Is there just one you?

The plan was to dedicate this thing to flying and system administration.  I lost my inspiration and let it just linger for a while.

Anyhow, I recently re-read some letters from my college years, and particularly from a female friend who had no trouble being smarter than just about every guy around her and was also interested in exploring some of life's mysteries.

It was interesting how I have a lot of ancillary thoughts about these questions, while the central mystery remains.

One was the simple, wide-open question if I thought I was unique in all of history, with the warning to avoid getting into stereotypes.

I think just to be clear, we have to dispense with the obvious physical interpretations.  First, from a organic perspective, every wooden toothpick is unique.  If you start looking at the subatomic level, even plastic toothpicks are unique.  While on a practical level, the reverse is the rule.  Although I haven't met one, google tells me there are a number of people with my name out there, and my sister (years ago) met someone who looked enough like me, that it was seriously creepy when he hit on her.  Also assuming other things are the same, another me who was born elsewhere or elsewhen, would almost certainly have a different vocabulary and express himself differently.

All that aside, a good actor could play a recognizable impression of me as I would be in Elizabethan times.  Which is to say that I (and other people) have specific combinations of traits, ticks and habits which -- when displayed -- are strongly associated with 'who' we are to others.  This is pretty close to certainly being non-unique and strongly possible that many others would really make my friends think of me almost immediately upon meeting an 'impression double'.

However, as writers and poets (and psychologists) have pointed out, a man is not one person, but a different person for everyone he interacts with and still different for each group of people that he meets.  I think while a coworker or biographer might be fooled by a double, that person's close friends and family would never be in a one-on-one situation because that sense of recognition is more like a unique interference pattern between two personalities.  That's why I frequently recognize friends in my dreams even when they look like someone else, are a different gender or even different species.

PIC and the student pilot

I ended up with four different instructors before taking my Private Pilot check ride. I wouldn't have put any of them in the "Bad" category, but when I found a good instructor that I clicked with, I hung on. He had the breadth and depth of aviation knowledge that come with a lifetime of study and enthusiasm for aviation. It turned out we both graduated from Purdue University, albeit several years apart. We just got along.

Maybe too well. The 'C' in PIC is for "Command". When your buddy, who knows vastly more than you is in the right seat, it's easy to become complacent about protecting your authority when you are the PIC. We all know intellectually that the PIC is responsible and the answers to these questions come easily on the written test and the queries from the FAA examiner; however, you get in the habit of trusting the guy to your right even if you've never flown with him before -- especially if he's a CFI.

On one flight after getting my PP ticket, I hired a local flight school CFI to fly as a safety pilot on the last return leg cross-country because there were delays forcing me to land at night, a head-cold that wasn't serious yet, but combined with the night flying and winter cold, it seemed like a good idea and worth hiring him and buying his return airline ticket.

It was agreed that I was to be the PIC, and it turned out to be a good idea when my sinuses flared up mid flight and I was able to hand off the controls for an hour and take a break. As far as I could tell, he seemed like a safe, conscientious pilot. As previously mentioned, my engine is getting close to TBO, and I suspect that despite good compressions, it just doesn't have the power it used to and using W&B calculations to look up take-off distance is pretty optimistic. In this case, my CFI felt more comfortable with full fuel (4h 45m) which also got us pretty close the gross with a 100 lb dog plus x-mas luggage in the back. I had planned of just fueling to the tabs which would save close to 100 lbs on take off, but only provide an extra 45 min of fuel instead of over 1.5 hours beyond what we needed to get to BTV. Well the runway at that flight school was 3200' x 75', and I was very close to aborting the takeoff when we finally got airborne and I nursed the airspeed for the first few hundred feet. We discussed how close it was -- if I had it to do over again, I'd lighten the load, but I wasn't going to turn around and land in order to do so.

Well, the CFI was flying the final leg and decided to take the landing. Between the gps, the heading indicator and ATC, we got lined up and landed fine, but couldn't stop in time and had to go around because, while we discussed the fact that my plane only has hand brakes, it was a long trip and he was searching for those toe brakes.

ATC wasn't too busy, and cleared us to try again, and I took the second landing. As we were circling (right pattern) to try 01 again, my safety pilot yells out that I should turn or I'll miss the runway. This should have been my clue that I'm not in charge as I should be. BTV really is a sea of lights, so I figure I'm just disoriented, and I turn -- but it turns out to be heading 33, BTV's longer (8320 x 150) commercial runway. A quick call to ATC and they were very cooperative in changing clearance to 33. As we stabilize on this heading and get lined up and on glide slope, I really should have reiterated that I was the one landing, and he should keep his greasy hands off my controls.

There was a crosswind component which I think got stronger as we got down to the last 50', I did some adjusting, but ended up landing about 20' left of center. Kind of embarrassing, but when your runway is 150' wide and your wings are 30' (not to mention the main gear are only 10' apart), being off 20' isn't any kind of panic situation. We've still got a little vector left, so I want to make small adjustments to get us traveling parallel before returning to the centerline.

My co-pilot evidently would rather correct back to the centerline in one correction and applies rudder pressure toward this end. Maybe there are some big, old birds where you can see your cohort's feet, but the Cherokee ain't one and particularly when my eyes are glued outside trying to get the plane to settle down. I definitely don't want to give the plane its head to slide over to the right and maybe off the runway since I'm struggling to get it hold steady now.

It seemed like an epic battle of wills, ala The Old Man and the Sea, that dragged on for a long, tension filled scene, but was probably all of 1.5 seconds. I figured out what was happening and yelled something unprofessional over the intercom. What I had thought was strong winds buffetting the aircraft as felt through the rudder suddenly disappeared, and I returned to the centerline, turned off and taxied to the FBO without incident.

So the question is now, do I add a veiled threat* to my passenger pre-flight briefing -- between "fasten your seat belts" and "there are no oxygen masks or restrooms in this plane"?

--==<<>>==--

* - Something subtle like, "If you touch the controls except when I tell you to, I'll break your arm."

Contingency Planning

As mentioned previously in admin scripting, coming up with scenarios of possible problems and how to prevent, mitigate or just plain survive them is an important skill for a pilot.

I've heard some people say that they are constantly planning the next spot of the ground for an emergency landing. Maybe they do, maybe it helps them. Personally, I find myself busy enough tracking other things going on inside the plane, monitoring instruments, my position over the ground and scanning for traffic. Picking a spot to set down takes 2 seconds, tops, and can generally be done at the same time that I'm trimming the plane for its best glide speed. You can spend a little more time scanning for a better place to put 'er down, but that first, 2 second, choice is often the best.

My plane's engine still gives good compressions (68/80 or better on all 4 cylinders) while getting really close to TBO (1938.56 of 2000). It's not like an engine will quit suddenly at 2000 hours, but the odds are rising steadily.

So, when I'm planning a trip from my home airport in Highgate, Vermont to Erie, PA; I choose a route that gives me lots of options. They have radar and an approach controller at Wheeler-Sack airport at Fort Drum who will give you clearance if the airspace is quiet, but those mountains and the miles and miles of just nothing don't go away. Crossing them in mid-winter in a plane whose single engine is close to TBO is somewhere between nervous and foolhardy. You'll notice there's another path south to Glen's Falls and then Rome (Griffiss) to Syracuse. It's another contingency in the event that the northern route has bad weather.

This also lets me follow VOR's which is great because it's good practice and a fall back if my GPS fails. Unfortunatey, this is just not a friendly environment for x-country flying and no instrument rating.

On this particular trip, the forecast was for 5000-6000' ceilings near the lake, but clear to scattered skies elsewhere. As I got to about Rochester, the clouds ahead looked less patchy and more like a wall ... a wall that went very low. Maybe +2000 AGL, which I regard as borderline scud running when over unfamiliar terrain. Looking back, landing in Rochester or Syracuse would have been better, but I decided to duck under the edge and stop at Buffallo. Visibility was still ok, maybe 5-6 miles, the ceiling was low, but I went around hills to keep an extra cushion and because they put towers on top of hills. I'm talking to KBUF approach and thumbing through my green AFD trying to glean what I can in spare seconds.

I just about flew exactly over BQR (Buffalo-Lancaster regional airport) before I noticed it on the GPS, told BUF that I was going to put down there, had it in sight and was requesting frequency change. I keep a binder in my flight bag with all the airports* I've visited and added ones along my route, but neither BUF nor BQR was really on my route, and weren't there. Luckily BUF and BQR are one the same page in the AFD, so I tuned in the CTAF, announced while I was turning around and turned on the runway lights.

The landing was smooth enough as the runway was recently plowed, but no discernable traction when I tried the brakes**. Fortunately the winds were pretty straight down the runway and I think they did as much to stop me as friction during rollout.

So I pulled off, stopped near the fuel pump, hit the head (which was wisely close by and unlocked), then

1. broke out the laptop and using the FBO's wifi [this is up there with GPS in terms of sheer usefulness]
2. checked the weather reports [terrible, with continued bad conditions for days]
3. got the FBO manager's contact number [again wifi Internet and cellphones make the pilot's life so much better it must seem like cheating to the old pelicans]
4. arranged to hangar my plane [waiting for flying weather looked foolish]
5. called to arrange a rental car and a taxi*** to get to it.
6. drove the rest of the way.

Two of the stanard contingencies when flying VFR are renting a car and booking a commercial flight. If it was just me and my stuff, getting a flight would have been easier, but with a 100 lb dog and all her gear, getting a full sized car was the way to go.

The fact is I had enough fuel to get to mid-Ohio at least and maybe even Indy on fumes. The clouds were low enough to fly on top where it was clear. Maybe it would have been fine. Maybe it would have cleared once I got past Lake Erie. But flying at night over a solid layer of low-lying clouds, unfamiliar terrain and low fuel is a really bad place to find out that the maybes I was hoping for didn't show up.

When the only contingency plans you have left is the choice between get it on the ground or die trying, you should have stopped following your last plan a while ago.

---===<<<>>>===---

* - Organized with divider pages by state and then in alphabetical by call-letters. I just print out the AOPA kneeboard page for each airport.

** - For the non-pilots: Having no traction is much less of an issue than you might think at first. Except at very slow speeds, the rudder in the back is far more important than the nose wheel in steering the plane left or right during landings. Some planes just let the nosewheel castor freely and depend on the brakes in the right and left main gear being activated independently.

*** - "Enterprise: We'll Pick You Up" but only during normal business hours and not to or from the airport where they have extended hours.

Scripting for admins

Sometimes admin work seems like being a wizard summoning a demon. Most of the prep time is making sure that the circle is secure and there is no way for the demon to do anything unwanted, constraining him to do just what is asked for and nothing else.

My very first script for unix admins was a simple script to find all the processes owned by a particular user and kill them all ... first with a simple kilsig and then with -9 on the stragglers. It was all too common for some user's simulation to land on a box and then spin out of control, either using up all the cpu without reading or generating data, or to recurse and use up all the RAM. A simple "fhkh username" (Find Him and Kill Him) and the bottleneck is cleaned out and running normally.

I liked this script, my co-workers liked this script and it was useful. Then an admin used it specifying the username as 'root' -- as you might imagine, this was a problem. I added a run condition test to check that the username specified wasn't root before running. If it was, the script would exit with, "No killing root! Bad Admin! No cookie for you!"

I was recently asked to add a crontab entry to almost 392 AIX systems. Half of the code was all about making sure it was ready to run. Is this host really running AIX? Do we have admin rights? Is the host on the list? ... and before that, "Oh yeah, can we read the list?" Have we already added the crontab line?

A majority of the remainder is me being paranoid and setting variable names to the full path of the executible. (i.e. - TAIL="/usr/bin/tail") Another -- and shorter -- approach is to restrictively set $PATH, but I guess I'm used to this now.

At the very start, I set operation variables, like the list of people to receive email into $MAIL_RCPT ... this makes life so much easier for me or anyone who wants to tweak the script months or years down the line.

Here's the meat of the script:

RND_HOUR=$(($RANDOM%24)) # Generates rnd b/w 0-23
RND_MIN=$(($RANDOM%60)) # Generates rnd b/w 0-59

$CRONTAB -l > $CRON_TMP
$ECHO "${RND_MIN} ${RND_HOUR} * * ${DAY_TO_RUN} \c" >> $CRON_TMP
$ECHO "$PERL -MLWP::Simple -e 'getprint \"${LSSEC_URL}\"' | /bin/sh" >> $CRON_TMP

$TAIL -1 $CRON_TMP | $MAIL -s "$HOST_S crontab appended" $MAIL_RCPT
$CRONTAB $CRON_TMP

$RM $CRON_TMP

That's all the script really does.

What else could go wrong? Here's a few I've come up with since: check the hostname of the URL and make sure nslookup comes back with a result. Check both the location of $CRON_TMP and /var/spool/cron to make sure they aren't full and I will be able to add to the crontab. Maybe even use wget to make sure I can get a useful file from the complete URL -- in this case, it should be perl code.

This sort of contingency planning (the next blog topic for pilots, I think) is a good idea for any programming and the biggest lock you can use to secure your program against misuse. When you're writing a script that will be run as root, used day-in, day-out maybe for years on systems which could affect the work of dozens, hundreds or even thousands of users; it needs to be bullet-proof. Think of everything that could go wrong, and how to prevent it, or at least notice it, stop and yell for help.

We have a high transaction volume system that is frankly too busy to do its own backups. So, we have a second system runing as a hot spare with the same configuration and data that does the backups and can, in a pinch, be used to replace the primary system in a couple minutes if the primary has some flavor of heart attack.

Since system B always keeps current with system A, it will copy over new files and delete files that are gone from A. What if A gets rebuilt or renamed, etc? It would erase all the data on B. I check the ssh key to make sure the system whose data is being cloned is the same one as always. What if the filesystem on A isn't mounted for some reason? We may need that clone on B to restore it, so no erasing it. I keep a sanity file on A ... if that's missing, no clone and an email goes out warning us.

Sky Yacht

The Model ML866 by Aeroscraft is an interesting hybrid aircraft which looks like it will make a great yacht for the air. Not fast, but luxurious.

The plans is after the Model ML866, to make a bigger one ... a flying cruise ship if you will. Given the prevailing west-to-east winds, I wonder if it is more economic to fly (in the US) from California to D.C., then up the coast to NYC and Boston and then follow the coast up past Newfoundland, then over to Alaska for the shortest possible* east-to-west within reach of civilization, and then down the West coast to start over. If we had a smaller, more geographically and politically homogeneous planet, having a small fleet in a kind of relay of 1000-2000 mile hops constantly cruising East around the globe would make sense.

Top speed is 138mph, which sounds great, but given the wind-facing cross-section, I'd bet on a cruise speed of 100mph or less. Given a easterly wind of 45 kts at 10,000', which is pretty common, your time for flying east is significantly faster, and more importantly, west is slow, really slow.

First, let's figure a trip from Chicago (ORD) to D.C. (DCA). Let's say no wind, so you're cruising at around 100mph. It's 612mi, so takes 6 hours and 12 minutes. That's a lot slower than a commercial jet, but also a lot more comfortable.

Next, how about the eastery 45 kt wind (51 mph). Same flight, but you have a 50 mph tail wind. Now that same 612 mi trip takes 4h 05m -- a lot better!

Finally, let's turn it around, and go from the Capitol to the Windy City. This time, we have a 50mph head wind. It's still the same 612 miles, but time in the air is over 12 hours! You can drive a car faster than this.

One possibility is to do these westerly trips at lower altitudes where the winds aren't as fast over very scenic countryside. The longer trips will give tourists and photographers more time to take in the view. This may well actually meet the contest requirements for the NASA initative for 200 mile, 100mph average, flight that gets more than 200 passenger miles per gallon of fuel. And do it for commercial transportation instead of just for some wacky experimental contraption.

--==<<>>==--

* - Look at a globe, not a flat map. The distortion of flat map projections becomes severe near the poles.

Ground Navigation using Aviation Handheld GPS

I was taking my lady-friend to the Boston airport. I was driving because the weather was not very friendly, and I took my GPSmap 296 because the streets in Boston are not very friendly.

Rather than do my research, I just changed the GPS from aviation mode to automotive mode and told it to find a route to KBOS. It does it's thing and starts me off with a little route line pointing towards Beantown. I've used this trick to find airstrips in rural area before, and it works like a charm.

I was expecting to end up at Logan Airport; something like this:

Instead, I got a route to here:

Why? Because it was the closest street to the end of the first runway listed. Just not exactly useful for boarding a jet as a passenger. It was a fantastic view of aircraft taking off and landing -- if we weren't running late by then, I would have stopped a while to watch.

I briefly toyed with the idea of asking her if she wanted to do a little swimming, but I wanted to keep her as my lady-friend.

The solution was to scroll over the cursor, find a street nearest the terminal and then press Enter and select "Go to" to get directions to that street. Once we got within a couple miles, there were plenty of signs pointing towards the airport.

GPS Visual Aids

There's a lot of (and legitimate) talk about how a moving map GPS helps with orientation over unfamiliar terrain, and how great the "Direct-to" and "Nearest" buttons are; however, my favorite aspect almost every single flight is the extended runway center lines drawn on the map.

About anytime I'm out of sight of the airport, the green arrows extend out from the airfield and help me either stabilize for a straight-in, or orient myself to enter the pattern without having to visualize the geometry when I'm, by definition, in a high traffic area and should be scanning for traffic and doing all the other landing prep work.

When departing in a crosswind from an unfamiliar airport, it can be used to make sure I'm climbing out on the runway heading and not drifting, since looking below and behind my plane are equally challenging from inside.

With the exception of my night x-country training for Private Pilot, I've done all my night flying into or out of the little county airfield (KFSO) I'm based at with PCL or at the nearby Class-C Burlington Intl. (KBTV) which is also used by the VTANG F-16's. Still a majority of my night hours are at KBTV, but it still looks like a sea of lights at first most nights, and even picking out the beacon over the FBO doesn't help about half the time. A quick glance at the GPS display -- ok, it should be a couple miles out that way and pointing 20 degrees left -- and those extended centerlines gives me the hint I need to find the runway.

On the otherhand, I have my doubts about Synthetic vision w/ Highway in the Sky.
I'll grant you that flying some odd, teardrop holding pattern in zero visibility solo is tricky, and this could help, the problem is that it would be far to easy to get your head stuck inside flying through those rectangles instead of scanning for traffic in VFR conditions.

Don't get me wrong, I still want this for my airplane, I'm just concerned that it will be used as an excuse for non-instrument pilots to fly into IMC instead of just used by them to fly out when they go in by accident.