phik

SIR–

Our communication must remain brief, as this customer has already lost the feeling in his fingers and toes.

Your northeast corridor trains offer unmatched convenience at an affordable price, but the arctic blasts with which they are equipped do not please this correspondent.

Heavy coats and mountaineering undergarments oughtn’t be required upon boarding your vessel in any season; that you additionally disregard your passengers’ summertime apparel displays a contempt for comfort that has become unfortunately common in most modern American transportation.

P I Schwan
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Although I cannot speak to the “beercheese”, about which I was and remain blissfully unaware, I can confirm that Brooklyn’s Floyd is an excellent place to spend a Friday night.

George and I took to the in-bar bocce court around 21:30 to face the reigning champions. Our first few frames were hardly spectacular, and it was looking grim until they made a series of grave tactical errors followed by an even more grave strategic error, and our comeback was immediate and unassailable. From that point we bested all comers, aided and comforted by Hoegaardens in the heat of battle.

The crowd came and went as the night progressed, hungry for their shot at glory, but there were constants throughout: women wanted us; men wanted to be us; everyone wanted their chance to contest these remarkable yet unknown prize-fighters who chose this night to emerge from the shadows of retirement.

At last, undermined by our own hubris and perhaps the very Hoegaardens that gave us our subtle control, we relinquished the court to a pair of locals all too familiar with the well-worn grooves of their home court. It was a match we could and should have won, but it was a good run. After two and a half hours on top we retired once more as champions in the eyes of a grateful nation.

George and I were keen to see a movie, and Ratatouille seems to be all the rage among our 25-35 peer group. It started very badly, but progressed to being entertaining (though I think one viewing is enough for this critic). I was terrified for a while that it was going to be an hour and forty minute-long cooking lesson for idiots. The ham-fisted attempts to educate the audience about food and the professional kitchen were not welcome.

That being said, we saw it at a really nice independent cinema in the east village. The main auditorium is a converted three-level theatre, with even the side boxes still intact! (Though alas, inaccessible, and they would offer a poor view in any case.) It was clearly a very nice theatre in its day, and it retained all of that charm; it was, in short, the best cinema I’ve ever been in.

I think this is also the first Pixar film I’ve seen in a cinema, which leads me to an observation.

We arrived right at showtime, expecting to be advertised at for 20 minutes, then sit through a bunch of trailers for idiotic summer kids movies.

Instead, we saw a delightful Pixar short and were whisked directly into the feature. The second most awful part of the moviegoing experience, just behind being asked to pay $4 for water, had been neatly excised.

So my question for the audience: was this a one-off experience by a posh New York cinema who know that it will build customer loyalty and, frankly, can easily charge an extra $1 per ticket to compensate for it?

Or did Pixar, in what I would consider to be very much Steve Jobs’s style, tell cinemas across the country that they could show the film only if they agreed to nix the trashy advertising? Even if it meant they had to charge cinemas less per copy — which I’d doubt, given Pixar’s can’t-lose record for filmmaking — going ahead and choosing the improved aesthetic, customer experience, and long-term brand loyalty over the quick buck.

I fear the former, but Steve’s hollywood, indeed cultural, clout has never been higher, and it seems like the sort of thing that he would care about.

I’m about halfway through Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, the excellent sequel to the equally-excellent The Making of the Atomic Bomb. The sequel has so far spent less time on the basic science of the new bomb and focused more on the political environment of the time, in this case the emerging Cold War.

When it came to Operation Vittles, the 321-day Allied airlift to break the Soviet blockade of Berlin, newly-appointed airlift commander Maj. Gen. Tunner transformed chaos into order, dramatically increasing the airlift’s effectiveness and proving its long-term viability.

Perhaps his most important change was to order that all missions follow instrument flight rules in all weather. This, combined with the instruction that any aborted landing return to base without a second attempt, meant that pilots could be easily and routinely sequenced, a landing every 3 minutes, around the clock, in virtually any weather. Lines of planes, spaced 3 minutes apart, all the way back to the Allied air bases supplying Berlin.

[Tunner] also believed the Soviets underestimated the significance of instrument flying — of navigating with compass and attitude indicator without ground reference, a skill American military aviators had developed in the 1930s, well before radio or radar guidance systems came along. “The Russians were good pilots … but always beneath the clouds, never on instruments. I am convinced that the Russian unfamiliarity with instrument flying led them to take our airlift too lightly… They did not think we could do it.”

If our military aviators had continued to fly on their own visual navigation in good weather, not only would they have been caught off-guard by unexpected North German fog, but the precision sequencing that comes with everyone following the same pre-cleared, published procedures would never have been possible. The airlift that the President had hoped would merely stretch supplies and buy time for negotiation became the salvation of West Berlin, a plane touching down each minute at its peak.

(Operation Little Vittles was pretty excellent too, while we’re on the topic.)

You would think, considering how much I complain about the rain in Boston, that it would be fairly easy for me to get good instrument conditions. This summer, though, it seems to oscillate between severe clear and thunderstorms — even though those mythical thunderstorms never actually drop any lightning in Cambridge where I can enjoy it.

Today, at last, was excellent. Forecast ceilings around 600 feet, no thunderstorms, reasonable winds, light turbulence. Even the drizzle stopped at the airport, so I didn’t have to preflight in rain gear.

FlightAware, great service though it may be, turns out to be pretty useless for these local flights. The tracks are 8 and 17 minutes long which, thinking back, are right about when I started getting vectors from ATC. I’m not sure why that affects anything, because it’s not like I change transponder codes or cancel IFR.

Given the FlightAware failure, I’m pleased that this cheap little GPS tracker is working out reasonably well. It took a bit of tinkering, and I don’t think it’s as accurate as the Garmin that Stuart had in Australia, but I only notice when I’m moving really slowly, like walking around town.

Even today’s conditions weren’t quite perfect IMC; the tops of the clouds ended up being down around 2800, so I spent most of the en-route portion VFR-on-top.

On the other hand, the weather was great for approaches almost down to minimums, breaking out around 400′ above-ground each time.

Pease Tower gave me an altitude warning just as I was breaking out, which made me a little nervous — those are usually the last words you read about in an NTSB transcript before they start counting bodies — though neither John nor I saw anything wrong. We were right where we should have been, still 100′ above the minimum for that approach, altimeter set correctly. We could see the trees below us at that point, so it ceased to be a big deal. Maybe it was a high-strung trainee, or maybe the radar was showing something different.

Start getting used to tracks that aren’t arrow-straight between my origin and destination; that’s just not how IFR flight works.

I’ve been watching a few TED talks now and then, but I don’t really have the time for an exhaustive study.

blizzard made me watch this one last night, though, and I strongly recommend that you do the same.

Particularly the architects and urbanists among you.

This will probably appeal more to my aviation friends, but anyone interested in the history of aircraft will probably find this pretty fascinating: a US Government training video for the F4U Corsair, first operated during World War 2.

Apart from its clever design, dizzying complexity, and highly impressive performance, check out the power-off stall in the landing configuration, the first one they show. It looks terrifying.

I assume that one of my friends got to Ryan, and that’s why he devoted three consecutive days of comics to the fact that Dromiceiomimus didn’t bring back any gifts from Australasia.

OK I GET IT. NEXT TIME I WILL BRING GIFTS. I’M SORRY.