Learning from Dogs

Seventy years on – many still remember.

Many of the English readers of Learning from Dogs will comfortably skip this Post as already much of the news has been reporting the fact that we are 70 years after the Battle of Britain in 1940.

But for those that are from other places, where the BoB is not in the psyche of their national bloodstream, these links may be of interest.

The BBC has been doing well in presenting material.

Here’s a good piece setting the scene:

While memories of the Battle of Britain remain fresh in the minds of The Few who flew, and the staff who supported them, veterans fear its significance could soon be forgotten by others.

The Luftwaffe lost 1,733 aircraft and the RAF 915 in the Battle of Britain

Seventy years ago the RAF was locked in a life and death struggle with the Luftwaffe in the skies over England.

The three weeks between mid-August and early September in 1940 were decisive for the Battle of Britain.

The bravery of the RAF pilots was captured in Winston Churchill’s speech on 20 August when he said “never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”.

Those left of The Few, as those pilots became known, are now in their 90s. Some of them fear they will soon not be around to remind people of the events that summer.

And if you want a flavour of what it was like to fly a Spitfire, then click here – excellent piece from Evan Davis of the BBC.

Seventy years on from the Battle of Britain, can the current generation comprehend what it is like to fly a Spitfire?

To find out, BBC Radio 4 Today programme presenter Evan Davis took a flight with The Aircraft Restoration Company’s chief engineer and test pilot John Romain.

See more on the Today website.

Well done, lads. And thank you!

And a thank-you to my Uncle who, despite being rather ill, is still alive.  He was in the RAF and stationed at Biggin Hill during those demanding months in 1940.

By Paul Handover

Learning from Dogs has been running for one year.

On July 15th, 2009 a post called Parenting lessons from Dogs started what has now become a bit of a ‘habit’.  But more reflections tomorrow.

Reach for the Skies

Today I want to voice something that has been running around my mind for some time.  It is whether we give in to the mounting doom and gloom at so many levels in our societies (and it can be a very compelling draw) or whether we see this as a painful but necessary period where slowly but surely the desires of ordinary people; for a fairer, more truthful, more integrous world are gaining power.

And I’m going to use Richard Branson to voice it for me!

(Now this is an unusually long Post so I’ve inserted the Read More divider to prevent the Post visually swamping your browser.)

Read the rest of this article

The brilliance of fine engineering

The BBC have been started a series on how things are made!  The first episode was on the making of a nuclear submarine – perhaps not something that touches most of us!

Trent 900 on the A380

But the second episode was much more the ‘touch of the common man’ as it was about the building of a commercial jet engine, the Trent engine built by Rolls Royce of Derby, England.

Anyway, I’m not going to natter on other than to say that not all regulatory bodies are bad in this world.  Indeed, the aviation industry has shown how splendid both engineering and the certification processes can be in giving us a incredibly safe form of transport.

There are plenty of YouTube videos on the Trent engine but here are two that I found of great interest. (Thanks to Simon H for the pointers.)

Rolls Royce Trent Engine Certification video

A380 Loss of Blade test

By Paul Handover

Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!

A quick Google search shows that this is a well-documented story that has been doing the rounds since 2009.  But I hadn’t come across it before so was very grateful for a friend in England, Richard Howell, including me on a recent email circulation.  I shall reproduce Richard’s email just as it was received.

OK… so… you’re the pilot of a plane…

It’s on auto-pilot and you’re catching up on People magazine and having a cup of coffee.

Suddenly the loudest sound you will ever hear goes off just behind your left ear.

You’re blinded by the flash and can’t hear.

All you can feel is something warm running down your leg.

You immediately consider retirement.

This is an Atlantic Southeast Airlines/Delta Connection aircraft… soon after it suffered a lightning strike.

Yep… time to RETIRE!

Thanks Richard,

By Paul Handover

The Loop in North Wales and a neat gag!

Photo Chris Chambers

The British Royal Air Force frequently train their air crews in and around the valleys of North Wales.  Much of that area is designated a Tactical Training Area.  One such route is known as The Loop.  Here’s a description of that from the website Warplane.co.uk:

Machynlleth Loop

The most appropriate place to start with is the Machynlleth Loop which is usually referred to by aircrews as ‘The Loop’ although the USAF crews refer to it as ‘The Roundabout’. It is literally a roundabout of flowed valleys running counter-clockwise following the A470 north eastwards from Machynlleth in the south to Dinas Mawddwy then heading north west to join the A487 at the Cross Foxes Inn. From here it follows the A487 southwards through Corris to end back at Machynlleth. Ordnance Survey Explorer Map OL23 is recommended for anyone planning a visit.

It is arguably the busiest part of the UK low fly system and although the cold war days of up to 80 plus movements in a day are long gone it is still sometimes possible to see 30 plus aircraft in one day. The usual daily total is usually between 10 and 20 aircraft mainly made up of Hawks with the odd Tornado, Harrier or Hercules thrown in. It is certainly the place to go to practice your panning technique.

It takes about 3 minutes for a jet aircraft to do a circuit of the Loop and multiple passes by aircraft is not an uncommon sight, especially by Hawks. So whenever you see an aircraft it is worth checking to see if it looks like doing a circuit as you may be lucky enough to see it again in 3 minutes.

Do click on the link if only to view some of the fantastic flying photographs.

Anyway, a couple of British newspapers recently published a piece about an RAF Navigator holding up a sign inside the cockpit for the many amateur photographers who frequent this part of the country.

Here’s an extract from the Daily Mail:

A RAF navigator gave plane-spotters a chuckle as he held up a sign reading ‘I’m with stupid’ with an arrow pointing to the pilot.

The pair were on a training mission in a £13million Tornado GR4 aircraft, capable of reaching 1,400mph, when the navigator pulled the prank as they jetted through a valley in Wales.

Copyright Andrew Chittock

Wonderful prank, and wonderful picture taken by Andy Chittock who clearly is rather used to taking a mean photograph!

By Paul Handover

This is very, very uncomfortable.

Reflecting the truth?

Trying to say anything new about the implications of the terrible disaster in the Gulf of Mexico would be impossible.

All I can do is to admit my very great discomfort at knowing that later today, I shall be returning to Phoenix by flying across the Atlantic in a Boeing 747.

A small amount of web research suggests that there are about 600 transatlantic flights a day and that my B747 will use roughly 10 tons of fuel an hour, i.e. conservatively 100 tons for the flight LHR-PHX.

So 600 x 100 = 60,000 tons of fuel every day just in flights across the Atlantic!

So pointing the finger at BP is, in a very real sense, misdirected.  BP are only responding to our need for oil, in all its forms.

Do watch the videos from Prof Al Bartlett being shown on this Blog from tomorrow to understand the mathematics behind our unsustainable way of life.

By Paul Handover

Air Safety is a matter of ….. politics!

Many years ago I saw an overview of airline safety rules and regulations which revealed, in my view, a  disturbing double standard: airline attendants are provided with protective smoke hoods to use in the event of a crash, but passengers are not.

Could be safer?

These hoods protect your eyes from cinders and smoke, and your lungs from most toxic fumes.  The hood (presuming you can get it on in an actual emergency) gives the wearer up to two minutes of precious extra breathing and visibility after a crash, which is when the vast majority of airline crash deaths occur: not during the crash, but afterwards as survivors try to escape the burning wreckage.

A simple, compact smoke hood

That’s right. The statistics clearly show that most of us, up to 75 or 80%, survive the actual impact; it is  the dark, confusion, smoke, toxic fumes, and the inability to see or breathe that cause up to 80% of all fatalities in plane crashes.

The airline attendants and crew are provided with officially sanctioned smoke hoods for their use during an emergency, presumably to stay alert and safe enough to help blinded, coughing, choking passengers out to safety … maybe. Once a plane starts smoldering, one has only about 90 seconds to get out alive.

Well, I’m not a big fan of restricted access to a product that I believe could save my life or the lives of my children.  So I rattled some cages, asked some airline personnel and made some calls and it turns out, at the time I was pushing this issue, the FAA was considering — as it had been for many years —  several different patent-pending smoke hood models for passengers.

In fact, according to the FAA, they were considering so many smoke hood models that it would take some time to find “the” right one.

The FAA banned all such masks until they found “the one.”  As of press time, “the one” had not yet been approved.  So passengers remain unprotected, and dying.

So I contacted a company in the UK that sold the smoke holds which led me to a distributor in Fort Worth, Texas.  As it turned out, I was living in Dallas at the time so could drive to the vendor to do business.

The vendor informed me that in order for him to sell me the smoke hoods at about $60 a pop, I would have to be a business.   I asked him what was the smallest order he had ever filled for a business. He said six.

So I instantly became an academic consulting business and ordered six smoke hoods.  Within a couple of days,  I was the proud owner of six orange-colored, travel savvy smoke hoods for any type of fire or smoke emergency, including in hotel rooms, on cruise ships,  and in the cabin of an airplane. This, by the way, was in 1990, TWENTY years ago!

So, I wonder how that federal legislation that is supposed to provide passengers with the same protection as airline employees is coming along these days?

The next time you board a commercial flight, try to get a peek at the safety equipment provided to the airline attendants.  Then, you’ll have to ask the attendant why the same safety equipment is not made available to passengers.

The answer is politics, my friend!

Thoughts?

By Sherry Jarrell

Is that what I heard?

“Take your hands off the controls.”

We were climbing after take off in a Cessna 152, and I was applying significant control inputs to keep the aircraft level. Before the flight, there had been some conversation among other pilots on the ground about there being some turbulence at low level today, and I had just remarked that this seemed to be true.

In response to this gentle instruction, I took one hand off the control column, but continued to concentrate on maintaining the attitude of the aircraft in the bumpy conditions. Then the instruction was repeated, still gently, but with a little more emphasis:

“Take your hands OFF the controls”!

Now, whether one follows instructions like this does depend to some extent on who is issuing them! On this occasion, I was honoured to be flying with the most capable pilot and flying instructor I have ever met, or am ever likely to meet.

As it happens, I was not formally under instruction, being qualified to fly and my “passenger” having lost that privilege on medical grounds. Nevertheless, when flying with other people there is always something to learn and, when flying with someone as experienced and knowledgeable as Dickie Dougan, one is learning all the time! Dickie had a very long flying career during which very many people learnt a tremendous amount from him. Sadly, he passed away in 2007, at the age of 89.

So, in this case, the instruction was being issued by someone for whom I had the utmost respect and trust. Nevertheless, it was contrary to my instincts and seemed to me to be decidedly risky.

Very gingerly, I let go of the controls which, now free from my grasp, moved more violently and over a much wider range than I had been moving them. My instinct was to grab them again, but my trust in the instruction that I’d been given was just sufficient to hold that instinct at bay for a short while.

The aircraft seemed to be rolling more than it had under my control, but it was returning to level flight fairly consistently. It was, at least, stable and seemed to be flying satisfactorily without any input from me (to be accurate, I was continuing to apply some right rudder to compensate for the yaw effects of the single propellor in the climb, but it seemed to me that I was not controlling anything!)

After I had realised that the world was not turning upside down and my level of anxiety lowered slightly, Dickie then said quietly, in his soft Irish tones:

“There you are; you’re working too hard! The aircraft can fly itself!”

Incidents like that teach us something quite profound. The world functions without us.

We are not the centre of the universe!

Background:

This post was inspired by Trey Pennington’s description of his conversation with his daughter about Copernicus, as described in his interview of C.C.Chapman.

Further information about the legendary Dickie Dougan can be found in this document in an obituary for him written by Chris Martin who was the Chief Flying Instructor at Exeter Flying Club during the time that I was trained there.

By John Lewis

Wonderful short film of the P-38 Lightning (thanks to Steve).

The Lockheed P-38 Lightning was a WWII American fighter aircraft. Equipped with droppable fuel tanks under its wings, the P-38 was used as a long-range escort fighter and saw action in every major combat area of the world.

A very versatile aircraft, the Lightning was also used for dive bombing, level bombing, ground strafing and photo reconnaissance missions.

The Lockheed team chose twin booms to accommodate the tail assembly, engines, and turbo superchargers, with a central nacelle for the pilot and armament. The nose was designed to carry two Browning .50 machine guns, two .30″ Brownings and an Oldsmobile 37 mm cannon.

The P-38 was the only American fighter aircraft in active production throughout the duration of American involvement in the war, from Pearl Harbor to VJ Day.
Music: Benny Goodman with Helen Forrest – ‘It’s Always You’.

The WikiPedia entry is here.

P-38 Lightning

By Paul Handover

So this is how they do that!

Some videos are just fun to watch. Whether you are interested in aviation or not, this blast through the making of an aircraft by Boeing makes it all look quite easy really:

By John Lewis