Rants and Revelations

Ok, the big load job just finished, and it appears I was loading the old FAA data, not the data that became current on Wednesday. Also, it appears I have a bug in the code that loads the runways - the old scripts seemed to have taken “U” or “” for the runway end latitudes and longitudes as null, but the new ones are putting those values in as 0. Oops.

I guess I’ll have to run it again - using nohup this time. See you next week.

I took the Lance over to Batavia for service. It was only supposed to take a couple of hours, and I’d be back at work before 11:00. Of course, it didn’t work out that way.
Continue reading ‘A day well wasted’ »

I made some major changes to the way data gets loaded into my navaid.com waypoint generator database, mostly in the processing of the “combined user data”. Mostly, I wanted to make sure that if “Bob” provides me some data on Canadian airfields that includes communications frequencies but no runway data that it doesn’t wipe out the runway data from the dataset of Ontario airfields that “Alice” provided me last year, but only updates the data that has changed in the overlapping part of those two datasets. Add in the possibility that a waypoint might have changed identifier or been resurveyed so the location has changed a bit, and you can see that there are a lot of possibilities to consider.

Unfortunately, considering all these possibilities is time consuming. I’ve been testing these new scripts with a dataset from one person that covers the entire UK and some nearby locations in varying levels of detail, and another that covers Ireland in great detail, but which is unfortunately no longer being updated because the person who provided it moved. Running both datasets would be an overnight job. But now that I’m satisfied with the results of that, I decided it was time to reload the old DAFIF data though these scripts to get the combined user data exactly the way I want it. But this has caught a couple of bugs in the scripts, one of which only manifested itself after 36 hours or so of running. That one didn’t even give me enough information as to why it failed, so I had to add some “use Carp” and “use Data::Dumper” magic to my scripts and then I re-ran it and found the actual cause after another 36 hour run. I’ve been almost continually running load scripts all week. I’m hoping this run will be it, but I’m not sure.

Since my new home box is so fast, I’m thinking one possibility might be to do the load processing on it, and then just mysqldump it and bring the dump file up to the colo.

Thanks to a post by Skud, I’ve discovered Freebase, which is, as Skud described it, “crack for information nerds”. It appears to be exactly what I was hoping to develop or find for my aviation navigation data project - a flexible structured information agregator, almost like a wiki with user definable fields.

You probably can’t see much of it, because right now it’s in alpha and by invitation only, but so far they’ve imported all of Wikipedia and added some links between then, and people have written some demo applications.

Like many AJAX applications, it has a tendency to get the dreaded “a script on this page is running slowly”, but otherwise it’s pretty nifty.

A couple of months ago I was so happy when my friend Mike took me out flying in his float plane, as I wrote in Rants and Revelations » Splashy fun.

Today, Mike and his flying partner Dave crashed that plane and died.

This sucks.

I woke up this morning at was shocked to find it was raining. This was a total surprise to me, as I thought the forecast was for more sun. This was a huge disappointment, because I’d decided that I’d prevent New York controllers from giving me a half hour ground hold or re-routing me all over hell’s half acre by flying VFR.

Fortunately, while it was raining all over most of southern and eastern New York and New Jersey, it was all layered stratus clouds so no thunderstorms. So it would be IFR, but flyable IFR. That’s good.
Continue reading ‘Hating re-routes, part II’ »

…how much I hate flying near New York City?

Yesterday, we flew down to a friend’s birthday party. She lives in New Jersey, which places the nearest airport to her Monmouth Executive (KBLM) in the slot between New York’s Class B airspace and Philadelphia’s Class B. Because of that complexity, I decided to take the club’s Dakota, figuring the Garmin 530 GPS would be a big help. And it was.
Continue reading ‘Have I mentioned recently…’ »

David Megginson has put together a really nifty little AJAX/Google Maps application to allow people to record what airports they’ve been to, and record comments about those airports. He’s put me to shame, since I’ve been intending to do something with AJAX and Google Maps for over a year now and haven’t even started.

But in spite of my jealousy, you can click the above link and see the 30 airports that I’ve landed at so far. The page doesn’t work 100% correctly in Safari, but it works great in Firefox.

Disclaimer: I was reluctant to report on this, because I’m absolutely awful with people’s names, and not much better with faces (sorry David). Plus there is the problem that as well as names, there are people’s blog names, and the fact that some of these people don’t want their names appearing in public in anyway associated with their blog names, and keeping track of what details of their real lives shouldn’t be associated with their blog names, and you can see why I was hoping somebody else would write this up. But nobody has, so here I am.
Continue reading ‘Pilot Blogging World’ »

I nearly didn’t make the flight up to Toronto for the Pilot Blogger weekend. There wasn’t anything on the radar, and the TAF (Terminal Aerodrome Forecasts) were talking about a 40 percent probability of isolated thunderstorms, which is pretty normal for this time of the year. But at decision time, the METAR (current conditions) at Rochester were:

KROC 131554Z 25011G17KT 10SM BKN037TCU BKN070 22/12 A2993 RMK AO2 SLP132 TCU SE CB DSNT N T02110111

Now, I’m not great at reading all the “RMK” (remark) part of the METAR, and that’s where the scary stuff was. All I know is that “TCU” means “Towering Cumulus” and “CB” means “thunderstorms”. And I went to the decoded report on DUATs, and it said that the “TCU”s were in all quadrants. So I thought I’d be flying IFR, dealing with the extreme turbulence of TCUs while out over the lake, and thought that wasn’t a good situation to be in. So I told people I’d be driving instead.

And then I walked outside. One odd thing about Rochester is that the airport is south of the I490 highway, and there is frequently a real difference in the lake-affected weather up north of I490 and the mainland-affected weather south of it. So I walked outside and looked up and north to see scattered clouds and bright sunshine, and then looked south towards to airport to see some of the TCUs the forecast was talking about, but mostly to the south of the airport. And suddenly realized that if I were to depart VFR, I could dodge the TCUs until I was in the lake-effected weather, and have no problems following the lakeshore around to Toronto.

I haven’t done a VFR flight into Canada in a while, so I had to dust off those old memories. But I managed to get all the appropriate paperwork all done, and didn’t cause any international incidents. (Not so on the flight home - as I type this I realize I forgot to close my flight plan, so I’m calling right now. Can I just mention for the record that I wish US controllers would open and close flight plans the way Canadian ones do?)

When I took off, as soon as I got turned over to departure control, there was a gigantic rain shaft about 5 miles in front of me, and I was about to tell him I was going to turn north because of it when he pointed it out to me and gave me a vector. But 5 miles later I was at 3,000 feet in sunshine, mostly smooth air, and I could see across the lake.

The lakeshore is a lovely flight, and Toronto gives me flight following around, but requires me to stay out of their airspace, which means descending into mild turbulence and staying lower than I’d really like to. But the flight was fun and I’m really glad I got to fly.

I thought I had no problems with distractions. After all, I’m a highly trained and experienced pilot, and when I was a student pilot my instructor had spent a fair amount of time making me deal with distractions. But today I was taking some friends out flying, and just as we were leaving the class C airspace I noticed a bit of a strange noise - and I looked over and realized the door wasn’t latched at the top. I unlatched the bottom to try and get it re-shut, but it wasn’t possible to get it closed. I slowed the plane to 80 knots and tried to get the passenger to close the door, but he couldn’t do it. Unlike the club’s other aircraft, the Lance doesn’t have a strap you can yank on to pull the top of the door closed, so neither of us could get it properly latched.

Now you and I both know there is nothing wrong with having the door open except for the breeze and noise, and the potential for having your charts whisked out of your hand at a bad time. But I didn’t want to do a two hour scenic flight with all that noise and wind, especially not with people who’d never flown before.

Fortunately, Ledgedale Airpark was about a mile off my right wingtip. So I told Rochester departure that I’d be making a landing there, and did a 180 degree turn to enter the pattern. But I was having a terrible time in the pattern. The winds at Ledgedale down low were gusty as hell. But I can’t blame the horrible pattern I flew entirely on the gusts - my speed and glide slope control was ridiculous. I heard the stall horn a few times, I got the “Landing Gear Unsafe” light a few times before I put the gear down as I horsed the throttle around overcorrecting altitude and speed excursions. I was so low on final I had to put in full throttle so I wouldn’t touch down a dozen feet short. And then my landing was, to put not too fine a point on it, a bit firm. I must have let the door distract me. And that’s not good.

I guess it’s time to spend some time with an instructor re-learning how to deal with distractions.

Warning: this would normally be a bunch of separate posts, but I’m feeling lazy.
Continue reading ‘What I’m up to these days’ »

This photo blog of a flying trip into Alaska in a tundra-tire-equipped Piper Super Cub just has me in awe. The scenery, the photography, the fun of a gaggle of Cubs parked in that scenery… It’s all just too much. I read this and I want to immediately grab a Super Cub and head north.

My “DAFIF Replacement” Wiki is currently shut down because of a bug that was causing my computer to hit load averages up over 10 every time Google indexed it. My log files were full of lines like:

[Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] [error] [client 66.249.72.194] [Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] view: Use of uninitialized value in string eq at /var/www/twiki/lib/TWiki/Plugins/TablePlugin/Core.pm line 457.
[Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] [error] [client 66.249.72.194] [Thu May 31 21:09:21 2007] view: Use of uninitialized value in string eq at /var/www/twiki/lib/TWiki/Plugins/TablePlugin/Core.pm line 462.


I hope to have time to upgrade to a newer version of TWiki Wiki one of these days and then I’ll re-open it. Or possibly I’ll just let it die since it wasn’t getting any use anyway.

There is a member of my flying club who owns a Cessna 172 on straight floats, and a half share of a light sport Legend Cub which spends its winters on skis and its summers on straight floats. Yeah, some people have it tough, right? I’ve been begging him for a ride for over a year now, and yesterday he asked on the club mailing list if anybody wanted to be his safety pilot while he tried out the new Garmin 430 in his Cessna. I think I set a record for speedy replies to that mailing list with my “PICK ME! PICK ME!” response.
Continue reading ‘Splashy fun’ »