Getting My GPS Fix

As I searched my bookshelves for a book I needed to prepare for my PPC, I realized that I have been incredibly remiss in not devoting a blog entry to my favourite GPS book, Max Trescott's GPS and WAAS Instrument Flying Handbook. It is dog-eared and filled with notes on the multiple ideas for future blog entries it inspired. Max There are two reasons this entry never has never been written. One is that I had this crazy idea that I was going to be able to fully digest all the information in this book, and then write the mother of all blog entries on GPS, and the second reason is that when I pick it up it's usually because I have to learn something, and get carried away with that.

Today is one of the latter occasions, and I've given myself a time deadline to study this, so I'm just going to transcribe some of the marginal notes I made reading through the opening chapters. "Excellent and now obvious," "Max knows what he is talking about, doesn't just parrot, which explains why I am not understanding things I didn't before." "Explains from zero knowledge without insulting intelligence."

There's lots of information on GPS on the Internet, but my time is worth something in sifting the wheat from the chaff. The Internet seems to be at odds over whether the unit can be programmed to fly a hold. Given that none of the Internet people I saw say it could be done gave useful step-by-step directions on how to do it, I was believing the naysayers, but Max says, "The Garmin GNS 430W and 530W send commands that let an autopilot automatically fly a procedure turn or a course reversal in a holding pattern. On the moving map page, it adjusts the size and shape of holding patterns based on an aircraft's speed and the winds aloft. Once established in a hold, it can command the autopilot to fly the holding pattern as long as you'd like." And now I see that the unit will only do this for published holds. Max does give some tips, some credited to a colleague, Doug Stewart, on flying unpublished holds. I'll reproduce them here to enhance my understanding and remembering.

The typical hold clearance (a "hold" is the way an air traffic control asks a pilot in an aircraft that requires speed in order to stay aloft to "go wait over there for a bit") instructs the pilot to fly directly from her present position to a specified point (called a "fix"). The fix can be any defined point in space, like "thirteen miles from the ABC VOR on a bearing of 298 degrees" but usually it's a VOR or an NDB. The clearance then includes a vague direction (north, east, southwest) from the fix to hold and an exact track on which to be inbound to the fix each time she circles around. The goal is to fly a little racetrack pattern, with each inbound leg taking exactly one minute and being right on the specified track. The outbound leg isn't necessarily parallel or one minute, because winds mess us up. What also messes me up is trying to learn a procedure I use once a year when I renew my qualifications. But if I master this I can probably also use it to fly shuttle climbs and descents, which I do use in real life.

So here is what I should do: Once assigned the holding fix I set the course direct to it, with the autopilot in NAV mode to track to it. Once the autopilot has figured out the heading that will hold me on that course, I should bug that heading and fly in HDG mode on the autopilot, while I set up the hold. I hit direct to again on the autopilot and enter the inbound course as the desired track. That makes it show a pink line to the fix along that track. I should put it in OBS mode so it doesn't automatically go on to the next waypoint. Reaching the fix, I turn the heading bug to my calculated outbound heading. When I have flown outbound for the necessary time I should use the heading bug to turn inbound, but when I am within 45 degrees of the desired inbound track, I turn the autopilot back to NAV and it will intercept and track inbound. In a direct entry, I can use the ETE feature of the GPS to figure out my timing, by looking at the distance when it hits one minute, and I can look at the wind correction to figure out my outbound correction angle. Curiously he suggests triple the inbound correction, while I use double.

I see Max Trescott also sells a CD ROM course for $100. Given that that's the cost of about twenty minutes of dual instruction in a light twin, I suspect it would be worth one's while.

On Leadership and Lost

I've been rewatching, or kind of re-listening to--I tend to do chores with the television playing--Lost recently. One of the themes of the show is leadership, which is something I'm dealing with in life, as well. You'll see whatever it is you're focusing on, in whatever you look at, so it's not surprising I'm finding it in Lost.

When I was in high school, and I got into first world funks of depression at the hopelessness of life, (i.e. when I was a normal teenager), I discovered that a good route out was through reading really depressing stories by A.P. Chekhov. He wrote hundreds of the things, generally short simple tales on the futility of life, populated by characters who knew, discovered, or completely failed to realize, that every step they took was merely plodding closer to pointless death. They're well-written, with believable characters and the somewhat alien world of 19th century Russia--took me ages to understand why so many grandmothers slept on the stove--so one can read quite a few. At first I would nod my head in sullen agreement that the world was that way. After a while I would venture an internal opinion that maybe it was not that black. And finally I would yell at the characters not to be so pathetic, to go forth and do something. And I would get up and set an example. For some people, inspirational literature requires actual inspiration, but nothing goads me to do things so much as seeing it done incorrectly.

The same seems to be true of leadership training. As much as I probably need to pick up a book to help train myself in the art of leading a group of people to accomplish a goal without any of them killing one another or being eaten by polar bears, I have no desire to. But watch a couple of hours of Lost, and I'm really wishing the smoke monster would get Jack. Sure, I understand that fiction requires drama and heroes, and that fictional heroes require tragic flaws, but some of the television traditions, dare I say tropes are really aggravating. The leader character on Lost is a doctor named Jack. In the immediate aftermath of the crash he is the hero because he can treat injuries, and resuscitate people, but he ends up racing from place to place being the hero for everything. So here are my non-leadership techniques to learn from Lost.

Playing up the incompetence of those around you is not a leadership skill. This is more something Lost (and every other TV show does) than something Jack does but they are both fictional creations of the same writers, so it counts. To show that Jack is a great and mighty leader, everyone else on the beach is depicted as clueless and incompetent. There's a character, Boone, who is a licensed lifeguard, training which specifically includes a good deal of first aid and emergency scene management. Jack has to take over his resuscitation efforts because he's doing it wrong, and later in the show rescues him from drowning, while they are both trying to save a third person. There's no plot reason for Boone to be a fraudulent or incompetent lifeguard. It would have better showed Jack's leadership abilities if he had come over, approved and encouraged Boone's competent resuscitation and moved on to another victim. He would have looked like more of a leader if he had left the task of resuscitating someone who had been pulled out of he water specifically in the hands of someone whose professional specialty that was. The dramatic point that was made during the swimming rescue would have been made more strongly if it were Boone who had to haul an exhausted Jack back to shore. When Jack needs someone to hold down a patient who has to endure surgery without anaesthetic he chooses a man who specifically and repeatedly states that he can't handle the sight of blood. He sets the guy up to fail.

Doing everything yourself is not leadership. Jack is always running, literally running, from one situation to another, placing himself in danger without developing or drawing on the skills of the people around him to solve problems. This is his major dramatic character flaw, so it couldn't be more blatant, but watching him do it wrong is a good way to make me wonder where I can apply this lesson. My beach isn't covered in able-bodied people who can be pressed into service to do the essential tasks, but I still might be doing more leaping than is strictly necessary.

Meanwhile Ben, the mysterious leader of the others, shows quite a different style of leadership. He doesn't do any leaping at all, accomplishing everything through sinister psychological manipulation. This fascinates me, and I know it can be done without the sinister part, because I willingly go to great effort to achieve goals under psychological manipulation by my own boss and by the director of an organization I volunteer with. You see, I like to feel valuable and appreciated and they know that, so they appreciate me in return for my efforts. I'm always left thinking to myself, "I'm happy, and--in the case of the non-volunteer position--they give me money. Am I being tricked here? If I weren't being manipulated into doing this, I might go and do something else ... which might make me happy ... or money." And then I get confused and stop thinking about that.

So, in conclusion, leadership lessons for the day: Get people around you to do things they are competent at in return for things that they want.

Legs

A few people have asked about NaNoWriMo, my one-month novel-writing stint. National Novel Writing Month is a thing people do, an international event, despite the name, open to anyone but largely done by English-speakers because it started in the US and the website is monolingual. The exercise is to write 50,000 words of a novel in the month of November. Everyone who writes fifty thousand words or more is considered a winner. You're allowed to develop your characters, conduct research, or outline a plot before the beginning of the month, and you're allowed to continue writing after the month is over, but I'm doing other things the rest of the year, so I finish writing and print out a copy before December starts. My NaNo started November first with a few ideas scrawled on a post-it, and the File New command. I had arranged to meet a couple of friends downtown at seven a.m. for the ceremonial beginning of our novels, but before I could leave for that, I was called into work.

I'm usually pretty happy to go to work. I get to fly an airplane, with great people, over spectacular Canadian scenery, but this has been a long season with a lot of flying, plus more than I wanted to do of that other stuff I have to do since I succumbed to the pressure and let them make me chief pilot. I stomped a little. I went to the airport, researched the route, filed a flight plan, walked around the airplane, hauled it outside, supervised fuelling, sorted out charts and an operational flight plan, and loaded the gear. The flight was then postponed for a couple of hours.

I started up my computer and banged out a couple of pages about a pilot who had something else to do but had to work, and about a bitchy charter passenger, who was also going the to last place she wanted to be. Write what you know, they say, but I got off track pretty fast. I had a cow spontaneously burst into flames by the end of that chapter. The flight was eventually cancelled. I kept writing. I wrote at home on the couch, on airplanes, in airports, on trains and buses, in hotels, in restaurants and coffee shops and at my friend's house. There are some airplanes, sentient electromagnetic catapults, a volcano, and radioactive Polynesian artifacts. Now even without the foregoing you have to know that a novel written in a couple of hours a day over the course of a month is not going to be a work of art. The working title was "Legs," and my point-of-view characters legs number between zero and ten. Not all of the characters are human, although one of the zero-legged ones is. He and the hermit crab (technically a decapod) are my favourites. I think I might bring them back for a sequel. Of course the sequel might turn out to be a bad Victorian era mystery drama instead of a bad science fiction drama. I was initially intending to write a tech horror, but space aliens turned up and they were having so much fun that the genetically engineered pine beetle predators (six legs each) who were supposed to kick off the plot barely got a cameo. So did Ian Hanomansing. I like him.

I thought the novel might be horrifying, but fortunately it's ridiculous enough that I think it's just funny. It's not very funny, scientifically accurate, poignant, or gripping. It's not even very weird. It's just your everyday novel about biologists who don't even know they are dealing with a new life form, and explorers who take too long to figure that out.

Here's an excerpt. The space aliens aren't very knowledgeable about matter. They're visiting Earth, and they have just discovered gravity.

Having a sense of the organization of such a complex planet was empowering to the group, so when they detected a large piece of solid matter suspended well above the rest of the solid matter, up in the gas layer with the clouds, they were confused and disappointed. They analyzed the situation more closely.

The outside of the object was solid, but it enclosed both liquid and gas components. There were no photosynthesizing plants present, but the front of the object was emitting moderate amount of heat energy, and parts of the structure contained constrained linear flows of electrical energy, so common on this planet. The electrical energy transmuted into heat and light in some places, but nothing other than its suspension in midair seemed unusual. There was moving warm matter present too, two discrete quantities. They scanned the larger one. It was extremely complex, had to be a product of intelligence, but what was it for? It didn't convert energy in any way they could detect. And then suddenly they spotted something they had missed before with animal matter. The warm matter contained double helix energy signatures. It was not a mistake, or some stray plant matter. The same signature was repeated throughout the structure, always identical, missing only from the dead, outer layers in some places. But this was alive.

They started paying closer attention to the energy flows within the structure, and found that the main electrical flow was from the inside of the roughly spherical top part, down a roughly straight column. From there it branched out to the other parts. They probed the inside where the electrical impulses were centred. It was a kind of solid liquid mixture. They couldn't figure out what the impulses were for. They were not being transmitted anywhere outside the structure, and were not resonating at all with the energy flows that produced heat and light. The electrical activity of the alive thing increased, and the ends of the structure moved around quite a lot. That was very interesting. They thought that might be a reaction to stimulus, but after a short while the electrical activity stopped all together.

So yeah, the Nobel committee doesn't haven me on their short list this year, but I had fun. Any other NaNoers among my readers?

Automatic Rough Running

I'm re-reading Vol de nuit by Antoine de Saint Exupéry. It's available here for free. I know it has been translated into English, but perhaps the copyright hasn't expired on the translations yet, because I didn't find it online in translation. It's one of those novel like Fate is the Hunter that pilots like to read because the author identifies situations and feelings we didn't even know were there to express. Non-pilots can read them and get a glimpse what a pilot thinks and feels. Both are about what now is history, so they allow me to look into the past and imagine life without SIGMETs, without reliable weather forecasting or reporting at all.

The passage that made me want to share was this. It's a conversation between a pilot and a manager, about the pilot's experience when his instrument lights failed. He has already admitted to being afraid.

Je me sentais au fond d'un grand trou dont il était difficile de remonter. Alors mon moteur s'est mis à vibrer...

— Non.
— Non ?
— Non. Nous l'avons examiné depuis. Il est parfait. Mais on croit toujours qu'un moteur vibre quand on a peur.

My translation: (if someone has a copy in English, a professional translation is probably better).

"I felt like I was at the bottom of a big hole that was difficult to get out of. Then my engine started vibrating..."

"No."

"No?"

"No. We examined it afterwards. It was perfect. But one always believes that an engine is vibrating when one is afraid."

It's so true. The name in English for the phenomenon is "automatic rough". You get automatic rough running as you get overhead a large body of water, impenetrable mountains, or simply go further from your home airport than you've ever been.

The Moral of the Story

I'm sure many readers of this blog already follow Randall Munroe's xkcd ("A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,") but not everyone knows about his side projects, like his what-if blog. In it he answers questions of life, the universe and everything, such as "could an airplane fly in the atmospheres of other planets?" His answers tend to be both amusing and comprehensive, plus you don't need any math to understand the pictures illustrating the calculated success of flights on the various bodies of our solar system.

Turns out Titan is our best bet. It would be even easier to fly there, but too cold. Cold, Randall points out is merely a materials science problem. He says, "I've never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive." Yes, Randall, yes. So many stories ask me to accept baffling morals.

I more than once got in trouble in English class for laughing at stories that were supposed to be sad, or just being plain baffled as to why the story ended where it did. Shadow of a Gunman features a young women infatuated with a writer. She asks him to typewrite their names together on a scrap of paper and later protects him during a raid by hiding contraband that he in her room. At the end of the story she has been arrested, then shot dead while attempting to escape custody. A neighbour reports this, saying that the police found a scrap of paper in her breast with her name on it, and someone else's name, all covered in blood. I howled with laughter right there in class and when I explained that I liked the irony that she thought she was protecting him, but really she has condemned him by keeping that paper. The English teacher patiently explained that her blood had obscured the name, so she had protected him, and the teacher refused to accept that the most basic of 1920s police procedure would be able to read typewriter ink despite blood. I believe I challenged her to bleed so profusely on a piece of paper that I could not distinguish typewritten words using merely tools I could prove existed in 1920. I never considered it a bad thing to be kicked out of that English class.

Romeo and Juliette is another one. How is that not a hilarious lesson on the stupidity of overly dramatic teens? Or the story about the woman who sells her hair to buy a watch chain for her lover, who sells his watch to buy a jewelled hair comb for her. A lesson for all on basic communication in a relationship. And her hair will grow back. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer teaches us that it's okay to mock and exclude someone for being different up until the point that that difference is proven to have a material benefit to us, at which point we can do an about-face. An earlier version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears ended with the titular intruder (then a silver-haired old woman) impaled on a church steeple for her crimes, but now I could think I was supposed to believe it's about not giving up until you've found something that's just right, and running away if anyone questions your right to it.

Sometimes the story doesn't support the moral, but if the story itself is well told, then people accept the moral they are fed. How about this TSB accident report. (Hah, yu thought I'd wandered so far off aviation I was never coming back, didn't you?) Normally I love the attention to detail and the simple laying out of discovered facts in an accident report. Nothing is pushed on you. You can see what they found, what occurrences the experts find it consistent with and pretty much draw your own conclusions. While it is quite startling to see the altitude deviations correlated with the pilot talking on the phone and sending text messages, I think this accident was more a convenient place to hang the "no cellphone use during flight" message than it was a demonstration of the dangers thereof. Read it and don't you get the idea that the TSB considers the cellphone use a bigger deal than the fact that the pilot was flying at night for a company not certified to do so, and therefore with no recent night-specific training and quite likely no recent night experience? My company hung the cellphone message on this accident, too: the preliminary report year or so ago was the trigger for my own company's ban on pilot cellphone use during flight. Oh well, I could never get Facebook check-ins to work at 15,000', anyway.

A moral that doesn't match the story isn't necessarily a bad moral, and a story with a mismatched moral isn't necessarily a bad story, I just feel like someone is trying to cheat me when I encounter the combination. Also, the air gets cooler the closer you get to the sun until well after the altitude at which Icarus would have asphyxiated.

Windex

I'm at an airport. I've been here before. Some of you have too, no doubt, and will recognize it from the following I know the essential things a transient pilot needs to know. I know the gate code to return to airside. It's a truncation of a famous mathematical constant. I know how to find the fueller. He often monitors the traffic frequency so if I announce my need for fuel exiting the runway, he'll probably park the fuel truck in front of the airplane as I shut down, but if that doesn't work, there's no specific FBO frequency. He has an office with an entrance inside the airline office, so I can ask the customer service agents at the airline counter to alert him for me. I know where the women's washroom is. It's downstairs past the stuffed bear. The men's is probably there too, but a sign implies there's a unisex accessible washroom on the main floor, for those who can't navigate stairs. I've filled my water bottle in the women's washroom before, but the water from there tastes terrible. Much better-tasting water, and baked snacks are available at the café.

On this particular occasion all my knowledge of this airport does not help us have a quicker turn because we are waiting here for something. I don't remember what we're waiting for. It' snot my job to decide when it's time to leave. It's my job to be ready to leave when I'm told it's time to leave, or to explain succinctly why we can't. On this occasion I am waiting in the café for whatever configuration of factors is required for it to be time to leave. I have eaten all the baked snacks that I require and am now entertaining myself by reading a book that someone has left at the café. I don't have a really discriminating taste in literature. I'm reading Maximum Boy starring in Attack of the Soggy Underwater People by Dan Greenburg. Its eleven year old male protagonist obtains superpowers from moon rocks. He also has to get his homework done. The story climax is predicated on an immediate need for ammonia at the north pole. Mr. Greenburg nursed my willing suspension of disbelief all the way through the scenes of conflict with the protagonist's sister, negotiations with the titular soggy underwear people and meetings with the president and then broke the whole concept by having Maximum Boy identify the the helicopter pilots (they were also at the north pole, but I won't spoil the whole story) as a potential source of ammonia. They use Windex to clean their helicopter windshields. Noooooo! It spoiled the story for me. It wasn't a detail. It was the pivotal moment in the story, and it was supposed to be a science teaching moment too. There's no way the helicopter pilots were using ammonia-based Windex to clean their acrylic windshields.

If you're cavalier with the integrity of your windshield you might use non-aviation specific products like Pledge furniture polish or acrylic polish marketed for the marine industry, but generally pilots use a product specifically designed and marketed for care of aviation windshields. The windshield allows us to see oncoming aircraft; it keeps the air inside pressurized cockpits and it protects us from the onrush of air and particulate matter we're flying through. If it fails in any one of these endeavours we could die of the results. Windshields and their care are kind of a big deal. I've heard and generally abide by the vertical strokes only rule too. The idea is that if you put a scratch in the window you definitely don't want it to be in a direction that would align with the wings of an oncoming aircraft.

I usually use 210 Polish, but if I run out and I'm in Winnipeg or something, I may have to settle for Prist (not to be confused with the fuel additive). Prist is foamier and doesn't work if you keep it in a cargo compartment where its temperature drops below freezing. And neither of them contains Windex. And that is why I am never supporting the Maximum Boy franchise again. I didn't think much of the new Star Trek either.

History of English

I went back to the library looking for a book on the history of English. I've seen some references to the case system of Old English and the language I speak has only the slightest remnants of that. I was interested in what they looked like and when and how we lost most of it. I was looking for something with a readable style, but not too simplistic, that had tables showing the old forms, and that would fit easily in my bookbag. Seeing as I was looking for information on events that happened about a hundred years ago, I wasn't too concerned when the date on the spine of A History of the English Language by Albert C. Baugh was 1957, and its title page indicated that it was the second edition of a 1935 work. I really didn't expect the last fifty to seventy-five years to have brought with them any shocking revelations about the past participle of strong verbs, so I picked that one.

The author sets the scene for the drama of English history.

"English is the mother tongue of nations whose combined political influence, economic soundness, commercial activity, social well-being, and scientific and cultural contributions to civilization give impressive support to its numerical precedence."

It's a little amusing how secure he is about this position for English, and while it's still the dominant world language, there are nations that prefer other languages on the ascendancy in some of those dimensions. Later in the book I discover he's an advocate of an English-based world language. It's odd to see someone so interested in language who declares, "How much pleasanter travel would be if we didn't have to contend with the inconveniences of a foreign language." For me the two chief joys of travel are of the tongue: food and language. But Albert and I can disagree on that. I guess he doesn't have little time travel fantasies as he studies the old word forms, wondering if he would be able to express himself intelligibly and understand the locals, should he be whisked back to Saxon times.

Here's the present tense conjugation of a couple of Old English verbs.

'to be'	'to drive'
ic eom	ic drīfe
ðū eart	ðū drīfst
hē is	hē drīfð
wē sindon	wē drīfað
gē sindon	gē drīfað
hīe sindon	hīe drīfað

Yup, that's English. I'll see if I can find the verb "to fly" for you later. I'm pretty sure it wasn't transitive, though. There were actually two more nominative personal pronouns, but this book doesn't fit them into the table to show which verb conjugations they took. They were wit 'we two' and git 'you two'. I don't know why my language's ancestor needed these specific pronouns, but they each had alternate forms for genitive, dative and accusative. As did all the others. So in fifteen hundred years, English has gone from twenty-four different pronouns means 'you' or 'your' to just those two. There was a subject pronoun ye and an object pronoun you in the 16th century, but they were both pronounced the same way, so merged to be just you. This is my idea of fun.

It's interesting reading about the issues of England as a French/English bilingual nation, because that's what Canada is, and there are similar issues. Robert of Gloucester wrote of the two languages in 1300, "Ac wel me wot our to conne boþe wel it is,/Vor þe more þat a mon can þe more wurþe he is." ("But men well know it is well to know both,/For the more that a man knows, the more worth he is.") Curiously, the greatest infusion of French into English occurred not in the years between the 1066 invasion and the 13th century dissolution of ties between England and Normandy, but in the subsequent two hundred years as the children of the French nobility stopped learning French as a native language and English gradually regained its position as the language of the land. A large bilingual population shifting from doing business in French to business in English transferred vocabulary between the languages. I wonder if a similar thing is true for English vocabulary going into French-Canadian. Was there a lower rate of borrowing into French between the battle of the Plains of Abraham and the passing of the Official Languages Act than since?

I find that I have three conflicting responses to the incredible changeability of my language. Firstly I want to change it to my whim, to somehow leave a mark; secondly I want to stop it from losing all its old features; and thirdly I want to be a witness to the effects of language change, against which I realize I am completely powerless. And I love the fact that each of the first two impulses can be described as "fixing" the language. Fixing as in repairing and fixing as in fixing in place. I love it when a word can be its own opposite.

It also makes you realize that has never ever been a correct, proper way of speaking or writing from which the current language has devolved. There have always been some things that are more complicated and some that are less. For example, we used to have three genders of noun and full declensions for them all but sound changes that made the endings indistinct made us lose all but the genitive, which ended in s, like stonis 'of the stone.' People started interpreting things like "the cats paw" as a contraction of "the cat his paw" so writing it as "the cat's weight," even though that interpretation made no sense at all for things like "the woman's beauty." The move became more than just a spelling change when the apostrophe-s broke loose to attach to entire phrases, e.g. "the King of England's crown." It doesn't take long for the way a few influential people do it to become the way most people do it and thus the way it is done. Spelling and pronunciation do not need to adhere to any outside rules, the way piloting has to occur within the laws of physics. This shows that the people who put so much effort into defending the possessive apostrophe against the ignorant, are defending the result of earlier ignorance.

There's more. Despite all those pronouns, until almost 1600 the possessive pronoun for neuter was the same as for male: his. As English no longer had grammatical gender, people started to think that didn't sound right and by the fourteenth century, some people started avoiding it, with expressions like "nine cubits was the length thereof" instead of "... was his length." People started using the nominative pronoun, "We enjoin thee .. that there thou leave it, Without more mercy, to it own protection" or the article "growing of the own accord." Nouns at that point already had the genitive ending in 's, and at some point toward the end of the sixteenth century, it's began coming into use. Yes, with an apostrophe. It took a hundred years for his to become an archaism, and two hundred for its to gain its present apostrophe-less form. All of this makes it pretty difficult to get huffy about where people put their apostrophes, doesn't it? Does for me, anyway.

When I write something, I may reword it several times, trying to find the most concise interesting way to say it. Now as I consider the huge upheavals that the language has undergone, it makes me realize that anything I write has an expiring window of accessibility. No matter how clearly I write my thoughts today, in another time my words will become marked, ungrammatical, obscure, and then unintelligible. I laugh when I turn a page in the book and find the same idea from a poet named Waller, "But who can hope his lines should long/Last in a daily changing tongue?" So I'm doomed to obscurity, and unoriginal to boot.

This book turned out to be heavier on political history and less thorough on stages of the language than I expected. I had a few more odds and ends to discuss from it, but I'm trying to be done with the linguistics posts.

I have one question for the Americans. On page 435, Baugh states that the educated American pronunciation of figure ends in a "yer" sound, like the beginning of yearn, and that a pronunciation like "figger" sounds hick to an American. Is this true, or was this just an early 20th century fad? When I say "figure" it rhymes perfectly with "bigger."

Library Surfing

I'm wandering in the library linguistics section looking for books worth reading. It's more like the Internet than you might think. You start out following one link, the shelving number of the book from the catalogue, but you can accidentally get distracted by things like the children's story of The Whiting and the Flatfish, written in parallel text in Russian, English and the endangered Siberian language Ös. (I'd tell you, but I already forgot how the flatfish became flat. I guess it wasn't that good a story. The pictures were nice, though.) You pick up a book and the table of contents leads you to something interesting, so you read that chapter and then follow the bibliography to more on the same subject. Sometimes you pick up a book and discover that the author knows less than you on the subject, has an irritating writing style, or has dedicated pages to ranting about the shortcomings of some other author. Sometimes the links are dead, and there is no book with that call number at that location. Sometimes you pick up a promising-seeming book and when you open it discover it's typeset in non-proportional Courier. Seriously. This is late 1970s technology at work. You even get the problem of inane comments. Almost all the books I read have pencil marks in them underlining passages some reader found important. Some of the books are in languages I can't read. (Can't as in don't know how to as opposed to can't as in it would drive me insane, like the ones that are just typewritten manuscripts someone slapped a binding on).

I pick up a textbook by David Odden. Introducing Phonology. Cambridge University Press: 2005. I'm hoping to learn about the muscles and other anatomy underlying the interesting phonology course. I had no idea that linguistics would go so deeply into how language is produced and interpreted.

This book doesn't go where I was hoping, but I read it anyway. (I have to stop doing that). Sounds are variations in air pressure. The vowels are periodic waves defined by amplitude and frequency. Prominent frequencies are those that resonate and which those are is related to the shape of the vocal tract. We use our speech apparatus, tongue, lips, and velum to change the shape of the vocal tract and produce the frequencies we want. A longer tube gives a lower resonance frequency, which is why when you blow in a recorder it sounds all squeaky until you can figure out how to get your fingers over all the holes.

Sound is a continuous property; soundwaves show little in the way of breaks between letters. Spectrograms show more than is needed for language analysis. We need a way to represent speech such that speakers of a language agree it is the same word, when it is, but that shows differences that are important to distinguish between words in a language. An assumption in phonetics is that there are systematic limits on what constitutes a speech sound in a human language. My problem with linguistics textbooks is you have to know how the author talks when they say "the æ sound is like a in hat." There are a lot of different ways English speakers pronounce /hat/.

Vowels are classed by height (high-mid-low) and vowels at the high and mid positions can be tense or lax. Any vowel can be rounded or unrounded, and front, centre or back. It is common, but not necessary for back vowels to have lip rounding. So multiply that out and it makes five times three times two equals thirty possible vowel sounds. And then there are more multipliers like nasalization, length, stress, tone, phonation (i.e. creaky or breathy), and glides such as y and w sounds.

There are eleven places of articulation for consonants: bilabial, labiodental, dental, alveolar, alveopalatal, retroflex, palatal, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, laryngeal-glottal. A consonant may have a primary and secondary place of articulation. There is also a manner of articulation: stop, fricative, nasal, or affricate, and a consonant can be voiced or unvoiced.

The chapter discusses laryngeal consonants, comparing series like p b pʰ bʰ bʱ b̤ʱ p’ ɓ according to movement of the larynx, but without the anatomical detail I was looking for. This whole chapter is leading towards the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is all very useful, but not what I was looking for. My problem is that this is a book on phonology and what I need is a book on phonetics. Here's the difference. With my luck my next try will be a book on phonics. Or telephony. In courier extra faint. Or maybe that early-1970s pseudo-computer font.

Language and Expertise

My in-class strategy was to note all the concepts I didn't understand and then go to the library and read up on what everyone else has been learning all term in class. Libraries are so awesome. You don't have to be a student to use the university library. You can go in, use the catalogue, find books and sit there all day reading them, already prepaid with my taxes.

I start with a book on language history, I won't name it because I'm about to mock the author, who is undoubtedly pompous enough to be a regular egosurfer. Or what do you think? The following is from the acknowledgements:

As I buckled down to work on this book, I consulted profitably with my colleague Valdis Zeps on a numberless variety of matters of both form and content. I looked forward with relish to his inspection of the completed text-- for the pleasure it probably would have given him; for the praise I smugly anticipated; and, most of all, for the valuable criticism he would have certainly offered. I am cheated of his pleasure; the reader is cheated of his wisdom and knowledge.

Okay, it's true that in the last year I have watched many more episodes of Law & Order than I have read scholarly books, but does that paragraph not make him look like the prime suspect in the death of Doctor Zeps? The course of the corresponding Law & Order episode would determine if it was a professional disagreement, a financial matter, or a sex thing. He comes off as pompous and opinionated, but so long as he knows his stuff, it should be interesting.

It starts, as I've discovered do most textbooks on linguistics, with some concrete examples demonstrating change in English. He reproduces an excerpt from a 1927 dictionary. It's the second edition of a dictionary first published in 1909, and the excerpt is from a section listing words new to this edition. Professor Pompous mentions that "The items are shown exactly as they stand in the source (including the baffling language under drag)." I scan the facing page for its entry on drag.

drag n. Aeronautics. The component parallel to the relative wind of the total force on an airfoil or aircraft due to the air through which it moves. It the case of an airplane, that part of the drag which is due to the wings is called wing resistance; that due to the rest of the airplane is called structural or parasite, resistance.

The only thing wrong with that definition of drag is the word It starting the second sentence. It should be In but I don't know if the error is in the original dictionary or the transcription in the linguistics textbook. It certainly doesn't count as "baffling language." The relative wind is the airflow resulting from the aircraft's motion, and seeing as Professor Pompous had a dictionary in hand at the time he disdained to understand the definition, he could have looked it up.

Parasite drag is still the usual term for resistance that increases with airspeed. It is itself composed of form drag, skin friction and interference drag. The specific terms for various components of drag wiggle around a bit from textbook to textbook, as no one wants to admit that lift and drag aren't actually separate things, just two components of the same force defined along perpendicular axes. The term wing resistance is unfamiliar to me, possibly it is synonymous to what I call induced drag, or perhaps it includes some of the parasite drag of the wing structure itself.

Below I quote from a 1918 aeronautics paper by Alexander Klemin (isn't the Internet amazing?) He gives plane resistance as a synonym and states that it decreases to a minimum at 65 mph for a certain wing and then increases with speed, suggesting that yes, wing resistance is the sum of induced drag and parasite drag attributable to the wing alone. Induced drag as it is defined today is inversely proportional to the square of the airspeed, so it continues to decrease with airspeed. Note that Klemin specifies that parasite drag "includes the resistance of the wing bracing, chassis, etc." but unless there's a missing comma before bracing, doesn't list the wing there. There's nothing wrong from a physics point of view with partitioning the drag differently. It still all adds up to the total drag. Presumably modern engineers find it more useful to use the partition that I am familiar with.

The body or parasite resistance which includes the resis- tance of the wing bracing, chassis, etc.. as well as the resistance of the body proper, is taken as varying as T'" 2 and allowance has been made for propeller slip stream velocity. The body resistance is seen to play an unimportant part at low speeds. But at about 53 miles per hour it becomes greater than the plane or wing resistance, and at high speeds it. is almost twice as great as the wing resistance. This emphasizes the impor- tance of minimizing the resistance for a high-speed machine. However good a wing section itself may be, high structural resistance will make high speeds impossible.

The plane resistance curve has a minimum value at about 65 miles per hour and increases on either side of this speed. It is interesting to follow out how this increase in resist- ance on either side occurs. At high speeds, the angles of incidence and the drift coefficients are small but the speeds are very great, and the increase in wing resistance is obvious. At small speeds on the other hand the airplane is flying at large angles of incidence to give the necessary sustentation and the drift coefficients are large. The shape of the total re- sistance curve follows from the summation of the two.

The Cambridge Aerospace Dictionary (nice online reference: bookmark it!) only uses resistance in its electrical sense, and defines wing drag as "When lifting, induced plus profile drags." Profile drag it defines as total drag minus induced drag, so my parasite drag. Some of these may be historical and some trans-Atlantic differences. I won't crawl any deeper into this hole today. I have made a note to research the history of drag-related terms at a later date.

Other aeronautics entries in the short excerpt include drift, drift angle, drip band or flap, and drome. Drip band is a balloon term, no idea if it's still in common use and I've never heard a pilot shorten aerodrome to drome, a demonstration that the up-to-date vocabulary of 1927 doesn't necessarily stick around. The years 1909 to 1927 marked a huge advance in aviation, so it's not surprising that aviation features here, but it's still a coincidence that he picked that span of time and that chunk of the alphabet. I like to take coincidences like that as affirming that I should keep trying to make a living in aviation. There's no reason language can't be a deeper hobby for me than it has been.

Back to the linguistics aspect of the book. We now know that the author is pompous, opinionated, contemptuous of fields in which he knows nothing, and proud enough of his lack of knowledge to boast about it. I hope the late Zeps would have known better and told him it made him look like an idiot.

One of the many ways language changes is by adding bits to or losing bits from words. Being that linguists like words, you can bet that there will be words to learn to describe this all. Here is a sampling of words to do with adding sounds.

anaptyxis - a vowel added between segments

gemination - lengthening of a consonant

prothesis - addition at the beginning of a word

excrescence - consonant added between segments or finally

So when people pronounce /nuclear/ as ['nʲu:kʲuləɹ], instead of freaking out, you can say "Cool, that's an example of anaptyxis." When people say things like "That's a whole nother story," it's prothesis in action: other is acquiring the n from its indefinite article, just as happened with newt in Middle English (used to be "an ewte"). I have a friend who always says "slaunter" when he means "saunter." I don't know why he does it, but it's an example of excrescence. I can't think of any English examples of gemination, probably because I can't think of anywhere in English where consonant doubling occurs. I mean in pronunciation, of course. There are lots of examples in spelling, like latter and later: but the real difference between those words is the sound of the first vowel. In my dialect they are ['læ ɾɚ] and ['le ɾɚ] respectively. Depending on where you are from, you may pronounce a t sound or replace it with a glottal stop, and you may do more with the r, but no one says [læt təɹ] (late-ter) repeating the t-sound.

These words are to do with losing sounds.

syncope - from between segments

apocope - from end of word

aphaerisis - from beginning of word

haplology - loss of a sequence of segments

metathesis - transposition of segments

My slauntering friend pronounces /ruin/ as [ɹun] and /mirror/ as [mɪɹ] compared to my [ɹuɪn] and [mɪɹɚ]. The former I guess is syncope, losing the vowel, and I suspect the latter is too, but you could argue that it was apocope, and that it's the middle r sound he's lost, from that word, not the ending one. Yeah, my friend is a one-man agent of language change. It's not the people who talk like everyone else who cause changes! I could probably call the childhood pronunciation of spaghetti (p'sketti) ['pʰskɛ ɾi] an example of metathesis, with the additional wrinkle that the hard g in the original is devoiced to k by the child, an example of lenition or weakening.

It's interesting that these changes are variously perceived as cute, lazy, uneducated or infuriating, but I find that knowing they have names and roles in inexorable language change makes them kind of cool. It's the difference in approach between "Eww, we've got ants in here!" versus "Look, Formicidae! I bet these are Leptothorax canadensis!" And then you rush to Antweb.org to find out more, before your roommate squashes them all.

Future Predictions

This book was originally published in France in 1911. Aviation was a daredevil sport, conducted in open cockpit single engine aircraft with negligible carrying capacity and unreliable engines. The artist Xaudaro mocked the pursuit of aviation by cartooning ludicrously implausible activities involving aircraft...

.. such as transporting sixteen passengers at once. Note the flight attendant, all the passenger baggage in the rear hold, and the baggage attendant. Both the transit time and the fare on Concorde were at least double that 'predicted' in the caption. And how many hundreds do we cram into one airplane now?

Here he has correctly demonstrated the importance of proper loading and baggage securing on a cargo flight. And I'm sure I told you that there was a dog on my first revenue cargo flight, moving house from one province to the next for a family, including a large dog. The dog rode in the passenger cabin, not on the horizontal stabilizer.

I've carried the mail, and I've picked up objects using a hook attached to my plane, but not quite this way. I love future predictions, whether or not they ever come true. I received e-mail from an editor at Popular Mechanics the other day. He was looking for the author of the information on Landing During an Earthquake. I couldn't help him, but I let him know how much I enjoy the visions of the future in his magazine. Someday I'm going to get my flying car.

The skydiving guy e-mailed back to say that he had just hired everyone he needed. I guess the combined delay of tax guy passing the information on to me and and skydiving guy getting my resume was enough for the pilots to be hired. That's how it goes. I would have liked that job, I think. Simple constraints, people having fun, an operation where I know I can operate safely, and lots of scope to excel in efficiency and customer service. It's kind of wry how quickly I imagine myself in a position. I'm mentally deciding which street I'll live on in the city of another job I've applied to and haven't heard back from. I can't help it! I predict I will get the job.

Amelia Earhart: The Turbulent Life of an American Icon

When a publisher's representative asked me if I was interested in reviewing a new biography of Amelia Earhart I rolled my eyes and gritted my teeth a little. She gets so much press, and I'm constantly expected to revere her as a role model, despite the fact that her self-aggrandizing, poorly planned stunt flying eventually got her killed. My own mother refuses to understand that do not find it endearing when she calls me "Amelia." I look a little warily even at the record setting flights by Louis Bleriot and Charles Lindbergh but forgive them as necessary proof-of-concept achievements in the evolution of aviation. I grant no such dispensation to Ms. Earhart. There were a few words in the publisher's blurb, words like "reckless" and "lacked basic navigation skills" that told me this wasn't going to be an "Our Hero, Amelia" book so I asked to take a look.

The biography is Amelia Earhart: The Turbulent Life of an American Icon by Kathleen C. Winters and is published by Palgrave Macmillan. It's a well-researched, fair account of documented aspects of Amelia Earhart's life. It neither glorifies nor vilifies Earhart. Winters gives background information on the time, bases for comparison, footnoted facts, and quotations from people who worked with Earhart, and for the most part leaves the reader to identify patterns, speculate, and draw conclusions.

Winters was herself a record-setting glider pilot, but I don't know how much powered flight experience she had. In one passage she describes airframe icing as a familiar hazard to Earhart, referring to an earlier incident of carburettor icing. The two are completely different hazards, and it seems odd to link them. It's possible that Earhart's description of the first situation as "water in the engine" was more accurate, as carburettor icing both chokes the air intake as it forms and causes sputtering and a temporary further loss of power as it melts. I would have liked more information on contemporary knowledge of aviation hazards and techniques, especially more details on the instrumentation, navigation techniques and ground-based navigation facilities of the time, but Winter's choice to concentrate on the woman rather than the flights is not a flaw in her work.

Winters is careful to document her sources, not to restate the legend, and not to take people's word for what they said or wrote. For example Earhart wrote in a letter that the cost to learn to fly would be about $1000, and Winters researched contemporary flight training to determine that $250 to $500 was more typical. Earhart kept poor records, so Winters crosschecked her training claims with flights recorded in her flight instructors' logbooks.

Winters tells Earhart's story in an easy-to-follow linear fashion, and the balance of documentary evidence to narrative is good for this type of work, but it's not riveting, I suppose exactly because she is telling the whole story and not simply summarizing Earhart's dropping out of multiple schools and endeavours, and trying all manner of ways to raise the money she needed to keep flying.

I would recommend this title for both fans and detractors of Earhart, and for those interested in either aviation history or the history of the feminist movement. It is not excessively technical, and certainly requires no previous aviation knowledge. It has few details that would interest people primarily interested in Earhart's disappearance, unless they care to look at the evidence that she was poor on details like checking the fuel level during her preflight inspection, did not know Morse code nor how to operate the direction finding radio navigation equipment, was a poor navigator, did not plan ahead for how she would coordinate with ships to find the destination she never reached, and probably jettisoned some of her survival gear to save weight.

I did find some things to admire about Earhart. For example she tried to organize students to oust an incompetent teacher who held a position through nepotism, and worked to disband secret societies at her school. She really did work to parlay her achievements into not only money for herself, but for real opportunities for women.

"Women will gain economic justice by proving themselves in all lines of endeavour, not by having laws passed for them."

I think my favourite parts of the book are those where her path intersects with other aviatrices of her era: Jean Batten, Laura Ingalls, Edna Gardner Whyte, Louise Thaden, Blanche Noyes, Jackie Cochran, Mary Heath, Mary Bailey and other women whose aviation achievements are largely forgotten. I hate that Earhart, through the skill of her husband and publicist George Palmer Putnam, and because of her disappearance, is the one remembered. It's not so much that she is remembered is that it leaves people with the idea that she was the only aviatrix of her time. There were hundreds, and many of them lived long productive lives.

Ms. Winters wrote a previous biography on Anne Lindbergh and I would look forward to more from her on the history of women in aviation, but unfortunately she died of a brain hemorrhage shortly before the book was published. Oh and Kathleen Winters was born in the same city where Amelia Earhart first became interested in aviation--Toronto!

I'm on a Boat

We're up early the next morning to load ourselves into a tuk-tuk convoy for the waterfront. The dock turns out to be right beside the Titanic restaurant, still lovely in daylight. We've bought our tickets in advance, so one member of the group just hands them out to us to present at the top of the gangplank. In exchange for my ticket stub I'm given a bag containing a bottle of water and a small baguette. There's a very attractive looking boat at the dock, like one of the Bateaux Mouches that take tourists along the Seine through Paris, but maybe a bit taller. That is not our boat. Ours is smaller, a low-to-the-water craft, basically a floating bus, with four across seating, two on each side of a narrow aisle. Our tickets have seat assignments and I'm in 8A. I didn't count the rows: there are maybe sixty to a hundred seats altogether. The roof curves overhead. It's a lot like being on a narrowbody aircraft, and it wasn't just me who thought that, because someone across the aisle from me starts mimicking an airline passenger briefing. It's about this point that we realize that in addition to no oxygen masks to drop down from the overhead compartment, the boat has only two exits, both at the front on either side, right behind the cockpit, and as far as we can tell there are no life jackets or other flotation devices anywhere on the boat.

Adding to the third world death boat stereotype is the fact that a large proportion of the passengers have declined to sit inside and are instead on the roof. The local police are there and apparently have refused to allow the boat to leave until the proportion of people inside to outside is great enough to suggest some kind of flotational stability, so some of them come inside, but as soon as we've cast off the dock, most of them go back up. Everyone on board is obviously a foreigner. There must be yet more dangerous and less luxurious boats suiting the transportation budget of the locals. There are quite a few Germans.

From the boat we can see the houses of the people who live right along the river. They don't have or don't enforce building codes, so these are shacks made out of everything, and also floating homes that appear to be made mostly of bamboo and reeds. Stunningly, a couple have satellite dishes. An aid worker later tells me that some have electricity powered by car batteries which they can pay charge with gasoline generators in the town. We pass people in motor boats and paddle boats, and most wave to us. There are even fishing trawlers made out of reeds and sticks. The Professor on Gilligan's Island has nothing on these guys. Everyone is the bamboo MacGyver flying the Cambodian flag.

I go up on the roof for a bit and meet an Australian who is living here teaching English. It's a better view on the roof, and not too hot because the speed of the boat produces a breeze to whip away the thirty-something or more degree heat. There really is a safety/freedom trade-off. It's being talked about a lot in the US at the moment, and it should be, because once you lose a freedom in the interest of safety, it doesn't take long to stop missing it, so it's essential that people make sure that they really don't need that freedom. I'm really enjoying sitting on the top of a boat that was obviously not designed as a passenger area. It's convex. But the water is calm and the boat is being driven smoothly. I don't stay up long because it's quite crowded and there isn't really a comfortable position to sit for long with no back support, plus I don't want to get sunburned. I lower myself down from the roof to the fifty centimetre ledge (not quite as wide as my two feet heel to toe, with no railing) and then work my way along that back to the door.

One of the choice spots on the boat is in the doorway, where you have most of the advantages of view and breeze without the direct sunlight and scrabbling for position on the curved roof. I take a few photos and videos through the door and then spend most of the five hour trip reading a stunningly unsatisfying Agatha Christie novel, Postern of Fate. There's no trail of clues, just random poking about until someone finds something, and the actual mystery is never revealed. I think it was supposed to be character-driven, but it was never consistent enough in its pursuit of any character to drive anything. I find someone to give it away to.

There are a few people up in the cockpit, or the bridge, I should call it. They might be the captain and his family. It looks fairly new and high-tech, actually. I wonder if this boat is owned by a company or if he is an owner operator and has bought it from the proceeds of carrying people in smaller boats. I'm one of the least capitalistic people out there, so I'm always intrigued by people who invest in something to make money for themselves. Maybe that should be one of my twelve foolish fears to overcome this year.

After consultation with three doctors, I'm taking anti-malarial medication. I seem to be fine without any untoward side effects. It amuses me that the package instructs me to store it between fifteen and thirty degrees Celsius. Is there anywhere in the malaria belt where the temperature is below 30 degrees? A refrigerator is too cold and the ambient temperature is too hot. If a traveller had an air conditioned environment in which to keep it, she wouldn't need anti-malarials!

The river widens out as we go north until we can't even see land on either side. This is the Tonlé Sap Lake. It's not as large as the Great Lakes along the Canada-US border, but it seems as large, from the water-level vantage point. It's just like flying across Lake Superior, except I'm on a boat. I'm on a boat! Stupid internet meme has stolen a perfectly ordinary English phrase. I sleep a bit--can't do that while flying across Superior. We know we're reaching our destination when we start to converge with other boats. There's a faster one filled with Chinese tourists that passes us, a less seaworthy one with bilge pumps spewing fountains over the gunwales, and all kinds of others of different shapes and sizes. There are more floating homes here, plus a floating Catholic Church and a floating English Language School. I wonder if perhaps these people were less disturbed by the regime of Pol Pot, already more closely embodying his back-to-the-land ideals.

We pull up to the dock and once the ship has been made fast, we disembark. This involves walking from the fore starboard door aft along the narrow ledge on the side of the boat and then climbing up onto the dock via the rubber tire bumpers. The boat staff and the local police hold out hands to help us up. The police here, in an understandable opposite to the former regime, really seem to place a strong emphasis on the serve and protect part of their duties. Some of them must be old enough to have been machine gun toting Khmer youth, but despite Nari's sleepless nights and an untold number of other personal persistent horrors, the society here works. I wonder if there are lessons here that Cambodians could be teaching Sierra Leone or Rwanda. Surely their experience at rehabilitating child soldiers and rebuilding a shattered society would be as useful as the university degrees and good intentions of as many privileged western aid workers. Cambodians would have a head start on the climate, too.

The dock at Siem Riep is orderly. The boat staff retrieve our baggage from the hold and nothing is lost. None of the passengers fell off the boat, either, although our Lord Master from last night has lost a shoe overboard. It was a newish running shoe, but the worst part was that it contained a custom-made orthotic support, expensive in Canada and probably not replaceable here, right before the part of the trip that may entail a lot of walking. We tease him mercilessly and try to get him to imagine the delight of the one-legged landmine victim who will find it downstream.

We walk away from the pier itself and are in a little covered market with food and souvenir stands. It's only after we leave the shady area that we are thronged with cab and tuk-tuk drivers all promising us best price, good tour. We have a prearranged hotel trasfer, and the driver is there holding up our group leader's name in an elaborately carved wooden frame. Canadian hotels and tour directors take note: want to ratchet up the class a little, the mahogany carving really does the trick. And the tone it set was not a false one for the hotel. We were welcomed into the immense lobby by elegantly dressed women serving us a delicious iced guava juice. Our rooms in Phnom Penh had not been bad, but these ones are luxurious. Silk bathrobes, all kinds of amenities, a balcony that opened onto the inner courtyard, the swimming pool visible through a screen of banana trees. The leaders basked in our delight at the hotel, as it wasn't expensive.

I went for a walk to find some aloe vera for a sunburned comrade, a mission that she knew that I would enjoy, as it would involve walking around town and talking to people. There was a market right near the hotel and "Aloe Vera" is such a simple word with sounds that are in English and Khmer, so I led with that as a request. Unfortunately the botanical ingredient is in every kind of cream and even drinks, but I wanted the 100% aloe vera gel that is the very best thing on raw burned flesh. I eventually had to go into full-on tourist with a guidebook mode, finding a pharmacy and asking, reading straight out of the fill-in-the-blanks useful phrases section, "I am looking for something for sunburn, please." It may have been the only time I've ever done that. I feel that I've been lazy not to have learned enough Khmer to express myself. At least she understood me and I didn't have to go as far as turning the book around to face her and pointing at the appropriate Khmer squiggles. She had the product just as I'd hoped and I triumphantly brought it home.

I didn't want to go to the tourist street for dinner, so I went into a little place on the street. I expected to just look and point for my food but they surprised me with an English menu. I looked for unfamiliar things that I hadn't had yet and don't have at home. I first chose barbecued eel, but was told ah mien. Don't have. I picked another one, something so alien that there was no English translation. Just nguev. They laugh when I pick it and I'm told ah mien again, but I kind of suspect that it was really that they didn't want to serve that to a tourist. I settle for vegetables and noodles. It's good. They always offer cutlery tines down in a glass of water. Now as I write it up it occurs to me that perhaps they store utensils that way to keep insects from landing on them, but the feeling when you see it is that everyone uses it and just dunks it back in the water. In any event I always clean it on a napkin before use. This is the reason why there are only a few of the group that eats in these adventurous little places, rather than the big hotels and tourist restaurants. I don't imagine that the standards of cleanliness are any higher in the kitchens there. It's not like they're Canada foodsafe certified, and here on the street and I can see how my food is handled as it is prepared. I consider the risk to be a fair price to pay for the amount it stretches my budget--at a dollar a meal I can buy more souvenirs and gifts for my friends--and for the real interaction with people. The whole family that works here is here, eating at another table and probably laughing at the stupid tourist who wanted nguev for supper. There's Khmer karaoke on the TV, but no one is singing, they have the vocal track playing too.

You can't escape being a stereotype when you're a tourist in a foreign land. You're forced to be:

• an oblivious foreigner on a tour;
• on the tour but aware that you are getting the tourist-sanitized version; or
• an "aren't I brave" maverick, expecting some kind of kudos for doing what the locals do every day.

The only way to escape being a white foreigner stereotype is to do something totally baffling, like start an aid organization and become a citizen. Or I suppose build houses in a rural village. Man, were those people ever baffled by us. It was the first time I'd been somewhere with no language skills at all. I wish there had been time to talk in a meaningful way about something more than the identification of cows and chickens.

The hotel pool, it must be said, is fantastic. It's lit underwater and surrounded by little statues of elephants. I swim until the last group of people leaves, then I don't stay and swim alone. It would be a shame to survive the death boat and then drown in a pool.

We had an evening briefing from a member of the group whose friend had spent six months in this area, recommending the best sights to see. Everyone wanted to get going early, and we had no trouble getting tuk-tuk drivers to agree to pick us up at 6:30 a.m., right after breakfast.

The Best Stories

I flip on the TV guide channel and wait for it to scroll to the channels that there is a chance of me watching. But it's not the listings of channel numbers, names and shows that captures my attention. Instead of the usual advertising or muzak, the audio for the cable listings channel is a local radio station, and they are just introducing a dramatic reading of Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. There is definitely nothing better than this to switch to listed on the TV guide, so I listen. I'm familiar with the story, but its been a long time since I've read it, so I don't remember exactly when it ended, although of course I remember where and how. It's an excellent story, so I'm being vague so I won't spoil the ending for anyone who hasn't read it.

I appreciated the storytelling, both by the reader and the author Ambrose Bierce. On first reading, each detail makes perfect sense in the narrative and then later when you know what is coming it still makes sense with the real story. I also like the way at first the protagonist is a sympathetic character, so we're rooting for him, then as we learn a little at a time more about the way he treats people, we don't like him as much, just in time to be shocked but not disappointed by the ending.

I read a modern version of the story once, involving thieves who make their getaway down an empty elevator shaft. It still captures the imagination, but it wasn't written with the same complex layers and attention to both readings of the story.

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This is my opportunity to segue from that well-written fictional story to your opportunity to vote on contest entries. If the trick I tried there to link to a not-yet-published-as-I-type-this post didn't work, and I haven't had opportunity to fix it, someone please link to the 14th October Jet Age post in the comments. Last week I offered you an opportunity to win a copy of Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World, by telling me a story. I asked:

What is your favourite anecdote from the history of aviation? In the comments for this post, leave a description, up to 200 words long, of the funniest, most poignant, most inspirational or whatever you think is the "best" story to come out of man's urge to fly.

Please review the entries posted there and in the comments on this post, give your vote (or votes) for the best story there. Use whatever criteria you like for "best," and feel free to lobby, debate, and have fun. I know you will remain your usual civil selves. When I get back to Internet access I will announce the winner, casting an arbitrary vote of my own if your anarcho-democracy has not done my work for me.

Jet Age

I have just finished reading Jet Age: The Comet, the 707, and the Race to Shrink the World by Sam Howe Verhovek. It's the story of the development of the first jet airliners, and the establishment of transoceanic air travel, including reviewing the whole history of aviation from Icarus through to the Boeing 707 and its contemporaries.

After a few hilariously pessimistic quotations from people who should have known better doubting the future of aviation, the book opens with the de Havilland Comet, pride of the British Empire, grounded after three aircraft were destroyed by explosions shortly after takeoff. Meanwhile in Seattle, Bill Allen of Boeing was trying to make the jump from military to civilian contracts. He staked the future of his company on the Boeing 707, which debuted while the Comet was still grounded. Verhovek's story is not linear, often irritating in the way it jumps back in time then builds forward again along a new thread, returning to a previous development as if it had not already been the subject of an entire chapter. Perhaps people who grew up reading hypertext don't read books straight through, and a good index ensures you'll be able to find the time period or player you're looking for.

Every aspect of the tale is deeply researched, and illustrated with occasionally quirky but never boring anecdotes. It covers not just the technical aspects of spanning the world in an airplane, but also the politics, from the "great sandwich war" of 1954 to the negotiations between the manufacturers, airlines and government to finance the development of a jet, and of course the people that made it happen. There are even mini-biographies of some unexpected players, such as Tex Johnston, the Boeing test pilot, who famously rolled the 707 during a public demonstration flight and Ellen Church, the woman who conceived of flight attendants and convinced United Airlines to hire her as the very first. Highlights of airplane designer Geoffrey de Havilland's bio include his ancestor Sieur de Havylland, one of the commanders of William the Conqueror's army. There are fewer details than I had hoped for of the accident investigation process that revealed the design flaws in the original Comet, but Verhovek does describe the amusing Britishness of the worsted three-piece suits and other wardrobe of the crash test dummies. I suspect the eight page bibliography provided is just the highlights of what Verhovek read while preparing this book.

There are few geek details on specifications, design decisions, and the construction and testing of the new airliners, and this is not a picture book, although it does include about eight plates of historical black and white photos. In addition to the 707 and Comet, Verhovek also mentions the roles played by Douglas aircraft, the Canadian Avro C102, Soviet Tupolev Tu-104, and French Caravelle.

I found Sam Verhovek's prose occasionally distractingly flowery, calling attention to itself rather than simply creating images and providing information. Perhaps Verhovek is nostalgic not only for the age of the jetliners but for the days when news stories used the kind of language seen in the copious period quotations. It's still a very readable book and it doesn't demand background or current knowledge of the industry from the reader.

If you want technical details on the design process of the B707 or an explanation of the Comet disasters that extends beyond "square windows" and "metal fatigue" this book may disappoint. But if you like aviation stories and don't demand your history in chronological order, you'll probably enjoy reading Jet Age.

I received a free advance copy of this book from the publisher.

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Publisher Avery offers another copy of this book as a contest prize. I wasn't going to run a contest, but reading all the stories in Jet Age inspired me. Here's the competition:

What is your favourite anecdote from the history of aviation? In the comments for this post, leave a description, up to 200 words long, of the funniest, most poignant, most inspirational or whatever you think is the "best" story to come out of man's urge to fly. If you don't have a registered blogger ID, please e-mail a copy of the comment to me so I know who made it, in case you win.

In a week I'll put up a new post that lets everyone vote on the best. Judging criteria (going by my experience of such things) will probably be a combination of how much the voter likes the story, how well they think you retold it, an assessment of your spelling and grammar, and how much you have annoyed or pleased other readers during your tenure as a blog reader. I'll leave voting open for a week, then I'll tell the publisher to send a copy of Jet Age to the winner. I'd plan a speedier timeline than that, but I expect to be incommunicado for a couple of weeks starting day after tomorrow, so I'll have to let this run itself.

Round the Bend

No, waiting for engine installation to be complete didn't driven me insane, but it did given me some time to read. I just finished the novel Round the Bend by Nevil Shute. Blog reader Hawke sent it to me some time ago. I'd already read On the Beach by the same author and enjoyed that, and hey, someone wanted to send me a book. Of course I said yes to his offer.

It's out of print, I think. My copy is hardback with the proper old book smell and a map, in the endpapers, of the region between Saudi Arabia and Australia, where most of the action takes place.

I cracked it open and started reading the adventures of the protagonist, who as a teenage boy was so enthralled by a flying circus that he joined them as a labourer, becoming an aircraft mechanic and a pilot and eventually starting his own air transport business in the middle east. Despite the fact that he doesn't have much flying or business experience, nor even a commercial pilot licence, nothing much goes wrong, and he demonstrates a talent for business and people.

Before I got very far on my initial reading I had to go to work, so I left the book at home and didn't pick it up again until my next time off a month or so later. After a few repetitions of this, I wrote Hawke to assure him that I was reading it and I did like it.

Just like this blog, it's told in the first person and I was lulled into enjoying it simply for the similar but from another age and place recitation of the minutia of preparing airplanes for flight and the various logistics of going to new places, finding food and accommodation, and ensuring there will be fuel and maintenance available. The people he meets and employs along the way are interesting, and, despite their diverse religions and races, are treated as individual respect-worthy human beings, both by the narrator and as subjects of the novel. I more than once flipped forward to confirm the 1951 copyright date. Someone who today calls bigoted attitudes 'antiquated' is doing a disservice to the time.

I was probably halfway through the book before I began to suspect that the narrator was not in fact the protagonist, just a witness to the messiah-like life of what had at first appeared to be a minor character. Neither the book nor its humble messiah asks you to believe anything you wouldn't ordinarily, or to stop believing anything you already believe. The story could probably be criticized as simplistic, but the framing excuses that. It's presented as the matter of fact memoir of a pilot--someone who describes Agra by giving just as much weight to the quality of the runway and hangars as he does to the Taj Mahal--and as long as his airplanes are flown and maintained well and responsibly, it doesn't matter what the craftsmen believe. While reading the final pages I had to assure a Boston Pizza waitress that I was fine, really, just reading an emotional book, could you please bring me another napkin?

Nevil Shute was himself an engineer, pilot and entrepreneur, and according to Wikipedia, he considered Round the Bend to be his best novel. I think I'll try to find some of his other aviation novels to read.

Out in the real world, Captain David Cronin died Monday at age 81. He was the pilot-in-command of UA811, a B747 that landed in Honolulu with a gaping hole just behind the cockpit, after a forward cargo door came off.

Giant Killer

If you both read and have any interest in flight, you have heard (even if you can't spell or pronounce) the name Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. He was a pilot and a dreamer and a writer who lived and flew in the age when every flight was a dangerous leap of faith, before reliable engines, organized search and rescue, and good aviation charts. His writing is quite simple, linking the things a pilot sees and thinks about to the general human condition. The sentences are not complex, so they are good books to read to practice French, and they work well in translation, too. Even if you haven't heard of or read Vol de nuit (Night Flight), Terre des Hommes (Wind, Sand and Stars), or Courrier sud (Southern Mail) you may still have met Saint-Exupéry through The Little Prince, widely translated as a children's story. It's either about a pilot downed in the desert and hallucinating with thirst; or about a little man from an asteroid who loves a flower he believes to be unique in the universe, and who comes to earth where he discovers his flower to be common.

Saint-Exupéry disappeared during flight in 1944 and for years was like the French Amelia Earhart: no one knew what had happened, so people dreamed of the best. I only recently came across this article, revealing that they not only have found his identity bracelet and thus airplane, but they have found the German pilot who shot him down. The poignant part is that the Messerschmitt pilot, Horst Rippert, had read Saint-Exupéry's stories in school and says that had he known who was in the airplane he would never have fired. Saint-Exupéry probably inspired his own killer to take up the pursuit that lead to his death.

Blue Feather

Richard Bach, the author of Johnathan Livingston Seagull, also wrote a book called Illusions. In it, the character who is seeking answers to some of life's questions is travelling with a professional barnstormer. The barnstormer is a kind of guru who tries to help him answer his questions. He tells the seeker that he can have anything he wants from the universe, he just has to ask for it. The seeker doesn't believe this, so the messiah asks him to test it with something simple.

"Okay," says the seeker, "a blue feather." He looks around and the messiah tells him he'll find it soon. The next day, or maybe a few days later, they're in another town eating breakfast and the seeker is thunderstruck to see a picture of a blue feather on the side of the milk carton. It's from the "Blue Feather Dairy."

He's astonished and points it out to the messiah who just says "I thought you wanted an actual feather."

I think of this story every time I find a blue feather. I found one today on the grass next to the apron, right where I was about to lower the stairs. The hardest part may not be getting what you want, but figuring out what it is that you really want.

Information Transfer

I admire the following sentence.

Large portions of this section were written in a hotel in Ban Hat Yai, Thailand, which is one of the information-transfer capitals of the planet regardless of whether you think of information transfer as bits propagating down an optical fiber, profound and complex religious faiths being transmitted down through countless generations, or genetic material being interchanged between consenting adults.

Who knew where it was from without googling?

My Weekend on the Golf Course

Remembering that the inspector from my company was turned back at the border, you may be able to understand the level of stress in my boss when it transpired that the inspector from this company was also unavailable. I found a third company that had an available inspector and was willing to do the work in our hangar. This resulted before the end of the day in a beautifully itemized list of sixty-two items that need to be attended to.

A good portion have already been done, as part of the routine servicing, although the inspector says one engine is two quarts low on oil. Many of the ADs were simply items to be inspected, so the act of inspecting them has completed them. There are a number of trivial items, like the fact that the lens on my cockpit dome light has a crack in it, as does the plexiglass cover over my left nav light. They've both been there since before my time, possibly since before I learned to fly. The former was probably a result of someone struggling with the chinese puzzle of removing seats from the cockpit without violating the Pauli exclusion principle, and the latter is a stop-drilled crack in the edge, maybe a combination of ultraviolet brittling and a sometime-overtightened screw. A number of lines are written up as chafing. They've noticed a missing instrument in my panel. I smile at that one. It's not as if it fell out en route. It was a radar altimeter, not required by my operating certificate, but nice to have. The tone was working, but the needle was stuck, so company pulled it to see if it could be repaired. The hole in the panel is glaring at first, then you stop seeing it.

Here's an odd one, a leaking turbo clamp. A leaking clamp? I usually think of clamps as things that retain rigid solid objects, and leaking as something that fluids do. The guys show me where very hot gases are escaping from it and the subsequent damage on surrounding components. I take a few pictures to e-mail, and then fax the 62-item document to my company's PRM (Person Responsible for Maintenance).

I don't know how long it will take my company to comment on the list, so I go through it myself to give them a start. The customer is now alternating with the boss calling me to find out when it will be done, so I tell them to ignore everything cosmetic, defer what can be safely left for another month, and do anything that they aren't willing to release the airplane without. Kind of a no-brainer. I defer the marginal stuff to the PRM, who calls and discusses it all.

I checked the oil in the low engine and it turned out to be right on the usual fill level, if you look at the correct side of the dipstick. I feel a little smug that the inspector made the same error that I did the very first time I inspected one of these airplanes for a preflight. it's very easy to have a moment of left/right confusion while facing the airplane sideways. I spent most of the day there, but I'm not sure that I really accomplished anything, aside from reassuring boss and customer that the airplane was being worked on. Also I bought a copy of Fred and Ted Like to Fly which pretty much matched my intellectual level by the end of the day. My favourite part was where Fred installs a new propeller on his green airplane in the time it takes Ted to check the oil on his.

So, You Want To Be A Pilot, Eh?

Reader James Ball sent me his recently-published guide to Canadian aviation careers, So, You Want to be a Pilot, Eh? to see if I would review it for you guys. After reading it I'm happy not only to review it but to recommend it. Judging from my own experience and the e-mail I receive, there is certainly a need for such a book, and I can't think of a comparable career guide for prospective Canadian pilots. The closest might be Landing the Big Job, but back when I bought that one, So, You Want to be a Pilot, Eh? would have been a much better choice, had it existed.

James starts where the student pilot should start, with the question "do you really want to be a pilot?" He honestly explains the parts of the career that are tough, holding out no false hope to the waverer, while maintaining a sense of humour. "It's difficult to keep track of all the different licences and ratings that are available to pilots. It can be even more difficult to pay for them all." He gives an excellent jargon-free and Canada-wide overview of the industry, from dollar-a-jumper paradropping jobs up to major airline captains drawing six figure salaries. As he discusses different hiring policies and corporate histories he refers obliquely to companies as, for example, "one operator based in Norman Wells, NWT." Those made me laugh as James and everyone else who has been around the circuit a few times can recognize the operator just by the base.

I liked the good Canada-specific advice he gives regarding joining the military to learn to fly, working the ramp and working the dock. Those are areas in which Canada is quite different from the US, and their airline job-hunting or career guides don't apply. James also gives many useful website URLs. These will unfortunately change in less time than it take to read the book, but James is providing updates and errata on his blog. Perhaps he will group all the recommended URLs on one page there, to spare readers from having to type them in.

James gives good guidance, much of it straight from the Transport Canada website, without trying to take the place of more comprehensive guides on topics like passing written examinations and flight tests.

The resume guide is very worthwhile, as aviation resumes are different than those in other industries. It is vital that your hours be clearly visible and reference contact information be actually given. James says this, but I'm going to underline it here so that anyone hunting around the net for pilot resume advice finds it and buys the book.

There were a few things I didn't like, such as James' advice to student pilots out on a solo, "After you've completed the checklist, take some time to explore your local area." Flight instructors recommending this book should censor that part. Also one of the books he recommends is of such poor quality that my local aviation store has dropped it (but they do carry So, You Want to be a Pilot, Eh?).

There are items I wanted to add, such as the possibility of other more stable and lucrative careers in aviation, but that would make it a different book. There's nothing missing within the scope of the book and I was frequently surprised to see excellent but not widely-known tips. And there was even one that I had never heard of, "abstain from sexual activity for a few days" before an aviation medical. Is this folklore or based on some kind of fact? Unless it gets you pregnant, I don't know of any physical changes as the result of sex that persist long enough to drive to the doctor's office. Perhaps this is a male thing, and one of my readers will enlighten me.

I caught a few editing glitches, the military requirement for Basic Officer Training and Foreign Language Training mentioned twice in consecutive paragraphs in the same section, but there is no fluff here. James has a concise style and still fills over two hundred pages with useful information.

This would be a great purchase for the family of a prospective pilot. Amend the cover with a sticker to make the title read "So, Your Kid Wants to be a Pilot, Eh?" and give it to your mom. I would recommend this book not only for Canadians thinking about a flying career, but to student pilots, pilots looking for their first job, and instructors looking to move on. Also if you're a foreign commercial pilot interested in working in Canada, this book contains what you should know about the Canadian industry and process. It's also written simply enough for ESL students, and laid out so you can refer to one part or another, but it's readable and interesting enough to go right through, as I did.

The list price is $24.95 and there's a Buy It Now link on James' website but it seems that the publisher and distributor have changed their links, so go straight to Chapters to buy it online. It's even on sale at $16.46 which equates to about eight minutes of dual instruction time, converted to student pilot dollars.