How one thing is not like the other

In his most recent diatribe against evolution, OJ applauds Islamic countries for embracing creationism.

What a bizarre notion [that creationism corrodes scientific education]. Americans just won pretty much every Nobel prize and we reject Darwinism.

Any estimates as to how many of those Nobel Prize winners think creationism would be a valuable addition to American science classes?

Speaking of Halloween Jokes

In a costume ripped out of today's headlines, my daughter went as a blind airline pilot.



She has an acerbic sense of humor.

I so do not get this

Experts Puzzle Over How Flight Overshot Airport.

Include me as one of those experts.

To put things in an idiotshell (nutshell does not do it justice): The pilots overflew their destination by 150 miles, which means they went about 250 miles, or 30 minutes beyond their descent point.

They went 400 miles, or about 50 minutes, without talking to anyone. Getting lost on the frequency handoff between sectors happens occasionally, either through a controller directing the crew the next frequency and not noticing the absence of a readback because the crew missed the call, or the controller forgetting to make the hand-off in the first place.

It happens. No big deal. There are several means to overcome this: controllers attempting contact through other aircraft in the area, transmitting on "Guard" (while airborne, radio 2 is set to a common monitoring frequency), or telling the companies operations control to send the new frequency to the crew via datalink.

No big deal unless all efforts are to no avail, over a prolonged period, as here. That raises serious issues about crew situational awareness.

Not to not worry, they get even more serious.

At Northwest/Delta, flights over one hour require recording fuel and arrival time at least once per hour. Clearly, they weren't doing this.

But wait, there's more. The ancient, hand-tooled, traditional round-dial approach to flying required deriving information from a fair amount of abstract data.

Not anymore:


The aircraft with the headless vectors (all speed and no direction) at the controls was an A320, this picture is from an MD11. However, for the point at hand, the distinction is without difference. The crew had to completely ignore, or be droolingly ignorant of, certain very graphic symbology.

To wit: in the center display, the line down the center represents where the airplane is going. It is never not there. Well, okay, sometimes in flight re-programming of the Nav System can lead to the magenta line disappearing. This is always accompanied by "holy cr*p", and immediate action to unscrew the thing. It is never not there, but it will not be there after overflying the destination.

Here's my best, expert guess. The crew took off their headsets on reaching cruise altitude. Absolutely standard procedure. Unfortunately, both pilots forgot to turn on their overhead speakers. This rendered attempts to contact them by radio mute.

However, it also requires them to utterly deaf to the fact that silence on the radios is not normal. (Unless one is transiting the depths of Canada even further into the night, that is.)

And not pay attention to the flight plan.

Or the airplane.

Or the clock.

Or, well, you get the point.

Nearly all aircraft mishaps have a fairly lengthy chain of circumstances for them to occur.

Not this one. All it took was two guys with room temperature IQs and a perfect lack of professionalism.

Nothing new under the sun

Bret has taken on the not-quite-latest religion: AGW.

That reminded me of a recent trip to Exit Glacier, which due to Climate Change has been receding for the last fifty years. And, for what must be entirely unrelated reasons, had been receding just as quickly for at least 150 years prior to that:

Click on the image for better resolution

Each of the squiggly white lines in the image represents a terminal moraine; that is, a mound of glacial debris left at each pause in a glacier's retreat. The oldest* moraine, from 1815, is well out into the valley. In the next 100 years, the glacier retreated roughly half the distance (and likely more than half the volume change) to its present location.

The same is true for nearly all glaciers in Southeast Alaska and neighboring Canada.

So what natural process ended in 1950, to be replaced by AGW?

Glaciers have a terrible, implacable beauty. They are extremely dangerous.

It is also worth noting that there is probably no environment on earth deader than a glacier. There is only one life form of any note: glacier worms that look like short pencil scriggles, and appear to feed on pollen blown onto the glacier.

Consequently, I have a tough time seeing how the warming of the last 200 years has had any negative effects whatsoever.

Never mind apocalypse.

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Glaciologists are able to date terminal moraines by well defined arboreal forest succession stages out to about 200 years. Each of the white lines in the photo is dated by how long it takes for the differing forest type to appear.

Trimlines (think bathtub ring, but in this case the high-ice mark below which the glacier sheared everything) on either side of Exit Glacier's valley show that not only has the glacier retreated, it has also lost a great deal of depth.

Islands in the Sky

Hellooo ... This is Mr. Clue calling.

The newspaper of record has a front page story*, providing even more evidence of man-made global warming:

Pause in rise of global temperatures blurs a cause

Decade-long plateau tied to ocean conditions may hamper climate treaty.

The world leaders who met at the United Nations to discuss climate change on Tuesday are faced with an intricate challenge: building momentum for an international climate treaty at a time when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.

Which should, but did not, raise this question: What combination of facts would be sufficient to cause its believers to reconsider AGW?

Of course, there is a reason it is still warming even though it isn't:

Scientists say the pattern of the last decade — after a precipitous rise in average global temperatures in the 1990s — is a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.

Which should, but did not, raise this question: Which part of the latest IPCC report predicted this?

If I have parsed the above para correctly, the warming in the 1990s was not due to cyclical oceanic changes, but the not warming is. Which also means, if I have my basic physics, conservation of energy division, right, that the cyclic ocean changes that did not make heat appear made heat disappear, because the only other alternative is that it radiated into space. Which would mean, well, ummm ... I know, the pause in rise of global temperatures blurs a cause.

In other news, the tornadoes are not getting more frequent, hurricanes are quiescent, and Arctic sea ice coverage appears heading towards its "long" term average.

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In the print edition of today's International Herald Tribune, anyway.

Not all fanatics are religious.

The other SWIPIAW and RAWAD suited up for the season opener.

To Own, or Not To Own

For years The "Economist" has been on something of a jeremiad about tax policies that subsidize home ownership, typically through a mortgage interest deduction. Now, they are taking on the question of whether home ownership makes sense at all.

On the plus side, homeowners accumulate wealth, invest more in their neighborhoods, pay more attention to schools, etc. To the extent that is true,

Home ownership, in short, benefits everyone—not just the homeowner—and the more there is of it, the better. Which is why it is usually encouraged by the government. In America, Ireland and Spain, homeowners can deduct mortgage-interest payments from taxable income.

Yet, against this must be weighed the worldwide financial crash, which was tied directly to "... this supposed miracle of social policy:"

The disaster began with defaults on American subprime mortgages, a financial instrument designed to spread home ownership among the poor. It gathered pace after the failures of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored enterprises that provide cheap home loans. As a result, the home-ownership rate in America has fallen for four years, the first time that has happened in a quarter of a century. In 2008, 2.3m families lost their homes or faced foreclosure—double the average before the crisis—reducing the home-ownership rate from 69% in 2004 to 67.5% at the end of 2008. The number of owner-occupied dwellings also slipped in Britain in 2007-08 for the first time since the 1950s.

Hence the scare quotes around "Economist." The sheer dunderheadedness required to equate the social argument for home ownership -- regardless of its actual merits -- with government induced corruption of lending standards would earn an instant scathing on any free-to-read blog. Why the heck does anyone pay for this dreck? (Speaking as one who pays for it ...)

The main arguments for home ownership, though, are not primarily economic, but social. Home ownership, argue those who want to expand it, benefits society because it encourages stable, more law-abiding communities; it makes people more likely to vote in local elections and join clubs; and it benefits future generations because, it turns out, the children of homeowners do better at school and have fewer behavioural problems than children of renters.

...

[And,] More stable neighbourhoods are more law-abiding. According to a study of New York City, the home-ownership rate was second only to income as an explanation for different crime rates.

Further, children of homeowners do better at math and reading, graduate high school far more often, and have far fewer teen pregnancies.

However, correlation is not necessarily causation. Such consequences could flow from the birds-of-a-feather effect. Or not. Unless they do. Given the distribution of human talent, it is hard to argue against the possibility of the successful herding with their own kind, with the knock-on effect of sequestering relative failure.

Too bad The "Economist" left off perhaps the most potent argument for home ownership of all: self sufficiency. Renters need do nothing for themselves; they need take no precautions, nor think of prevention. They can simply, and only, call the rentier.

In contrast, and here I will induce from personal experience to discover the general rule, successful homeowners must take charge of their own conditions. For example, last winter I called on a heating contractor to do an inspection. As a consequence, I learned the fan motor, because of starting current exceeding spec, was giving signs of failure rather sooner than later.

As a renter, I would have relied upon the rentier to figure that out ahead of time, and paid for that figuring, and paid for someone else to do the work, most likely after the thing failed.

As an owner, I bought the motor, and, with my son, replaced it. We, as a family, gained the economic benefit of self sufficiency. He, as a man-child, learned how to approach a novel problem in such a way as to prejudice the future into providing a solution: having never done such a thing myself, success was only possible through careful analysis and proceeding very methodically.

These lessons, far from trivial, are unavailable to renters. The lesson they learn is depending upon someone else to provide.

But what of the subsidies to homeownership? In essence, the mortgage interest deduction represents a transfer of wealth from renters to homeowners, led to the housing asset bubble, and weakened financial services.

Right?

Hogwash. To arrive at that conclusion requires ignoring that rentiers also get to deduct interest, along with a whole host of other things, from income. Removing, as The Economist desires, the interest deduction for owner occupied housing amounts to preferring dependence upon others instead of self-provision. Further, by focussing on ownership, the article completely neglects what renting entails. Owners provide their own property management and, in a great many cases, their own maintenance. For a given amount spent on housing, paying for these things must mean smaller and meaner accommodation.

Of course, purchasing a home amounts to an automatic savings plan. Over, typically, thirty years, a homeowner will have put aside a substantial amount of money. On the flip side, though, people could have put their down payments into equities and rented rather than owned. Over the last 30 years, those equities would have been the better bet. (Also, oddly enough, the article faults equity tied up in houses as being illiquid, while two paras prior faults homeowners for using the equity in their houses. Which is it?)

Right?

Well, perhaps. Owning property as well as shares is called diversification, which, last I heard, is A Good Thing. Taking the longer view, though, owning property is a form of retirement planning. Paying off a mortgage means one's living costs plunge: all that is left is maintenance and property taxes. Until his dying breath, a renter continues to buy property for the rentier, while also paying for maintenance and property taxes.

Ultimately, this article failed. It performed a journalistic non sequitur, blaming home ownership for grotesquely stupid government policy, then used the consequences of doddery as proof that homeownership isn't such a good idea after all. The focus on mortgage interest deductions for homeowners is equally mystifying, giving further credence to the suspicion that The Economist's primary value lies in twee literary stylings, rather than any particular knowledge about economics.

So, To Own, or not to Own?

Homeowners are self-selecting. Absent CRA infections of traditional lending standards, being able to purchase a home requires significant self discipline and planning for the long term. No one should be surprised if communities comprised of such individuals are statistically temperamentally different than those that are not.

A free society should encourage self-sufficiency over dependency. Renting does just the opposite. Instead of rewarding the acquisition of a dozen skills, renting makes them pointless. And instead of providing the freedom to shape and improve one's own environment, renting leaves people at the whim of others.

For those who, through choice or fate, have the personal skills to, in effect, set up a business of their own, home owning makes sense. For society, whether to encourage owner occupied housing depends a great deal on how much that society values freedom.

The Economist ends with this:

As Adam Smith wrote in “The Wealth of Nations” two centuries ago, “a dwelling-house, as such, contributes nothing to the revenue of its inhabitants.”

Apparently they have not read, or do not remember, The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Remembering Don Hewitt

Don Hewitt, the creator of "60 Minutes", died last week at the age of 86.

Nowhere in this toadying, boot licking, supine obit that would make my dog look like a curmudgeonly cynic in comparison is there any mention of "60 Minutes'" Audi sudden unintended acceleration item of 1986.

That day, National People's Radio ran a retrospective of Terri Gross "Fresh Air" interviews with Mr. Hewitt. Her questions had all the ferocity and incisiveness of a Beanie Babie too fond of valium. Should you have been sufficiently bereft of luck to tune in, you would have listened in a great deal of vain to have caught even a glancing reference to that hit piece.

The one that nearly bankrupted the company. The same one where the demonstration was rigged. "60 Minutes" was a pioneer in more ways than one. It would be another seven years before Dateline NBC performed its own fauxreporting.

At least Dateline apologized.

It is undoubtedly bad manners to speak ill of the dead, but the hagiography, amounting to no more than self-congratulatory spittle, in the face of his arrogance and unwillingness to let facts get in the way of a good story is really too much to stomach.

Profiles in Pusillanimity

The Yale Press banned images of Muhammed.

In the book “The Cartoons That Shook the World”.

Yale University consulted two dozen "experts" in making their decision. Apparently, cravenness loves company.

Supply & Demand ...

... not just a good idea, it's the law.

Minimum wage laws are aggravating unemployment.

Young people typically find it hard to get established in the labour market because of their lack of experience, which makes them especially vulnerable in downturns. But even before the recession Britain’s youngsters had been faring worse than their counterparts elsewhere. Between 1998 and 2005, the jobless rate for 16-24-year-olds in Britain was lower than the average for the OECD, a club of mainly rich countries, but since then it has been higher. The unemployment gap between that age group and 25-54-year-olds widened from 2004 to 2007 in Britain while staying broadly the same across the OECD.

Now, why would that be:

The timing of the deterioration points to two possible explanations. A commonly held view is that British youngsters have been displaced by the influx of youthful migrants from eastern Europe since 2004. But this is the “lump-of-labour” fallacy—that a job for a Polish cleaner means one fewer for a native worker. Research by Sara Lemos, an economist at Leicester University, and Jonathan Portes of the Department for Work and Pensions last year found that the wave of migration had not increased youth unemployment.

A more likely explanation, though still disputed, is that the minimum wage was pushed up too much a few years ago. When it was introduced in April 1999, the main rate was set at £3.60 ($5.80) an hour, a fairly modest amount. There was a lower floor of £3 for 18-21-year-olds, because young workers’ chances in the labour market were recognised to be especially sensitive to pay.

Since then, however, both rates have risen by 59% and outstripped average earnings, which have gone up by 45% in the past ten years. The increases were particularly big in the four years to 2006, adding to the suspicion that the minimum wage was implicated in the rising rate of youth unemployment over that period.

Duh.

Not so sedentary Saturday

Recently the other SWIPIAW and I took part in a local bike race, the Fireweed 200. Not seriously, mind you. And it wasn't really as arduous as all that -- we did it as part of a four person* relay team, so an average of 50 miles each isn't really that bit a deal.

The view from the saddle was not particularly horrible (yours truly is in the foreground):




TOSWIPIAW and I cresting Thompson Pass, just before the descent into Valdez:



On the way back, we got an upclose and personal view of the Alaskan pipeline:

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* To be exact, three women and me. My idea for the team name was "Three Squeezes and a Wheeze". "Team Big Love" was the winner, though.

Backyard Bruin

One recent-ish morning I looked up from my Corn Flakes to see an interesting and, thankfully, momentary addition to our backyard (apologies for lousy pictures; it was early and there wasn't quite enough light):




I am used to the zoopoint on our wild cousins: outside boxes looking at the animals on the inside. Interesting feeling having it the other way around.

No Effect, No Cause?

Using a cell phone while driving is A Very Bad Thing. Studies clearly show the accident risk while texting is eight times greater than when keeping both eyes on the road, and all ten thumbs on the wheel. People talking on cell phones are four times more likely to cause a crash.

No doubt.

That undoubtfulness leads to a hypothesis: Since cell phone use while driving is risky, and cell phone usage has become increasingly common since the mid-1990s, then there must be an increase in accident rates over the period.

Turns out that isn't the case.

Number of US highway crashes (1000s) and miles driven (1,000,000s): 1990 - 6,471 (2,144,362); 1995 - 6,699 (2,422,696); 2000 - 6394 (2,746,925); 2005 - 6,159 (2,989,430); 2006 - 5,973 (3,014,116).*

With the minor exception of 1990 to 1995, the number of accidents per year has been decreasing. The rate, based upon miles driven, has decreased throughout the period.

There are two ways of looking at this. It could be that improvements in driver training**, car technology, and road design from 1995 - 2006 lowered the overall accident risk faster than cell phone usage increased it.

Alternatively, researchers had no real idea what they meant by risk. "Cell phone usage increases the risk of an accident by four times." If I increase my risk by four times, does my mishap rate go up by the same amount? If it does not, then how does risk have any meaning? If risk does not reflect in rate, then risk becomes a cause without an effect.

Impressionistically, I am find the former explanation unconvincing. ABS and ASC systems have made cars more controllable. However, most drivers have no idea how to use ABS, and ASC is too new in mass market cars to have made any measurable impact.

So I'll go with the latter. The researchers just know that using a cellphone while driving is more dangerous, so they stopped at demonstrating the "cause".

This reminds me of Warmenism. The Cause is obvious, so obvious that very often no ink is spilled looking for the effect. The Arctic icecap has been melting; well, until recently, anyway. Clearly, obviously, that is due to Global Warming, aka Climate Change. Has anyone seen a story on this subject that cited any actual sea or air temperatures?

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*2006 is the latest year available.
** Yeah, right.

This One's for Brit

Recently, Brit said some very nice things about my children.

Naturally, that makes me an expert in parenting.

Real soon now, Brit and his SWIPIAW are going to become parents.

This confluence of events makes now the perfect time for completely unsolicited advice. After all, if you can't trust a male blogger for insight into the parenting arts, who can you trust?

So, in no particular order, here are my parenting tips:

• Read Dogs for Dummies. Okay, probably not the leash training chapter, and certainly not the housebreaking bits. However, what works with a dog also works with kids from about 9 months through 5 years: reward behavior you want to see more of. Punishment has its place, but positive reinforcement works better at eliciting correct behavior than negative reinforcement does in discouraging bad behavior. Most importantly, though, is the underlying theme of the book: making continuously clear who is in charge.



• Dads are not Moms. I know this is heresy (I think the NOW thought police with their pastel truncheons have already arrived on my doorstep), but: There are certain things moms just cannot do. For example, our daughter used to be a very, very picky eater. Finally, in response to a food fit, I said "Fine. Starve. Your choice." Moms cannot, will not, pull this sort of thing off -- something about the nurturing instinct. Sometimes, though, it just needs doing.



• Use The Voice Brit, Use the Voice. When I wanted to kids to either start, or stop, doing something, I'd ask politely and quietly once, twice, often three times, very occasionally five. Somewhere between two and five, though, I would instantly switch to the room filling Wrath From on High Voice. Startled the heck right out of them. Moms cannot do this without sounding shrieky: it just doesn't work. See Dads are not Moms, above. I haven't had to use The Voice for a good half-dozen years.



• Do as you say. Sounds glaringly obvious; too often honored in the breach. If you want your children to be polite to, say, food servers, you have to be unfailingly polite yourself.



• Praise in public, discpline in private.



• "Which part of NO are you unable to take on board?" Best. Parenting. Phrase. Ever.



• Better to negotiate with terrorists than children.



• Parents best be singing from the same sheet of child raising music. That stops the little terrorists from playing one parent off against the other.



• Learn the Heimlich maneuver.



• Until a child learns to swim, water any deeper than is required to dampen the soles of your feet is the enemy.



• Get a puppy. Okay, not right away. This is best done at about age twelve. Your daughter(s) and/or son(s) will fall in love with it. Then toss in the sexual morality discussions. To a daughter: "You love this puppy, would you kill it?" Horrified look. "Well, what if you get pregnant?" To a son: "You love this puppy. Would you abandon it?" Horrified look. "Well, what if you get a girl pregnant?"



• A son is to a paper airplane as a daughter is to the Space Shuttle.

FWIW, neither my wife or I have hit, or even threatened hitting, our kids.

Now it is time for the hive-mind to kick in.

Won't Get There From Here

The paradox about The Fermi Paradox is that anyone finds it paradoxical at all.

To ruthlessly summarize, the Fermi "Paradox" goes like this: The Milky Way has lots of stars, many of which must have planets capable of sustaining life, at least a few of which must harbor intelligent life. And while stars are very far apart, the Milky Way's age trumps distance. Further, in a galaxy orders of magnitude older than human civilization, it is extremely unlikely humans are the first intelligent species. Therefore, since there are other intelligent beings in the Milky Way, we must have seen some sign of them by now, except that we haven't.

This is considered a paradox because reasoning from logical premises leads to a conclusion that contradicts observation: there must be, but there isn't.

As paradoxes go, this is nothing on anything Zeno cooked up. There are any number of ways to shoot holes in Fermi's logical premises: interstellar travel is, in fact, irremediably difficult; the mean distance between habitable planets exceeds the detection range; civilizations become harder to detect as they become more advanced.

To those obvious objections, add this:

(PhysOrg.com) -- For more than 50 years, many have taken the so-called Fermi Paradox to indicate that the existence of intelligent alien civilizations is an impossibility. However, a recent re-examination of the paradox points out that, rather than discounting the spread of an intelligent civilization, the Fermi Paradox merely points out that advanced civilizations with exponential growth are unlikely to exist.

In other words, for any civilization advanced enough to accomplish interstellar travel, there will be no point in doing so.

The only reason anyone still pays attention to the Fermi paradox is because Fermi said it, and it is a faux profundity: religion in miniature.

My British Tour Diary

To be there, first you gotta get there.

In my line of work, seniority is everything. Or, more pertinent to my point of view, juniority is nothing. I'm not quite at the bottom of the barrel, but I can see it pretty clearly. Accordingly, I should consider myself lucky that what I got for June was not completely horrible.

Still, it was a bit dodgy. The best I could do to accommodate our Grand Tour was a reserve line (i.e., on call), the end of which was two days after I wanted to be in England. Because I was a hostage to fortune, I couldn't buy an airline ticket to travel with my wife and son, since I wasn't sure I could be there.

On this occasion, though, fortune smiled broadly upon us. Skeds tossed me a trip that left only a few reserve days at the end, two of which were off limits for crew rest. Since there was no way I could get used, I was able to travel on the same day as the other SWIPIAW and the man-child.

I got home at 1 am on the 8th. Sleep as fast as I can. Get up. Unpack. Repack. Next day, head for England.

One of the benefits of being a pilot is the ability to jumpseat just about anywhere for free. However, this particular excursion, being international, was going to be a bit dodgy. I could have waited and tried to leave in the afternoon with Sue and Eric, but if I couldn't get on with them, the day would be shot. So I headed to O'Hare the first thing in the morning, figuring that there would be enough flights to Heathrow that I would be bound to get on something, and get there before they did.

That last bit was kind of important. Vague travel plans combined with no comm capability -- think of life before cell phones -- made contingency planning tough. The fallback option was for them to press on regardless, and for me to do planes-trains-buses as required to intercept the lodging itinerary. Obviously, getting there before they did would make a lot of problems go away.

I got to O'Hare on schedule, then headed directly for the international terminal to catch a ride on British Airways. Memo for future reference: BA does not accept offline (i.e., non BA pilots) jumpseaters. BAstards.

Okay, Plan B. Back to the American Airlines gates. List for jumpseat. Learn that recession memo may not have gotten to everyone. Terminal is packed, and flight oversold. Memo for future reference: one of the knock-on effects of militant Islam, combined with, umm, obscure, government reasoning is that I can't get on a flight deck jumpseat for an international flight.

Plan C. Trudge to United gates. Recession not readily apparent there, either, as they are trying to buy off 20 people as I walk up to the gate.

Verging on 9 pm, twelve hours after leaving home, Plan D. Trudge back to American gates for the last flight that evening. Fortunately, it would arrive at Heathrow an hour before Sue and Eric. Note as I plod past commuter gates that the last flight to Memphis leaves in 10 minutes. Quick call to my company's jumpseat schedulers. There is a four am flight to Stansted (nearish to Cambridge), and a seat is available.

This presents a conundrum. American, IF I can get on, avoids all the contingency problems. Going on Company leaves those problems completely intact, but does offer the certainty of getting in country, albeit to a different airport five hours later than Sue & Eric. I pretty quickly concluded that this was a real life bird-in-the-hand problem, so I headed to Memphis.

Once there, with a couple hours to kill in flight ops, I worked the contact angle. National Rental Car was no help. However, I was able to send an email to the first nights lodging, a B&B in York, with my arrival info, and noting I planned on trains and a cab getting me to York

(It is worth noting at this point that by that point I would have crossed 17 time zones in four days, and gone three nights out of five with essentially no sleep.)

Cue the sequence denoting passage of time: plane taking off, cruising, landing, parking.

Fine, I'm in England. However, I have no idea how to get from Stansted to York. So, contradicting the conventional wisdom that men won't ask for directions, virtually the moment the airplane door cracks open, I ask the ramp agent how to get to the first night's destination.

"What is the best way to get to York?"

"Oh, no need to worry about that. Your wife is here."

As my jaw was plummeting to the floor, just before the loud, anvil-like clang, I wondered if my fatigue was so extreme as to render me delusional.

As it happened, Sue and Eric stuck to our comm-out plan. If not at arrivals, proceed to car rental agency. If not at agency, stick to itinerary until I showed up at wherever they were to be staying on the day I could get there. Since they hit the road just as the afternoon rush hours were, getting out of London was an M25 traffic nightmare. Glaciers routinely move faster, some of your more athletic trees can keep up. Cold remedy companies should consider using the visuals as a metaphor for painfully clogged sinuses. After a couple agonizing hours, it was intuitively clear to Sue -- and the rental GPS (aka Betty) confirmed -- that their arrival at the York B&B was going to be late. Sue decided it would be a Real Good Idea to get in touch with them, so she decided to just buy a cheap pay-as-you-go cellphone at a fortuitously placed roadside services area.

The B&B told her how to work the after-hours arrival, and mentioned that ohbytheway I had sent an email.

Sue told Eric to find out from Betty how far they were from Stansted.

They had 45 minutes to drive the 5.8 miles to the cargo ramp. That is just lottery winning kind of lucky.


You have a friend in England

Still bafflegarbed at this turn of events, we continued the march to York in a continuous driving rain. Even more bafflegarbing, we were cut loose to drive on the left side of the road. It's amazing no one died.

Our rental barge was a Skoda something or other, most notable (to me, anyway) by its motor: a turbo-charged diesel. If you care about cost-per-mile, probably nothing beats a diesel, including anything of the Prius ilk. Great torque, especially after the turbo kicks in. Have to re-calibrate my thinking a bit, though: shifting needs doing about 2000 rpm lower than a regular motor. That, and getting it off the line.

Despite having driven almost nothing other than manual transmissions my whole life, I stalled the thing every third try. I am only guessing here, but because of the high compression ratio diesels require, they have very little torque at tick over, despite being able to pull stumps once under way.

We finally got to York just before 11pm. Sue was practically quivering in anticipation of going to a pub, so we did that immediately after checking in at the B&B. On the way back, we relied on old-fashioned memory to re-find the B&B. I don't know whether to blame cognitive deficits, or darkness and heavy rain. In any event, we turned a street too soon.

Pulling away from the subsequent signal, I stalled the car. Instantly, the car behind me started flashing his brights and leaning on the horn with both hands and a foot.

Oh, for Pete's bloody sake.

After chewing up every bit of four seconds to get restarted, I turned left, stayed in the left lane, and proceeded at no great speed. Despite having another lane, the car behind me stayed right on my tail, still with the lights and the horn. Now we are wondering aloud whether he is trying to tell us something: flat tire? wrong side of the road? lights off? Not apparently. Moment of panic, but no. No. Still puzzled.

A couple hundred yards on, and another stop signal. The other car, now far quieter, pulls to a stop in the adjacent lane. Seconds later, my door is yanked open by this guy who looks like every imaginable justification for "three strikes and your out" sentencing legislation. "Get out of the car you [insert loud graphic obscenities here]".

It didn't take long to suss that getting out to defend my honor was probably not going to be a winning strategy. Nor was waiting for the light to turn green. Nor would stalling. Thankfully, I had a credible Grand Prix standing start available just when I needed it. Twenty feet of rubber closed my door firmly, and I chose enough side streets to frustrate whatever desire he might have had to continue our conversation.

All three of us more or less simultaneously said "What the heck was that about?"

My second thought was that he probably should investigate other cultures before he travels abroad. If he was to try that in, say, Texas, Arizona, or Alaska, like as not he'd get his head blown off.

Welcome to England.

Well, no, not actually. That bizarre incident aside -- I promise my hands never left the steering wheel -- during our whole stay we never had a chance to look even mildly confused for more than a few seconds before someone stepped up to offer assistance; everyone was always friendly and courteous, almost as if the entire country was trying to make up for the the York incident.

Driving in England is a challenge. Having to overcome ingrained habit to drive on the left is hard enough. Doing simple things like pulling out of a car park onto a lightly traveled road is the worst: looking the wrong way to pull into the wrong lane. If I sound like an expert here, I am.

Besides driving on the wrong* side, roads are narrow, twisty and dark. Roundabouts come in infinite variety, occasionally including traffic signals. For those who haven't driven there, this is applied mixed metaphor: think Yield sign and stop lights at the same time.

The Brits really do need to create some insignia for rental cars indicating the driver is a foreigner. They already have one for drivers on provisional (learner) licenses: A big white circle affixed to the aft end of the car, with a very prominent red "L" in it. Not only would it have encouraged other drivers to self-defensively give me a great deal more breathing room, it would also attenuate their irritation at my more than semi-occasional benign buffoonery.

The nagging non-trivial worry about having nevertheless declined the rental car insurance coverage aside, the trip went perfectly. Britain must be the prettiest country on the planet, and the Tourist Board apparently obsessively dedicated themselves to ensuring perfect weather when it mattered, while leaving the rainy and windy bits for when we were driving, sleeping, or in need of a rainbow.

Cut to the Chase already

Of all the forms of writing, travelogues are the hardest to get right. So, rather than a blow-by-blow, here are some observations in absolutely no particular order.

• Betty the GPS was more than just convenient. No, Betty doesn't really do anything that can't be done with a map. However, her voice directions allowed us to keep both heads up, and not looking away from the road to find street signs which were noteworthy primarily in their absence, and secondarily in their promiscuous changability. Huge safety bonus. Also, gave the man-child something to mess with.


• The critters could not get enough castles.


• In a beautiful country, Bath could well be the prettiest city. Most of the buildings are made from a nearly buttery yellow sandstone. The entire place glows at sunset.


• As I have said elsewhere, the Internet Cloaking Device reveals clearly the person underneath. Thanks to my peripatetic job, I have been able to meet a good half dozen of Post Judd Alliance. Not once have I been disappointed. Meeting Brit and Anna was a great addition to our trip. We just missed Ali Choudhury, but it looks like there will be a do-over near the end of July.


• Whoever said the intertubes would lead to the complete atomization of human relationships was operating in a complete clue vacuum.


• Managed to see Shakespeare's "As You Like It" at the Globe. Taking the time to read the play first was a great help. The no longer so little man knew he was going to hate it. I told him he was wrong. I couldn't have been more right.


• We had a couple hours to kill before the play. Well, not "kill" exactly, London has no end of stuff to see. But we wanted to keep it close -- no point in buying tickets, only to show up two minutes late. So we went to the Tate Museum a few hundred yards along the Thames: modern art from top to bottom. With frighteningly few exceptions, modern art is pretentious, ugly, embodied faux-intellectual onanism. Resuming above ground nuclear testing within the building could scarcely create a worse mess.


• Why can't American drivers be even half as good as British drivers?


• If I was a car manufacturer -- Toyota, Porsche, BMW, Skoda, name it, I would subcontract Apple to design the software. Everything else aside, no one does look and feel like Apple does. The Skoda had an amazing amount of electronic wizardry on board. Unfortunately, it all gave the impression of being hurled through the passenger's side door in a wicker basket.


• During time in London, we stayed in Hounslow. As Brit or gaw could quickly tell you, that is not the posh part of town. Our arrival the first night was a bit late, so I went to a takeaway around the corner from the decidedly threadbare hotel. On ordering, I couldn't help but notice all the references to halal this and halal that. Clearly, I was in a Muslim establishment. While waiting for my order, the proprietor insisted I have some (presumably halal) chicken wings on the house. I retaliated by shamelessly overtipping.


• The more perceptive among you might have been able to hazard a guess that I am not particularly religious. That said, I cannot imagine how a hypothetical absence of all the Christian edifices from Britain's landscape would improve things in the least.


• If you want reasonably priced lodging in London, it will take you an hour on the tube to get to London from your lodging.

Since I am getting tired of typing, and you have long since wished this pathetic imitation of Lileks would come to an end, I'll let pictures do the rest of the work.

York

Edinburgh Castle. It was the woman-child's idea for the More Guinns in More Places lineup.

More More Guinns in More Places, this time along the Scottish border.

We stopped at the ex-RAF Upper Heyford, near Oxford, to show the critters without where they would never have begun otherwise. The RAF Commander's building is still open to the public, and they have a pretty good history video they show on demand.

We could also get to the Officers' Club, where Sue & I met. It has been slowly crumbling since the base closure in 1994. I wouldn't be surprised if it is still standing in 2394. (One place I lived in back in the day had "1462" engraved in the arch over the doorway.)

The man-child learning to pilot a canal boat. He is a very quick study.

---

*Wrong as in non-standard, but not as in without reason. WayBackWhen, England was plagued with highwaymen. Most people are right handed, so the English drove their carriages on the left in order to leave the right arm free to handle a weapon. Or, so I was told with a very convincing delivery, anyway.

Interregnum

My daughter plays in a High School age flute ensemble. I thought the whole point of the exercise was musicianship.

It is not.

Rather, it is a thinly veiled pretext to hoover Dad's wallet. What I did not know when she joined, but do now, is that they go on an exhibition tour every year. Not to Wasilla, nay, not even Juneau. Lordy, no.

England and Scotland for two and a half weeks.

As if that isn't hoovering enough, my SWIPIAW decided that if the woman-child is on the mud peanut*, then the rest of us need to be on the mud peanut.

Ordinarily, SWIPIAW is a model of prudent household budget management. But, not when it comes to traveling. Lordy, no. Making Congress look like a well disciplined team intent on squeezing every penny until you can hear the Lincolns scream, she has set the botgun* to full auto, and taped down the trigger.

So, for the next week and a half, the absence of writing will perfectly join with the habitual absence of content, while join our daughter in Edinburgh, to see the sights.

Given a little luck, we should meet the Brits in Bath along the way.

Over, and for a little while, out.

---

* It rains a lot on the ol' Blighty. If you look at a map of the British isles and scrunch up your eyes, it looks like a peanut. Hence, Mud Peanut.

** The Thai currency is the bot, which is as good a generic name for persuaders as one can find. That makes your wallet a botgun. Setting to full rapid automatic, as only Team Estrogen can do, sends those bots spewing everywhere.

Air France 447

The loss of AF 447 is a real puzzler. In the modern aviation era -- which I take to be roughly since the advent of the 707 -- and particularly the last twenty years, the sudden destruction of an airliner while in cruise flight is vanishingly rare.

What is worse in this case is that almost all the clues lie under a couple miles of water, and might never be found. However, that does not mean there is absolutely nothing to go on.

Watts up with that? posted an excellent detailed meteorological analysis of the conditions along 447's route of flight. It paints a pretty compelling picture that violent weather was the ultimate cause of 447's demise.

However, while it goes some way towards what, since the author is a meteorologist, not a pilot, there isn't a whole lot of discussion about the other "w" word: why did the four year old A330, one of the most modern airliners in the world, get in that position? After all, thunderstorms are not rare phenomena. For professional pilots, thunderstorm avoidance comes with the territory, particularly during the summer.

Obviously, one must detect to avoid. To that end, there are essentially two systems available to a pilot: the Mark One Mod Zero eyeball, and radar.

In many cases, visual acquisition works fine. During the day, cumulonimbus clouds are distinct, and at night the lightning can be seen for a hundred miles. Unless, that is, the thunderstorms are embedded in more widespread cloud. In that event, our eyes need help.

Enter radar. On modern airplanes, the radar is an amazing piece of kit. Among other things, it will overlay a color display (colors correlated to precipitation intensity) on the navigation display, and can, in the takeoff and landing phases, predict windshear.

Which, on the face of it, makes AFR 447's run-in with severe weather even harder to understand.

Time to dig a little deeper.

To visualize what the radar can see, imagine looking at an airplane from the side. The radar beam emanates in the shape of an isosceles triangle, with the apex at the airplane's nose, and the base at the range setting of the navigation display. The apex's included angle is roughly 10 degrees, centered around the pilot-set tilt angle, which is pitch stabilized (i.e., within platform limits, the angle is with respect to the horizon, not the airplane's horizontal axis; that means pitch changes do not affect the display). The triangle sweeps 90 degrees either side of the nose, providing a panoramic view of the weather ahead.

What about that tilt angle? That depends upon altitude. The closer to the ground, the greater the tilt angle, up to about 5 degrees, to reduce ground clutter. At cruise altitude, on a typical day, the tilt angle is roughly zero to -0.5 degrees. That means the lower edge of the beam hits the ground about 80 miles from the airplane's nose. Beyond that there may be some ground returns, but it is easy to distinguish them from weather returns, because only weather will appear within 80 miles.

You might begin to notice a limitation here. Just inside eighty miles, low altitude precipitation will not show, because it is just below the beam. The closer to the airplane, the higher weather can be, and still remain below that sweeping triangle, until a thunderstorm directly under the airplane will be outside the radar's field of view.

However, since an airplane will cover that 80 miles in about ten minutes, that means a thunderstorm would have to climb nearly explosively from low altitude in that time in order for its effects to reach a plane at 35,000 feet.

Which they can do. A self respecting thunderstorm probably has as much energy as a middling nuclear weapon, and can, once it starts developing, climb at 6,000 feet per minute. Put in more ordinary terms, that is a vertical velocity of about 70 miles per hour. The airplane I fly climbs better than just about anything that isn't an F-whatever. Lightly loaded, it can manage about 8,000 feet per minute at lower altitudes.

So it is entirely possible, although not common, for a burgeoning thunderstorm to climb fast enough to smack an airplane from below, all the while remaining just out of view.

That is why, if in an area with convective activity*, we will shorten the display range to get a more detailed picture, as well as essentially eliminating the possibility of getting schwacked from below.

There is also a less obvious radar limitation. What we see on the display is, in effect, colors that are correlated with the ratio of returned to transmitted energy. The more precipitation, the greater the ratio, and the color will change from light green through yellow to red. However, if there is enough precipitation, then no radar energy gets through that to anything behind it: sufficiently intense storms act like an impenetrable wall.

The other aspect to consider is aircraft performance. At cruise, we operate inside a fairly small envelope, sometimes referred to as the "coffin corner". Ten to twenty knots faster, and we hit maximum mach; twenty or so knots slower, and we run out of buffet margin. Additionally, typical cruise at about Mach 0.8 translates into a turn diameter of as much as 25 miles.

So, if an airplane runs quickly rising air, akin to suddenly going downhill, airspeed can suddenly increase beyond max mach. Conversely, passing through sinking air means the airplane must "climb" just to stay level, and may not have sufficient thrust to maintain altitude and airspeed.

Turn radius just complicates matters. When it comes to thunderstorms, pilots always have to have a "bolt hole", which has to be pretty big at altitude.

Finally, there is the A330 itself.** It is a full fly-by-wire airplane which, among other things, incorporates flight envelope protection. It won't let the pilot go to slow, or too fast, or bank too steeply, or let the pitch get out of hand. If things go wrong, it will also go into manual reversion which, if my memory of that simulator session serves, is very unpleasant.

None of this comes as any surprise. Weather avoidance is so common as to be essentially a routine part of the job, made far easier with color radars, and easier still on modern airplanes that overlay radar returns over the God's-eye-view navigation display.

Yet AFR 447 is gone, nonetheless.

Time to start speculating.

Despite all the technology, AFR 447 hit violent weather through one or more of:

Sheer bad luck. Directly overflying an extremely quickly building thunderstorm that just managed to stay out of view.
Bad luck of a different kind, mixed with bad planning. They got into a widespread area of rapidly building storms, and, thanks to that large turn circle, ran out of bolt holes.
Failure to note that severe foreground weather was hiding stuff behind it, and thereby running out of boltholes. This problem is rare, and relatively insidious. However, all flight manuals address it in detail.
Complacency led them to not be continuously working with the radar.

I think the most likely explanation for the encounter is running out of boltholes.

Having hit the weather, what caused the airplane to come apart? In and of itself, turbulence, no matter how extreme, probably isn't the cause. Aircraft structures are both very strong and resilient. However, at altitude, the narrow speed envelope can come into play. Strong up and down drafts can cause airspeed excursions outside the coffin corner***. That happens, and the coffin corner has built in margins. However, a sufficiently strong updraft could cause an irreconcilable problem: can't fight the updraft, because of greatly increased airspeed, yet going with the updraft could, due to temperature effects on Mach number, result in exceeding critical Mach.

This is where a little more speculation comes in. The A330's flight control system would have been trying to keep airspeed within the envelope, and if it was physically unable to do so, might have gone into manual reversion. Given the circumstances, that would likely have made the airplane impossible to fly. (IIRC, pitch control becomes an approximate kind of thing).

Alternately, they may have gone enough beyond maximum mach to reach critical mach, which would have put enough of the horizontal stabilizer into shock stall so that the airplane would have lost the stabilizer's balancing effect, and pitched sharply nose down, making the overspeed problem even worse.****

Either way, or for that matter, any other way, still leaves the fundamental problem largely unfazed: why did AFR447 fly into such severe weather?

Thunderstorms contain as much energy as an atom bomb. As strong as modern airplanes are, going through one can cause excursions beyond controlled flight, leaving pieces scattered over miles of ocean floor, and thousands to grieve.

---

* Satellite based weather observation is so good that I can't remember running into convective activity about which we had not been previously warned.

** I have flown the A320, which has an essentially identical flight control system. However, that was seven years ago, so my memory may let me down.

*** On descent into Narita yesterday, we ran into substantial turbulence that briefly caused airspeed to increase beyond max Mach, and which the flight control system could not handle without intervention -- briefly leveling until airspeed came back down. Not a big deal, though; just another day at the office.

**** Airplanes designed for supersonic flight move the entire horizontal stabilizer to control pitch for this reason.

Kicking Tin

Last February, a commuter flight from Newark to Buffalo entered a spin and crashed while configuring to land, killing all 49 aboard and one on the ground. It was the worst airline crash in seven years.

How is it that a perfectly good airplane just stops flying? On hearing that it occurred at night where icing had been reported, I assumed the crew had been caught out by airframe icing, which, particularly in smaller airplanes, can lead to losing control while configuring to land. As it turns out, that is only part of the story.

Two weeks ago, the New York Times reported on the National Transportation Safety Board's (NTSB) cockpit voice recorder (CVR) transcripts and digital flight data recorder (DFR) reconstruction of the flight's final two minutes.

As non-specialist reporting goes, I must give credit where it is due: the reporter went about as far as he could, stuck pretty closely to the facts, and made no significant errors; it is a very credible piece of work. Since I am a specialist, though, I am going to dissect the mishap a little more closely than did Mr. Wald. I am going to speculate a bit, but I will make it clear when I am doing so.

First, a precis of the mishap itself. [Some of this goes beyond anything in the NTSB documents. It is not speculation, though, as the information comes from DFR based flight path simulation video.

• The Bombardier Dash 8 was slowing to final approach speed, 118 knots, at glide slope intercept altitude, about 1700 feet above the ground.
  
  
• A few seconds before extending the extending the flaps to 15 degrees, the airspeed decayed to Vmin (1.3 times the stall speed for the configuration).
  
  
• At this point the stick shaker activated, and the throttles advanced to nearly full power. The stick shaker warns of approaching the stall angle of attack; i.e., the angle between the wing and the relative wind that produces the maximum lift, and beyond which lift quickly decreases.
  
  
• The pilot flying (PF, the Captain in this case) reacted to the stick shaker by pulling on the yoke.
  
  
• The airspeed then decayed at an increasing rate until the wings stalled, and the stall was allowed to progress into a spin.
  
  
• It took approximately 12 seconds for the aircraft's ground speed to go from 150 mph to zero.
  

So, how did the crew convert a perfectly good airplane into a smoking hole? The reasons read like a laundry list of Things Best Not Done: lack of professionalism, complacency & inattention, inadequate flying skill, incomplete training, and a longstanding transport category aircraft instrumentation omission. Oh yeah, and airframe icing. Everything but the first is my speculation.

The story's headline highlights a specific infraction: the pilots, particularly the Captain, far from rigorously observed the sterile cockpit rule. It prohibits non-essential conversation any time the aircraft is moving below 10,000 feet, or when in a climb / descent within 1000' of the new altitude. Almost all the Captains I fly with hew closely to that requirement; it is striking how often mishap CVRs show the opposite. Further, the first officer (FO) was suffering a head cold, and should probably have removed herself from the schedule.

The report mentions possible fatigue due to commuting -- the Capt slept in the crew lounge, and the FO commuted all night. However, flight ops can be astonishingly abusive of sleep cycles. Fatigue comes with the territory*, and cockpit discipline is the primary means to combat its effects. Besides, no amount of fatigue short of deep REM sleep explains the mishap sequence, and really tired people tend not to chatter.

Complacency and its evil twin, inattention, are an unfortunate consequence of modern glass cockpit aircraft with flight management systems (FMSs). Since FMSs know a great deal about the aircraft, its position in space, phase of flight and destination, the airplane takes care of many things itself. Among other things, FMS equipped aircraft will set target airspeeds based upon configuration, maintain those speeds with a combination of pitch and thrust while the automatic systems are engaged, and will even resume automatic control of the throttles to prevent speed excursions outside the allowed range.**

FMSs are, in general, great contributors to flight safety. When the conditions are not permissive (lots of traffic, bad weather, fatigue), an FMS provides two advantages. First, through programming approach details, it allows shifting some workload to the far less busy cruise phase. Second, in the terminal environment, it allows the crew to tell the airplane what to do without getting involved in the nitty gritty of actually making it happen. A woodpecker does not always have the best view of a forest.

Unfortunately, FMSs, while very good, are not perfect.

Sometimes they just do weird, umm, things.*** Glass babies, those who have spent essentially all their time on FMS, as opposed to clueless round dial airplanes, have a tendency to become passive observers. Well, the good ones, that is. The rest become merely passive.

What FMSs don't know, they cannot learn. There is no teaching an FMS about a wing with ice (actually, there can be; more later). It knows what the speed target for a configuration is, but it can be caught trying to do the impossible: fly a configuration predicated airspeed for a wing it no longer has.

That computers are imperfect, to the point of perversity, should come as no surprise to anyone more sentient than an iPhone. To comprehend that perversity, though, requires sufficient skill to know when the machine has boarded the handcart to hell. It is at this point, perhaps in the interest of avoiding speculation, where an otherwise well written newspaper article comes up a little short.

For all airplanes, there is a certain cadence to configuration for approach. While I am not a Dash 8 pilot, I am virtually certain that the pilots were in step with that cadence. The aircraft should have been roughly 15 knots above Vmin as the flaps went to fifteen degrees, and Vmin should have decreased by around 15 knots as the flaps extended.

For those of you at home in the pixel audience keeping score, a final approach speed of 118 should have a Vmin of around 113, and Vstall with landing flaps of roughly 87 knots. Vstall at the 15 degree flap setting would have been higher, but not much.

To put it in more notional terms, the crew was operating the airplane appropriately, but completely failed to take on board that it wasn't flying correctly: Vmin was far too high for the altitude, weight and configuration. The FMS was calculating Vmin on angle of attack, and target speeds on configuration. Those didn't add, and the pilots were too lackadaisical and ill-informed to break the code.

Being surprised is a wonderful thing. During Christmas and birthdays, that is. In the air, surprise is never, ever, good. Despite the wrapping being long off the gift -- the crew had almost 20 seconds to suss that the "foot" (the red vertical bar on the airspeed display indicating every bit of what red intuitively means) was where it most certainly did not belong -- neither pilot gave the tiniest sign of acknowledgment. Where mental warning flags and alarm bells should have been waving and clanging furiously, there was mere uncomprehending passivity.

So when the stick shaker fired up, it was a Jack-in-the-box moment to a crew who wasn't even aware the crank had been wound. Here is where inadequate flying skill comes into play. Yanking on the yoke when it is vibrating like a bad rental car at highway speed is just wrong. Like turning right at Indy, it is one of those elemental things one would think lies well into the realm of instinct.

This is where training needs to take a hit. My airplane is fully automated. And, oh by the way, it is the only one I have flown that doesn't require memorizing, or even knowing -- because the information is not available -- pitch and power settings for various airspeeds and configurations. Perhaps the Dash 8 is similar. Adding injury to insult, the flight manual essentially requires flying with the flight director (FMS computed steer-to bars) on. This does incredible violence to the control-performance concept of instrument flying (To abbreviate: setting specific attitude and power in order to obtain desired altitude, airspeed and heading. Repeat quickly and continuously). There is one sure result here. Performance cross check will atrophy because it almost never matters. Flight departments need to encourage turning off all the magic when conditions are permissive. I know of at least one that, until a couple days ago, did not.

All these paragraphs, and not one word about something that featured prominently, even amongst the impertinent chatter: icing. It is what caused Vmin to be so much higher than it should have been.

There are two things to be said here.

First, so what. There is no way the crew could to mount a response to that about which they were oblivious.

The second points an accusatory finger at aircraft designers. Angle of attack (AOA), the angular difference between the wing and the airflow, is essentially an instantaneous measure of the amount of lift the wing is producing with respect to how much lift it can produce. For a given combination of g-load, altitude, airspeed, weight and configuration, there is precisely one angle of attack. Not only is AOA the most fundamental measure of performance, it is also mechanically the simplest.

In fighter type aircraft, AOA is (g-limits notwithstanding) everything. In the realm relevant to the case at hand, the airspeed corresponding to landing weight is the crosschecked with AOA. If they match, wonderful. If not, something is up. Oh, and fly AOA on final.

Oddly, transport category aircraft ignore AOA so thoroughly that it isn't displayed anywhere. Had the the FMS been designed to fly AOA and compare the resulting airspeed against target airspeed, it would not have been trying to do the impossible. (Since the pilots had already proven themselves blind to the obvious, I doubt the addition of AOA would have caused them to change the outcome.) I can think of at least several crashes that would have been prevented with more emphasis on, and clear display of, AOA.

Flying can get very ugly very quickly. Once airborne, there is no pulling off to the side of the road. Cars do not fall through the pavement, or suddenly decide to head for the nearest ditch, if they get slow. This crew was undisciplined, oblivious and incompetent. I admit up front I don't know precisely what distinguishes profession from occupation, or occupation from marking off time. Despite that definitional inability, though, I insist that taking people into the air qualifies as a profession, and this pair comprehensively failed to meet even minimal requirements: they were passengers like the other 47 on board, distinguished only by getting paid for the trip.

++++

Miscellaneous notes about the article.

Officials of Colgan Air, the company that operated the Continental flight, offered startling testimony that pointed fingers at their own pilots.

John Erwin Barrett, the airline’s director of flight standards, said neither pilot in the twin-engine turboprop was paying attention to the flight instruments. A month after the crash, he said, a Colgan crew in the same model plane, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 on approach to Burlington, Vt., received the same warning of a stall, and recovered smoothly, landing without incident.

Officials at Colgan Air should be aware of when their own foot is in the crosshairs. Getting to the point of stall warning on a transport category aircraft means something has already gone badly wrong, no matter how successful the recovery.

Many recent crashes have raised questions about training and judgment, as opposed to mechanical failure — for example, the crash of another twin-engine turboprop, in Kirksville, Mo., in 2004, in which the crew violated operating rules and joked and yawned as they descended into the trees. The pilot of American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed in Queens in November 2001, used the rudder in a way that made the plane swing back and forth until the tail broke off.

The Kirksville crew was woefully inattentive during taxi to the runway. They were most certainly not joking and yawning as they left the ground.

As for the American pilot, he was an ex-Eagle driver, accustomed to using the rudder to control roll; unbeknownst to him (see Surprises, above) he was flying along the wing vortex of a preceding B747-400. Airbus neglected to mention in the flight limitations section any restrictions on rudder use. Why? Because no one foresaw that one-off circumstance.

---

* E.g. I will depart Newark for Europe in five hours at 11 pm body clock time.

** The FMS in my aircraft does all these things. Since the Dash 8 is a newer aircraft, I suspect, but do not know, that it has the same capability.

*** E.g. Enroute Here from There, the FMS adjusted the power a little high, then picked at an electronic hangnail while the airspeed increased by roughly 15 knots to Vmo (max Mach). Then, about the time the Captain and I were doing the Spock arched eyebrow thing, yanked the throttles to idle. If I had done that on the DC-9, which didn't know automatic from potatoes, I would have gotten slugged. Verbally, of course.