Rants and Revelations

In re: Rants and Revelations: Sad end to a beautiful bird

This month’s Flying magazine has more about the Starship. They don’t mention anything about a limited airframe lifetime. They say that Raytheon/Beech just found it too expensive to keep supporting them. Since they still controlled 30 of the 52 of them, they just bought the rest of them back.

Some impressive stuff about the plane, all of which added up to the ridiculous weight and cost of it:

• The canard had variable sweep because the flaps caused the center of gravity to move too much.
• The flight instruments had 16 separate CRTs. It looks from the pictures that it had a separate CRT for every instrument, and then some. They didn’t have multi function displays like they do now.
• The FAA didn’t entirely trust the void detection methods Beech invented, and made them really overdesign the airframe.

The aircraft never had a airworthiness directive, and nobody was ever injured in one. That’s pretty impressive, even for a plane that didn’t get much use.

I had my second checkout flight in the club’s Lance. We did the usual sorts of stuff - I experimented with the autopilot, tried a coupled approach. Did a few maneuvers while dodging low ceilings and snow squalls.

One manuever we’d tried was an emergency gear extension with the alternator and electric master switch off. With the master off, you don’t see the green lights to indicate the gear is down, and you couldn’t really hear or feel the gear go down. You got a bit of a pitch burble and a thump through the rudder peddles when the nose gear went down. We turned on the master again and saw three greens.

Went to Batavia and did some touch and goes. While in the pattern my CFI, Lenny, pulled the power a couple of times to make me do a simulated emergency. The first one wasn’t great - I would have made the field, but not the actual runway, and I would have landed gear up. The second one was better, although he thought I left it too long to put the gear down.

One time in the pattern, I didn’t see the three green lights indicating the gear was down. I immediately turned off the radio lights and there they were - the gear lights are designed to go much dimmer when the radio lights are on to preserve your night vision. So I aced that little test - Lenny had turned on the radio lights to see if I was paying attention to the gear lights.

Things were going pretty good when Lenny pointed out that the multi-function display near his knee was saying that I was on battery power. The alternator warning light came on soon afterwards. At first I thought he was trying another trick, so I looked for a pulled circuit breaker, didn’t find one. I tried cycling the alternator switch. No joy. Since we were in the pattern at Batavia, I said “I guess we should land and check it out”. Lenny said no, if we land here we’ll never get home. So we turned off one of the radios, the DME, ADF, the landing light, wing strobes, pitot heat, fuel pump, basically everything electrical we could think of except one comm radio, one nav radio, and the transponder. We both had handheld comm radios so it wouldn’t have been a disaster to lose the radio. The only thing Lenny was concerned about was if the electricals went we wouldn’t have had any indication if the gear was safely down.

We kept our speed up getting to Rochester, and if we’d been thinking a little clearer we probably should have asked if we could turn off our transponder when we got closer. In the pattern, I put down the gear and saw those three little lights. After that, it was like any other landing at Rochester. No crash trucks, foamed runways or anything fun.

What amazed me the most through this whole thing is that this was a minor emergency, not even really an emergency but more of a major inconvenience (we’d planned to shoot some approaches but couldn’t), but I found it hugely distracting. I sort of stuttered and stumbled over my first radio call to Rochester, and felt like I should be thinking of new ways to debug the problem the whole way down, and continually looking at the alternator gauge. Far more intense than a simulated emergency. Now I have a bit more sympathy for people who’ve gotten distracted by a non-event like a door open in flight and crashed the plane. I don’t think I was ever *that* distracted, but I could see it happening to somebody who is 10 years past their last new rating and hasn’t really thought about emergencies since then.

The Beech Starship is no more. Yeah, I know, it was too expensive, too heavy, didn’t carry enough, didn’t go far enough, all that stuff. But it was so cool looking. Whenever anybody would start to say “I saw this really weird looking plane, do you know what it was?”, you could answer “Beech Starship” without even letting them finish, and be right 90% of the time.

Here’s a picture of the last of them sitting on storage at Pima.

Lear Jet

Pilots say that a good landing is one where you and most of the passengers walk away unscathed, and a great one is one where you can use the plane again afterwards. This is merely a good landing.

Initial reports are that they sucked in a flock of geese.
If you want to see what happened to one of our club’s planes when it hit a couple of geese click here.

In re: Rants and Revelations: Great timing, assholes

Just got an email from Site Management. It appears this wasn’t a fire drill, it was a short circuit in a “pull-station” on the roof caused by the high winds and wet snow. Because, as everybody knows, we never get wet weather in Rochester.

Today, the wind was gusting up to 55 knots, and we’re getting the first snow of the season. So what does Kodak do? They have a fucking fire drill. And because it’s fucking cold and wet and blowing, it takes forever to empty the building, so therefore those of us who got out reasonably early have to stand around freezing our asses off.

One major reason why it was taking so long to empty the building was some fat ass dipwad cockbite was standing in front of one of the two double doors at our exit, and wouldn’t move out of the way even when I tried to push the door open. And if you’ve ever tried to push a 400 pound lump of congealed grease who is actively pushing back, you’ll know it’s not easy.

John Travolta’s House.

If I had a few extra million dollars and a Boeing 707 to spare, I’d like to live like that.

I haven’t been doing much updating of this blog, mostly because I’ve been busy fixing up Maddy’s blog. Good thing she never got around to changing her password after I set it up for her. I had been putting updates on her blog because she’s been incommunicado - as people reach her on the phone or go visit her, they email me some status information and I put it on the blog for the benefit of all her friends. But because she’s been in the hospital and extremely fatigued, my posts were basically overwhelming what is, after all, her story. So thanks to the wonderful extensibility of MT, I’ve made a separate category for my posts, made the main page only show her category, and put a side bar entry showing my most recent posts.

It was remarkably easy. The only hard part was that because my blog and her blog are on the same site, if I wanted to look at my “Main Index” template while editing hers, I had to use two browsers, because two windows on the same browser couldn’t be logged in as different users. Fortunately I was working on my Mac, so I had both Mozilla and Safari, two excellent and standards compliant browsers at my disposal.

Music for November 11th:
11:11, Garnet Rogers
We Remember, Dwayne O’Brien

Remember those who have safe guarded our freedom. We may not always agree with how they’ve been used by the men doing the calling, but they’ve answered the call of their country and there is nothing in the world more noble than that.

I’m currently without an aviation medical. If you want all the gory details as to why, you can read
this entry in my old journal, and you can read why it’s taking so long at this other entry.

In order to not just sit around on my ass having all my skills atrophy, I decided to check out in our club’s Lance. The club requires a 10 hour checkout, today I did 1.5 hours.

It was a lot of fun. The plane is big and heavy and a bit of a wallowy pig if you let it get slow, but at 90 knots on a standard landing pattern or 120 knots on an ILS, and it is steady as a rock and lands smoothly. It’s touchy on the throttle and propellor controls. But it’s fast and carries a ton literally - it’s got a max gross takeoff weight of 3600lbs and an empty weight of 1241. I’m looking forward to taking some long trips in it.

On my way to work, I drive on “boulevard” that has two lanes in each direction and a grassy median. For much of it, it has what I would call a “service road” or “access road” running parallel, with driveways into business and parking lots coming into the access road, and short little “ramps” for passing between the boulevard and the access road.
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The title is from a song by “Spirit of the West”. But I’m starting to wonder if I’m “too Canadian” or just crazy.

Case in point, I got to the post office before it opened. There were people there waiting, but they were waiting in random locations in the atrium, not actually lined up. The person nearest the door was a good metre and a half away from the door. Not being able to detect any order to this gaggle, I walked right up to the door and stood there. The gaggle soon formed itself into a lineup behind me. But all the time I stood there, I couldn’t make eye contact with all these people, because I know that they got there ahead of me, but I “butted in” in front of them. And yet I know there was no line to butt into until I formed the line, so why am I beating myself up about this?

Dammit, I forgot to bring my iPod to work again today. It’s not so much that I share a cube wall with “Chatty Katy” who appears to be organizing a volleyball tournament, or that right opposite another cube wall is the door to a conference room so I get to hear the post-conference discussions that inevitably happen after every use of the room. No, it’s this floor shaking horrendous thump that happens with disturbing irregularity. I’d estimate it to happen about 4 times an hour on average, but sometimes I don’t hear it for an hour or more, and sometimes it seems to be happening every few minutes.

This thump has been happening since I got here at this job, but if you ask other people, most of them haven’t noticed it. Some of them comment on it when they come over to visit my cube, because the rest of the development team is on the other side of a physical fire door and so maybe they’re more insulated from it.

We’ve had daylight savings time for how many years now? All of my life, I’m sure. So why the hell did I think that I could march my date-time classes from one day to the next just by adding 24 hours (or rather 24*60*60*1000 milliseconds)? Damn, that was a stupid bug. And I’d done it in about 15 different places in the code as well. It’s going to be hard to test it completely until April when the time goes back.

I hope it works.

I was disappointed in the Standing Stones river sculpture when I got back to it today. The river has risen, and it look like many of the stones have been swept away. I took some pictures of what was left, but it’s a pale imitation of what there was last month. I guess I’ve got to stop forgetting my camera.