Rants and Revelations

A while ago I wrote about the sad demise of the Beech Starship. Raytheon decided that it was too expensive to support them, so gave all the existing owners a King Air in trade, and parked them in the desert, probably never to fly again.

But this week’s AvWeb NewsWire has a short article about how some people are keeping their Starships alive. One of the people using his Starship works for Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites, and uses it as a chase plane there. Since Burt Rutan built the prototype Starship, I suppose he’s got the best chance of anybody of keeping it running.

One of my favourite ski races was the Kawartha Ski Tour. It wasn’t an official part of the race calendar, but it was the longest race available that weekend, the weekend before the Canadian Ski Marathon, so it looked to me to be a perfect tune-up for the CSM.
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After an hour or so drooling over the new paint job on the Dakota, it was time to fly home.
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Yesterday I did some more flying in the club’s Lance. The goal for the other people on the flight was to pick up the club’s Dakota, which was getting painted at Sky Harbour in Goderich Ontario. My goal was to get more time in the Lance, and have the club pick up part of the cost.
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I forgot to mention a few things in my previous blog entry.

The first is that some years after finishing my canoe, I got the bug to build another one. This time without the mistakes, or at least with new and better mistakes. So I bought the Harrowsmith Press book Canoecraft.
One of the prime reasons I’d wanted to build a canoe in the first place was lusting after the canoes from Bear Mountain Canoebuilders, and this book was written by the owner of Bear Mountain, so I knew it would be good. And it is good. But the most important thing I discovered in that book was that Ted Moores, the guy who built those perfect canoes that I’d coveted for years and years, in describing every detail of his canoe shop, pointed out his “crying chair”. Yes, Mr. Perfection himself every now and then felt the need to sit down, cry about the mistake he’d just made, compose himself and figure out how to fix it. Suddenly I felt a lot better about my own tears.

I don’t know if it was in the version of the book when I used it, but the website for the book I used in the first place, David Hazen’s “Strippers Guide to Canoe Building” has a Builder’s Pep Talk online. The most important part, at least in my experience is:

Soon after that release I realized that not one of my customers ever saw those mistakes. They were usually too overwhelmed by the charisma of the boat and ignorant of what small details composed the multitude of “mistakes” that went into every boat.

Or “how I once learned not to wallow in self-criticism”.
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It’s been bloody cold this week. Rochester is a lot damper in the winter than Southern Ontario, so it really cuts through you. But it reminds me of the winter of 1979-80.
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It took a few minutes for it to sink in, but I can’t believe how relieved I am to have my medical back. After I finished posting the initial entry to my blog, I almost cried. I wonder what it’s going to be like when I actually get the piece of paper. I can’t wait for a nice day to go up and remember what it’s like to fly alone again.

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.

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.

The New York Times has an article about my very favourite TV series of all times.

Spies Who Were Cool and Very, Very Cold

My Series 3 DVDs just arrived a few days ago, and I’ve already watched all of the episodes. Before that, I had a bunch of 3rd or 4th generation video tapes that were barely watchable. It’s sure nice to have them on DVD now.

Interestingly enough, the reason it’s taken until now for DVDs of the third series to come out is that there was some confusion about who owned the copyright. It was more convoluted than the whole SCO versus Linux thing.

There’s a fan site for the series. It’s pretty well done.

This is another in my series of reposts from my original journal on Slashdot over to this new blog. With hopefully a bit of editing. This one involves the age old question, “Is flying as good as skiing”. Ok, it’s not an age-old question, but it’s one a friend of mine asked when I was reminiscing about skiing and feeling bad about how I can’t do it any more.
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This picture used to be an ad for a PC debugger. A while back, a friend of mine revealed he had it on a t-shirt. A much smaller friend. I begged him for the shirt, even though I couldn’t possibly wear it. I scanned it, and added a logo from the project I was working on at the time, and made it the unofficial logo of the bug fixers on that project. One of these days I’m going to get some of that iron-on transfer stuff and make it into a t-shirt.

Ok, since I’m going to use this blog instead of the Slashdot one, I thought I’d bring some Slashdot entries over here. Oh, and maybe fix them up a bit as I do it.

This one concerns the Canadian Ski Marathon, which I skied in several times in the 1977-1982 timeframe. Back then, the CSM was a huge event, with over 4,000 people participating. The course went from La Chute Quebec to Montebello Quebec one day, and the next day from Montebello to either Hull or Ottawa, depending the weather and the organization, for a total distance somewhere between 160 and 170 kilometers over two days.
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