Battery of Battery-Related Thoughts

I walked all over town to find a 386/301 battery for my IFR timer and a couple of AAAs for my pulse oximeter. Who knew there could be so many different sorts of small round batteries. When buying devices, it's worth including battery availability in the comparison between brands. Everything in aviation should run off AA batteries. I carry a charger and a little pile of spare rechargeables so that when my headset battery cops out, or my flashlight isn't bright enough, I can swap them out.

Mark that against the Bose A20: the batteries are trickier to change in flight than for LightSPEED. They didn't intend you to change them in flight. They have an elaborate system of green and amber flashing lights designed to tell you your battery health and give you a chance to change them before the flight. These don't work with rechargeables, because of their square power profile: they work fine until they are almost dead then drop off to nothing too fast to give a warning. Bose tells you not to use rechargeable batteries for this reason, but I'm not leaving a trail of mercury all over the country for the convenience of flashing lights.

I keep my spare and used batteries straight in the cockpit using a pair of little plastic boxes, one red and one clear, that hold for AA batteries each. I was using it in the north and my favourite captain asked me where I got it. I didn't remember exactly, but told him I'd get him one, and I didn't, but I had to leave before I gave it to him. I asked for his postal address to send it to him, but then he had to leave, and the e-mail I had for him stopped working, but I kept the box all this time. Last time I was packing, I couldn't find my box, so I 'stole' the one I'd been saving for him, but I tell you, if you're reading this, you who forgave me for ripping the REMOVE BEFORE FLIGHT streamer off the engine plug on my first morning at work, send me your address and I will be honoured to send you one.

I have to plug the computer in to use flight simulator programs. The battery runs down too fast otherwise. When I'm flying my toy flight simulator, sometimes the panel lights spontaneously turn off, and I have to cycle the nav lights to put them back on again. Bug or feature to make the whole thing as inscrutably unknowable as a real airplane?

If you thought that last thought was disconnected, how about this one: Originally the forest moon of Endor was supposed to be populated by Wookiees, not Ewoks (wook-ee/ee-wok: original, eh?) but George Lucas decided that since the Wookiee Chewbacca was clearly proficient with advanced technology (i.e. he was pilot and mechanic of the spaceship the Millennium Falcon and also repaired the damaged android C3PO), it would be confusing to show the Wookiees with a primitive, "stone age" culture on Endor.

That's stupid. That's stupid enough to make me angry. That's racist 'logic'. That's the logic that didn't let women run marathons, because they never had. You don't have to be a whiny white moisture farmer with exceptional midichlorians to study and learn things, and it is perfectly possible to learn things that your parents didn't know. You'd have to be keen, and have some aptitude for the subject to make up for the not having the experience of growing up with technology, like Anakin building his own robots and podracers, but there's no reason Kashyyyk couldn't produce competent pilots and mechanics.

You may think this post has gone entirely into deep space, but I'll bring it home by examining Star Wars stored power technology. The Death Star had a massive generator, and no fuel tanks, but the society had batteries, power converters, power couplers and other means of transferring, transforming and transporting energy. I wonder if Han Solo ever had to walk all over Mos Eisley looking for the right sort of power cell for his blaster.