Month: August 2004

Possibly the stupidiest idea ever

One of the oldest members of the flying club is proposing that the club do a “Missing Man” formation over Bill Law’s memorial next weekend.

A Missing Man formation, in case you don’t know, is where 4 or 5 aircraft in relatively tight formation fly over a memorial or funeral, and then one peels off leaving his space empty, the gap representing the person being memorialized (uh… make that “remembered”). It’s usually done by highly disciplined military or private air teams, who practice formation flying together regularly and who are all flying aircraft of similar characteristics.

Bob is proposing that we do it with our club aircraft, the slowest of which can barely manage 105 knots at full throttle, and the fastest of which feels a bit mushy if you slow it down below 90 knots. He feels that since he took a formation flying course some years ago that he’s eminently qualified to fly this formation, in spite of the fact that the course involved identical aircraft and was lead by highly skilled and highly practiced instructors, and he just has to grab 3 or 4 others who’ve taken a similar course and maybe even practice it once.

What a great way to remember Bill Law – by having a fatal 4 plane mid-air collision over his memorial service! Oh well, at least the club would get some new planes out of it. Too bad we’d never get insurance again, and the club officers would be put in jail for not stopping this lunatic. Oh wait, I’m a club officer!

Not “Bill Law is dead” sad, but sad none-the-less

In software development, there is nothing sadder than seeing a nice simple and elegant design turn into a mishmash of special cases and exceptions – except maybe having your project relocated to India. And in this case, I’m not close enough to that part of the project to see if it’s just that real life turned out to be a lot more complicated than the design, or if (as I suspect) the guy doing the work is overlooking simple and elegant ways of solving the problems and grafting on complicated band-aids on top of other complicated special case band-aids.

My new favourite boat

Today Vicki and I went kayaking again. This time, instead of the tried and true Dagger Magellan that I usually use, I took the Valley Canoe Products Avocet RM. I think it’s a bit shorter boat, and it was definitely quite a bit narrower. It was a tight squeeze getting in and out, and the sides of the seat were pressing into me quite hard the whole time, but the firm connection made me feel much more a part of the boat. I had perfect control of the tilt of the boat just by thinking about it, and being narrower in the water as well, I could paddle closer to my body which I liked. It seemed fast, and it seemed to hit that sweet spot between tracking well and being able to turn when you wanted. It had a skeg but I never used it – but it’s nice to think that if I needed better tracking to get over a windy lake I could have it. In comparison, the Magellan was a better tracker, but there were times when I wanted to turn it and it seemed to take too much effort.

Vicki had the other Avocet RM, and she liked it too. She started out with the skeg down, since she’s found the other boats they had almost uncontrollable without one. But after having trouble making it around a few corners, she seemed to mostly paddle with it up, except maybe on some straight-aways.

The only thing I’m concerned about is that several web sites say it’s for paddlers up to 180 pounds. I’m considerably heavier than that – I was heavier than that when I was skiing in the Canadian Ski Marathon and I’ll never be that fit or that light again. I don’t know enough about kayaking to know what is wrong with paddling a kayak meant for a smaller person. Obviously I won’t get the optimal hull profile in the water, but am I in danger of swamping? Or is it just that I’d be limited in the gear I can carry? Because if that’s the only problem, it’s not problem – I don’t intend to carry anything more than a lunch.