the vw beetle of the skies.

You know you're beyond help when you geek out over something like this:

That is a screenshot of Flight Simulator X, specifically the virtual cockpit of a meticulously recreated Cessna 150L built in 1971. A bunch of French guys spent about 2,000 hours combined on the creation of that little two-seater, and the end result looks pretty much exactly like a well-used 150 with thirty-five years of flight school service and pleasure flights on its back. If you download the large version of the picture, you can see that the original dashboard is faded to a dirty gray in some spots, and that the 1970s salmon-colored trim is ripped near the top of the dash. Everything works like it does in a real 150--every switch and toggle. Even the key in the ignition has a well-worn Cessna factory fob that looks like the key's been changing hands frequently for a few decades. The key fob and the microphone wire even swing with the bank angle of the plane. That's attention to detail.

I guess I'm getting old. Tooling around the pattern in that beat-to-shit little C150, with its basic VFR instrumentation and complete lack of modern avionics amenities is more fun to me these days than loading up some combat simulator where you can strap on an F/A-18 and blot enemy fighters from the sky.

Oh, for those of you who have FS9 or FS X: that little Cessna 150 is freeware, available here.

notes from a weekday.

I didn't want to leave the house today, but Quinn kept bugging me to "go to the store, daddy?" all morning, so I finally caved in and saddled up the War Wagon just before lunch.

We went to the neighborhood grocery store, where I picked up some alibi Diet Rite, and some sandwich components. In the cheese aisle, where I was browsing for sliced Muenster, Quinn gazed at the variety of cheeses of all kinds, and kept repeating "Cheese!" in a hushed, reverent sort of tone.

After the tenth awed "Cheese!", I nodded and said, "Yeah. What a friend we have in cheeses!"

The older lady over by the yogurt section shot me a scandalized glance, but I think I heard her chuckle as we moved off with our sliced Muenster.

Other activities for the day: keeping the kids fed and content, making lunch for Quinn and myself, cleaning up the kitchen, and using the brief hour of "I can't believe they're both napping at the same time!" to practice ILS approaches with the Baron 58 in "pea soup" meteorological conditions. That's about a typical weekday for me.

intangibles.

When I put my little "Five Airplanes" thingie together, I started thinking about what really made my particular choices stand out among all the other excellent aircraft I could have picked. Then I came to the conclusion that the same thing that makes these particular human-made tools remarkable is also the thing that makes any great human-made object remarkable, and that's intangibles.

Every once in a while, an engineer or artist manages to create something that is far more than merely the sum of its parts, something that performs far better than the addition of its specifications on a sheet of paper may suggest. Aviation is full of such creations, for example. There's no specific list of features that made the Douglas DC-3 the legend it is, but rather the way those features add up to something above and beyond sterile numbers about performance, cargo capacity, or range. A well-designed piece of machinery has much in common with a good musical symphony—you can dissect them into numbers and notes, but when you hear the thrumming of a DC-3s Cyclone or Twin Wasp engines, or the opening motif of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, you realize that you're witness to something significant.

Almost every one of us has favorites among our selection of tools, and most of the time, we can't precisely put our finger on the exact reason why we prefer our favorites over any other tool for a particular job. The more vital the task, the more attached we are to the tool in question, and there are few issues more vital and personal than self-defense. Therefore, people tend to get very attached to their choice of sidearm, for example, and that's the main factor behind the endless "brand war" discussions we see on the discussion boards dedicated to guns and self-defense.

A person's preference in personal sidearms is unassailable. You cannot convince a man of the inferiority of his pistol by dragging out sterile data if he's been carrying that pistol through thick and thin, war and peace, calm and danger, for the last ten or twenty or thirty years. Their reason for picking that particular gun might be insufficient for you, and your personal preference may beat theirs on paper when it comes to empirical factors like capacity, weight, or loading speed, but you cannot overcome intangibles with mere numbers.

Take my personal preference as an example. I've often talked about the virtues of my carry gun, the Smith & Wesson K-frame with a three-inch barrel. In a toe-to-toe battle of statistics, any Glock fan could beat me soundly with sheer numbers. A Glock 19, for example, is lighter, holds two and a half times more ammunition, and is much faster to reload than my S&W Model 13. On paper, the Glock 19 is the superior self-defense weapon, beating the Model 13 in nearly every category. So why do I carry the Smith instead of a Glock 19?

Why, intangibles, of course.

The M13 has a heft to it that's lacking in the Glock. It has just the right amount of weight—heavy enough to absorb recoil and make follow-up shots easy, and light enough to not be a burden on the belt. Yeah, the Glock is lighter, but the Smith is light enough, striking just the right balance between shooting and carrying comfort. It doesn't need to weigh twelve ounces, because it's not a pocket gun. (On a side note, if you can tell the difference between a 25-ounce gun and a 30-ounce gun on your belt, you need a better belt and holster, not a lighter gun.) Now, how do you quantify the "proper" weight for a gun? The simple answer is that you can't, because "proper" in this case depends on the purpose of the gun, and the opinion of the person who has to carry it. To me, a three-inch K-frame on the belt is just right, but to someone else, a fifteen-ounce J-frame in the front pocket is just right. Can you argue who's correct, armed with just a spec sheet with numbers on it? Of course you can't.

The M13 has other intangibles that make it superior to the Glock in my mind. It's more reliable—not hugely so, since the Glock is a very reliable design as well—but enough to make me trust it just a smidge more. It's more adaptable to my hand, and balances better because it's less top-heavy. It's easier to verify as loaded—all I have to do is to glance at the back of the cylinder. It's a self-contained system—there are no magazines to lug around, and no need to spend another $200 on a sufficient stash of them. It lets me keep all my brass, every last piece, and I don't have to bend down and spend fifteen minutes picking up empties every time I go to the range. It's less ammunition-sensitive—I don't have to spend any time trying to find a load that feeds well, and I can load and unload it a hundred times a day without having to worry about bullet setback and marred brass or bullets. It holds less rounds than the Glock, but I'm a better shot with it because it makes me place those fewer rounds more judiciously—with the Glock, I always have the thought of "I got plenty more" in the back of my head, and it's easier to get sloppy with shot placement. It's more monolithic in construction—you can't put it out of battery by pushing the muzzle into an assailant, and it makes a better impact weapon in a pinch.

All of these factors put together add up to something that I don't get with any other carry gun, and that's something you can't really express with cold, hard data. The M13 on my belt gives me the warm-and-fuzzies in a way the Glock doesn't, and you will not be able to talk me out of one in exchange for the other by talking about capacity, weight, reloading speed, or anything else to which you can attach numbers.

The next time you read a discussion about Glock vs. 1911, pistol vs. revolver, Ford vs. Chevy, Piper vs. Cessna, New England vs. Dixie, or any other attempt to quantify intangibles and determine that "A is better than B", look at it as if they're trying to establish whether Beethoven's Fifth or Mozart's Symphony No.40 are the better compositions. Could there be a bigger waste of time?

five airplanes.

Edited and improved! Now with pictures!

I like airplanes. Since there's a "Five Airplanes" meme going around, I'm powerless to resist it. So, here are my five picks.

They're not in any order, though. There's a pure fighter, an attack jet, a piston-powered attack plane, a medium transport, and a light taildragger, so they all served a distinct purpose, and as such would be hard to measure up against each other in a "better than" contest. They're also largely planes that hardly ever make a "Top Five" list, except for the first one on the list.

Supermarine Spitfire



The sexiest fighter ever is the Supermarine Spitfire. There can be no argument about this; anyone who doesn't think that the Spitfire is to fighter aircraft what the Mona Lisa is to paintings simply has all of their taste in their mouth. It also had the capabilities to match its looks, which made it a supermodel with a punch. Fast, extremely maneuverable, and eminently adaptable, the various evolutions of the Spitfire were always at the top of the heap of piston-powered fighters in WWII, and with a good pilot behind the funny little ring-shaped stick, more than a match for anything the Jerries and Japs could put into the sky.

Douglas A-4 Skyhawk



The little attack jet known as the "Scooter" or "Bantam Bomber" hardly ever makes any "Top Ten" lists, but it's one of those designs they got just right for the intended purpose. Small, simple, agile, and robust, the A-4 was much loved by its pilots. A quarter the cost of an F-4 Phantom II, and with a wingspan so small that folding wings were not required for carrier use, the A-4 is a lot of capability in a well-engineered and balanced little package. A Skyhawk was the first jet airplane model I ever put together as a wee lad, and I've had an affinity for the A-4 ever since.

Douglas DC-3/C-47



Sure, it's slow and lumbering, it doesn't carry bombs, and it can't shoot down enemy fighters, but the DC-3 brought the bullets and the other stuff necessary for fighting a war. The hero of the early airlines, the DC-3 was the first passenger plane to make a profit on passengers alone. The DC-3 revolutionized air travel in the 1930s, and it delivered the goods for the proper Hitler-and-Tojo ass-kicking less than a decade later. The old "Gooney Bird" may not be sexy, but she's a great aircraft by any definition of the term.

Piper J-3 Cub



The Model T of aviation, the little taildragger served as a trainer for more pilots than any other aircraft. Clad in olive drab paint, it served with distinction as a messenger, reconnaissance, and light transport plane in WWII. The Cub's STOL capabilities are unmatched, and there's simply no better fixed-wing airplane for flying in the weeds. Cubs soldier on as pleasure aircraft, and there's still a remarkable number of them delivering the goods up in Alaska, where its STOL capabilities make it popular with bush pilots.

Grumman G-21 "Goose"



The Grumman G-21 started out intended as a "flying yacht" commuter plane for wealthy Long Island businessmen in the 1930s. World War II intervened, and the little seaplane was put to use as a naval patrol and SAR plane. In British service, it acquired its nickname "Goose". The G-21 can haul a fair bit of cargo almost anywhere, not being constrained by availability of airstrips, and many ex-military Gooses were happily snatched up by civilian operators, especially in Alaska and Canada. The Goose is a sturdy "land anywhere" utility plane that has no equal to this day when it comes to sheer fuctionality.


Those are my picks. They are, of course, entirely subjective, but I tried to think of the kind of airplane that was simply a superior tool for the job at hand at the time, not just the best-looking one.

aviation trivia.

Arniotis Karamanlakis was a Greek aviation pioneer. He holds two claims to fame--the first private aviator in Greece (he purchased a Bleriot XI), and the first aviation-related fatality in Greece.

out with the old, in with the new.

In the most recent issue of S.W.A.T. magazine, Clint Smith reviews Aimpoint's latest offerings in the combat optics sector. He muses that "in a world of changing technology, one area that has seen quantum leaps forward over the last few decades is visual acquisition systems for weapons."

He's absolutely right, of course. Twenty years ago, electronic sights were new-fangled gizmos with some utility, but the old pros preferred (and preached the use of) iron sights for serious applications.

These days, everyone who's anyone in the business of professional violence has some sort of advanced combat optic on their rifle, and iron sights are mostly relegated to backup or emergency use. It's still important to be able to use iron sight, of course, but the latest generation of optical sights has made the rifleman far more effective. As the saying goes, if you can't see it, you can't hit it, and a rifleman these days has many excellent optics from which to choose, tools that make him or her drastically more efficient by several orders of magnitude. An infantry squad with iron sight-equipped rifle would be at a distinct disadvantage against a squad equipped with ACOGs, ELCANs, Aimpoints, or Leupold CQ/Ts on their rifles.

I thought about the article for a while, and then realized that this technological trend extends to other applications as well. Small, inexpensive electronics are now attainable to the regular guy on the street that make any super-expensive industrial-grade stuff from twenty-five years ago look completely ancient by comparison.

Take civil aviation as another example.



This is the cockpit of a Beech Baron 58 equipped with analog "steam" gauges. You have your avionics on the left side, your engine gauges in the center, and the radio/AP stack to the right. It's fairly easy to keep an eye on things once you're used to the layout. With steam gauges, the Baron feels and flies like a nice light twin.



This is the cockpit of the same plane equipped with the Garmin G1000 "glass cockpit" integrated EFIS. All the information of the steam gauges in the previous cockpit shot is consolidated on two 12-inch flat panel TFT displays, with an integrated communications panel between them. The left panel serves as the PFD (primary flight display), and the right panel serves as a MFD (multi-function display). On the left screen, the pilot can view all the information related to aircraft attitude, speed, heading, and vertical speed, without having to scan multiple steam gauges. On the right screen, the pilot has access to all engine- and fuel-related information, along with a moving map. With the G1000 avionics suite, the Baron feels and flies like a miniaturized airliner.

Aircraft equipped with the G1000 system also retain some steam gauges as backup (and primary) instrumentation in the event of a system failure. The whole thing is designed for redundancy--if one display fails, the other automatically switches to PFD mode, and the system is designed to run off a secondary power source in case the aircraft's alternator and primary battery go "kablooie".

Once you're used to flying with a glass cockpit, it's hard to go back to steam gauges. The difference in situational awareness and functionality is quite substantial. With the G1000 and its competing products, civil light aircraft now have flight information and navigation systems that were reserved to modern airliners just a few years ago, and unavailable at any price just two decades ago.

Of course, in both the shooting and flying communities, there are always the grumpy holdouts that pooh-pooh the newfangled gizmos. There are lots of rifle shooters that use (and preach the use of) iron sights as the only "true rifleman's sight", and there are doubtlessly many pilots that eschew the new glass cockpits in favor of the tried-and-true steam gauges. ("If it was good enough for Lindbergh, it's good enough for me!")

Alas, time and technology march on, and the newfangled technology of today is going to be the mainstream of tomorrow, even in fields that have more than their share of traditionalists.

flying the virtual skies, again.

So I'm doodling along in my little airplane again, for a quick jaunt over to Martha's Vineyard.

Fifteen miles out, I radio the tower at Vineyard Haven to get landing clearance, and they curtly respond that my "request is denied--airport is presently IFR only", meaning they'll only allow instrument landings via their fancy-schmancy ILS system. I, however, am VFR at present.

Well, I'm too lazy to file an IFR flight plan fifteen miles from the destination airport, and it's only virtual ATC anyway, so I do what no real-life pilot should do if they value their airman certificate: I switch off the radio, fire up the GPS, and ride the sucker in without landing clearance, just for fun. Hey, the weather outside doesn't look that bad, and with the GPS and its approach path display, I can practically get her onto the ground on autopilot, right? Besides, I shelled out three quarters of a c-note for this game, and I'll land my freakin' airplane wherever and whenever I please. (Actually, most of the time I dutifully follow ATC instructions, and I never even request a different runway when they direct me to the least convenient one, where the approach pattern requires three loops around the airfield from my current position.)

I fly with real-world weather, updated every fifteen minutes, and it turns out that Martha's Vineyard is fogged in this evening like you would not believe. I follow the final approach indicator on the GPS screen, and let Robby the Robot take me down the glide slope in 500-foot increments. At 600 feet and a quarter mile out from the runway threshold, I still don't see any runway lights. Guess they weren't kidding when they said "airport is currently IFR." If it wasn't for my steam gauges and the GPS in front of me, I'd have no idea whether I'm even upside down or right side up.

I miss the runway completely, of course. I'm overflying it at 500 feet AGL and 80 knots airspeed, and I don't see so much as a flicker of runway lights until I've already passed the threshold on the far side of the runway, and momentarily catch a glimpse of the runway lighting in the right rear window. The fog is so thick that I never see so much as a bulb of the ALS, even as I pass over it at 500 feet.

Quick 360 to re-acquire the runway....ah, there it is, the lights barely visible even at 300 feet AGL. I drop full flaps, bank fifteen degrees to the left to line up with the runway, and nudge her down. By the time the rubber meets the asphalt, I'm already halfway down the runway, but luckily I am flying a Maule Orion, which can stop on a dollar bill and leave room for fifty cents of change. The taildragger sets down the rear wheel at fifty knots, I hit the brakes, and a hundred feet later, I'm stopped.

Now, I'll grant that the adrenaline factor would have been about a hundred times worse in a real airplane with my real hide at stake, but it was an educational experience nonetheless. Tamara says that she can't understand the appeal of a simulator that lets you fly from A to B without engaging something with machine guns or AA missiles along the way, but flying a little general aviation bird at night and in instrument meteorological conditions can be every bit as exciting as blotting virtual MiGs out of the sky.

Yeah, my hobbies are capital-N nerdy. You take care of two kids all day long, and there's not much energy or money left for dirt bike racing or Cowboy Action Shooting. At least digital avgas is cheap, and engine overhauls on a virtual airframe are totally affordable.

short landing of the day.

Grumman G-21 "Goose", stopped on the numbers at LOAL (Wiener Neustadt).

I'm sure there are plenty of experienced pilots who could land that bird on the width of the runway, but I was nonetheless pretty proud of putting her down on the threshold and braking to a full stop before the tail had even passed over the numbers completely.

In related news, a company called Antilles Seaplanes is tooling up to make brand new Gooses (the correct plural of the airplane's nickname), available with the original 450hp Pratt & Whitney Wasp Jr. radials, or new 680hp PWC turboprop engines. I think the turboprop version looks a little unbalanced with those long engine nacelles, but I'm fond of the Goose's original lines. That's a classic aircraft, and it's great to know that one could pick up a zero hours airframe if one were so inclined, rather than an original...there are about sixty airworthy original Gooses out there, and the youngest of them is more than sixty years old.

so long, laptop.

So the big brown truck of happiness showed up today and dropped off two packages: my eagerly-awaited Alphasmart Neo, and a CH Flight Yoke.

The Neo is simply excellent. If your daily routine includes a bunch of writing, for whatever reason, this thing is the device for you. It's about the size of a standard sheet of paper, weighs less than two pounds, and still has a full-sized keyboard. There's no waiting for it to boot--you turn it on, and a second later, you're looking at the blinking cursor waiting for your text input. If you turn it off, it'll pick up right where you left it once you get back to it. Every keystroke is automatically saved, so there's nothing to save manually. The memory has eight file spaces of 64k each, which comes to about 10,000 words per file. (It doesn't seem like a lot of memory in the age of multiple gigabytes of RAM, but this thing is just for ASCII text, and 64k times eight is a lot of text.)

When you're finished with the writing for the day (or week), you plug the Neo into your PC via USB cord, open Word or any other program that accepts text input, and hit the "send" button. Your scribblings paste themselves into the desktop program as if a speed typist on crank is hacking away at the keys.

Best of all: the thing is so light and sturdy that you can take it anywhere, and the battery lasts 700 freaking hours of writing time. (That's a month of non-stop writing.) Apparently, these things are popular with a lot of schools, and they run all year on one set of AA batteries. There's no laptop ever built that comes close to even a tenth of that kind of runtime.

Yeah, I probably sound like an Alphasmart rep, but this thing really is all that and a bag of chips. It's utterly useless to anyone who needs anything other than a word processor, but for writers, this thing is the best invention since Gutenberg's press.

Oh yeah, the flight yoke is the berries, too. Flying a Cessna with a stick just doesn't feel quite right, and the yoke adds a lot of realism. If you're into flight sims, and you can stand the snickers of your friends and family for getting your geek on with a flight yoke bolted to your computer desk, I highly recommend it.

Thus end today's product reviews. If anyone from Alphasmart reads this, contact me for my snail mail address, so you can send me a check and/or some free loot.

oh, the shame.

Today I managed to break a 1.2-million-dollar aircraft. (Thankfully, it was mine...and a digital rather than an actual aircraft.)

I spent my past forty-odd flight hours trundling about Europe in a Cessna 172, which has fixed landing gear. Today, I decided to do a leg of my pretend cross-Europe flight in my old pal, the Beech Baron 58...which has retractable landing gear. (Some of you may anticipate where this is going.)

So I come in for a perfect landing at Vaernes in Norway...80KIAS, two notches of flaps, textbook flare, and touchdown right on the numbers, smooth as silk.

*skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee*

"Hey, what are those sparks in front of my windshield?"

*facepalm*

That'll damage your ego. Nailing the last twenty-odd landings with a fixed-gear C172, and then neglecting to hit the gear lever on final and ignoring the "GEAR UP" warning on the dash that's merrily blinking away. Put back the keys for the light twin and go back to the Sky Moped, rookie.

Light blogging...I've been busy juggling the kids. (Not literally, mind you.) I get a few hours in the evening, and maybe another hour or two in the middle of the day, during quote-unquote "nap time", which Quinn spends playing away in his room six days out of seven. The short one is putting on some weight, and now only wakes up two or three times a night as opposed to every hour and a half.

Mark Pixler, of Dillon's Blue Press catalog, has asked me for permission to run "Why the Gun is Civilization" in their September issue, which is enormously flattering. I may be able to contribute more to The Blue Press in the future, which is even more flattering. Their readership/recipient list constitutes a non-trivial amount of readers, which is an awful lot of exposure for a little niche blogger like myself.