idea is that they can jump over the learning curve for using a mouse and such confusing keyboard issues. This may be a silly idea; we’ll see. I suspect that the iPad will find a home in any case.

Finally, a short update on the return to flying. Yesterday I had the opportunity to get another perspective by flying with a different instructor. My flying up to this point has been very focused on specific maneuvers, especially landings, but yesterday the goal was to visit a couple of new airports to experience the different “sight picture”, review the mechanics of entering the landing pattern, and practice radio communication at a larger airport. We left beautiful Albert Lea Airport, flew to the ever-popular Austin Municipal (not Texas), and then visited Rochester. In the process there was actually time to just sit back and enjoy flying and I realized that this had been largely missing from what I had been doing. It was extremely rewarding. I am hoping to get signed off within the next couple of weeks.

7

I see that it has been three weeks since I provided any update on how my re-introduction to flying is going. I'm sure that many of you are just hanging onto the edges of your seats in suspense.

The flight school at my local airport specializes in accelerated training programs. I keep telling my instructor that's not me. He understands. I think he finds it refreshing.

Today's session consisted of seven landings. It was relatively windy, which gave me an excuse for patterns which were not quite perfect. I feel the comfort coming back. I'm not there yet, but I can see progress.

My instructor wants to get me signed off before he leaves. He's looking at moving back into the airlines. If you have a mental image of airline pilots making huge salaries . . . it's mostly wrong. Yes, the senior pilots for the big airlines do OK, but there is a very long period when they make ridiculously low salaries working for the smaller airlines. My instructor is working a complex numbers game to get his flight hours up without starving. It's a bizarre world. I wish him well.

Flying progress

Here are some updates on my progress at getting back into flying, and a few musings on technology in general.

One of the requirements to fly is an FAA medical certificate, which is issued by a doctor who has been anointed by the FAA to do so. In other words, unlike playing sports at school, you cannot just go to your regular doctor and get a physical to meet the requirement. Yesterday I passed my physical and am now the proud possessor of a Class 3 FAA medical certificate. I feel so much healthier!

The exam itself was routine enough, but the machine that they use to test vision broke, and the doctor couldn’t initially access the FAA website from where we started. The issues were all related to technology. Which brings me to the real crux of these comments.

Back in the 70s when I last flew as a private pilot, when you wanted to fly from point A to point B you drug out paper charts, a ruler, a protractor, a calculator, and a pad of paper. You drug out an airport directory to look at the facilities available at the airports near A and B. Maybe you even called the airports on the telephone. You located the airports at A and B on the chart and drew a line between them, then you read your course off the chart using the protractor. You measured the distance between A and B and that’s how you figured out how much fuel you needed. On the day of your flight, you picked up the telephone and got a weather briefing (which might provide the winds-aloft information you needed to actually pick a cruising altitude). Then you talked to the friendly FAA person and filed your flight plan.

Wow, has that ever changed.

Today there are web-based flight-planning tools that just blow me away. By clicking on an airport symbol, you can see all the information about the airport including a nice picture. Tell the program you want to go from A to B and it will plot your course and figure out how long it will take and how much fuel you will use, based on information you previously stored on the aircraft you’re going to fly and the current weather. Click on another button to see weather of all kinds: clouds, winds aloft, possible icing, warnings. You can get an official weather briefing that satisfies FAA requirements by clicking on another icon. You can even file a flight plan, which is held until an hour before your takeoff time and then sent to the FAA.

This begs a broader question – the same question that rears its ugly head in many other ways – how much should a pilot know about how to do flight planning without resort to all this fancy technology? Another version of “Should you teach a photography student how to set exposure manually, or how to develop film, when they will likely never use that skill?” Or how do you motivate a kid to learn the multiplication tables when a calculator will always be available?

If you’re going to be a pilot, or a photographer, knowledge of the basic concepts is likely to make you better at that avocation. I think.

There’s another level to this. A good grasp of the basics of exposure, shutter speed, focus, and other concepts is likely to result in better pictures, but lack of it is unlikely to cause harm to the photographer. A pilot without the knowledge of basics could find himself in a pickle. Here’s an example: Back in the “good ‘ole days” the norm for navigating was to fly a route from one navigation fix to the next one, which often added significant distance to the trip. Now the norm is GPS navigation, which allows flying direct between any two points without regard to where the navigation facilities are on the ground. But what happens if the GPS receiver fails? For that matter, what happens if the entire airplane electrical system fails? The pilot needs knowledge in how to navigate by looking out the window. It could make a bigger difference than great versus mediocre photographs.

36 years

Many years ago, I obtained my private pilot certificate. I started the process while living in North Carolina at a little airport named Strawberry Hill that was, naturally, in a valley. I finished it after moving to the Chicago area, where I flew at a few suburban airports including Dupage Airport and Clow.

In 1976 I made the decision to stop flying. Flying is an activity that should either be done regularly or not at all. It became obvious that I wasn’t able to fly enough to maintain my proficiency, so I opted for the “not at all” option. This was the right decision; “weekend warrior” pilots but themselves and other pilots at risk if they can’t find enough weekends.

When I retired, I considered getting back into flying. Again I made a reasoned decision – flying is expensive and I could not justify the expense based on the amount of pleasure that would accrue from that expense. For seven years I’ve stood by that decision, but finally emotion won out over logic.

Last week I found myself at the controls of an airplane for the first time in 36 years.

Not to panic, gentle readers. It is not possible for someone to run over to the local airport and rent an airplane and take it aloft using a 36-year-old license. I was treated the same way that someone who walked in of the street and said “I want to learn to fly” would have been treated – I hired an instructor to be with me.

It was a humbling experience to accomplish tasks that you haven’t done in 36 years. In many ways I’m exactly like someone who has never flown; in others, not so much. I wonder how fast the skill will return.

So here we are. I have decided that I want to pursue this endeavor until it becomes obvious that it’s futile, and I don’t expect it to be futile. How much will my experience from so long ago be offset by 36 years of slowing reflexes? We’ll see. It’s going to be an interesting project.

Florida voters give it 129%

I have a love/hate relationship with traditional newspapers.

I realize that professional news reporting does not come cheap, and I appreciate its value. As many of you know, I want to be able to verify what I’m told, and I don’t consider reading it on Facebook or on someone’s blog as sufficient. Professional journalists who make their living reporting the news have to be paid, and some of that money has to come from the people who consume the product that they create.

On the other hand, I watch the traditional papers lumbering into the digital world with trepidation and a little amusement. Print journalism is on the decline and if these institutions don’t want to follow the buggy whip, they need to transition into a product that’s not distributed on ground up tree. I have to admit that overall they’re doing OK; mostly the web sites work.

But there have been a few interesting blunders.

I’ve not been impressed with the New York Times paywall, as I mentioned last year. I don’t appreciate being manipulated.

Then there’s the Washington Post. Last week I got this: “Our apologies, but the Customized Headlines system has experienced repeated catastrophic failures to assemble and mail. We are working to restore the systems. Thank you for your patience.” While I like the idea of receiving an email containing links to stories that I might like to read, their summary has always been rather lame – it lists the same story several times in the body of the email.

But tonight I would have loved to be a fly on the wall somewhere in the Post’s coverage of the Florida primary. Their news alert read, “With just under 40 percent of the precincts reporting, Romney was leading with 78 percent of the vote, followed by Gingrich with 31 percent, Rick Santorum with 13 percent and Ron Paul with 7 percent.” I glanced at it and my reaction was that Romney gave Newt an even bigger spanking than I had expected. It wasn’t until the correction arrived twenty minutes later that I realized that the percentages in the first email add up to 129%. And even that wasn’t really a correction; it was an update with results from 10% more precincts.

So here I am, valuing professional news organizations because they are accurate and reliable, when what I’m seeing seems to demonstrate the opposite. OK, granted, most of what I read is indeed accurate and reliable. I hope.