phik

I am shocked — shocked! — to learn that, as Bostonist put it, more people than expected chose Massachusetts’s subsidized health insurance, and now the commonwealth is wondering how to pay for it all.

Even without rehashing my two-years-ago commentary about how The Massachusetts Solution does nothing to address the fundamental unaffordability of health care, imagine the surprise it must have been when they subsidized something and got more of it.

I bet none of the fat cats on Beacon Hill saw that coming.

Fortunately, they have Ted Kennedy to do his usual trick, and try to get the rest of the country to foot the bill. You’re welcome.

I met Chris and Shona at the Orpheum Theatre for our third group evening with the internationally sweaty Gordon Downie and his Tragically Hip.

Gord wasn’t quite his usual self. He was less homeless man in the subway crazy, more Rutger Hauer dying at the end of Blade Runner crazy. He also destroyed four microphone stands trying to do tricks with them. That was endearing, actually.

It was a good show — they always are — but not as good as the ones I’ve seen before. They played all of the better songs from their latest album, and plenty of old favourites with many rearranged vocals.

Maybe it’s just my inherent dislike of change, but the new vocals are not an improvement. They no longer match the rhythm or harmonize well with the music, or indeed even with the backing vocals. It sounds like he just got tired of singing those songs the same way and wanted to mix it up, but it’s unfortunate. You could hear it starting to happen already in some of the songs on their That Night in Toronto dvd.

More unbelievably for a band like the Hip, the opening band, The Joel Plaskett Emergency, were abysmal. The lead guy was a technically proficient guitar player, but I’ll go no further. The songwriting was terrible. I figured these guys must be Gord’s nephews or something, because there’s no way The Hip should have taste that bad.

And now it turns out this guy won an East Coast Music Award for songwriter of the year? Those big Halifax award shows are dead to me.

Right. I’ve had the helicopter itch for a long time.

I don’t know when it started, exactly, but once I finished my instrument rating, and I realized that it wouldn’t actually bankrupt me, I decided to make it happen.

Today was my first lesson in the Robinson R44. Most people, myself more or less among them, come from the school of thought that believes that helicopters are basically designed in the factory to kill you.

So imagine my surprise when, three minutes after take-off, I am responsible for all four (or three, depending on how you look at it) controls and we’re heading directly for downtown Boston.

The actual flying turned out not to be very difficult — at least for this instrument-rated airplane pilot. My new instructor says that this is very common, that instrument pilots are quick studies, because they are already very sensitive to the attitude of the aircraft.

Small movements of the controls. This is the key.

The flying I found pretty easy. It was definitely made easier by the fact that this helicopter has a governor.

To explain the governor, it would help to first explain the four fundamental helicopter controls: collective, throttle, cyclic, and anti-torque.

The collective changes the pitch angle of all the main rotor blades. When you raise the collective, you’re causing the blades to impact the air at a larger angle. Basically, when you raise the collective and increase the blade angle, you’re commanding the ship to rise.

The cyclic control tilts the entire main rotor assembly, which changes the direction of thrust. For example, if you push the cyclic forward, you tilt the blades forward, which causes more thrust towards the rear of the ship, and the helicopter moves forward.

The throttle controls how much power is delivered by the engine. All else being equal, higher throttle means the blades spin faster and generate more thrust. If that thrust is pointed upward, you rise. If it’s pointed forward, you move forward faster.

Finally, the anti-torque rotor offsets the effects of Newton’s third law. You know Newton’s third? Equal and opposite?

Well, when the engine turns that main rotor, it’s effectively pushing against the body of the helicopter. The body wants to turn in the opposite direction, and the tail, or anti-torque, rotor pushes back. You use that rotor — controlled with foot pedals — to control left and right yaw.

OK, we’ve made it through that. So what does the governor do?

Well, when you raise the collective, and increase the blade angle, it’s harder for the blades to turn — higher angle means they’re pushing against more air, and trying to generate more lift.

All else being equal, if you increase blade angle, the rotor speed will decrease. Or to turn it around, if you want to maintain the same rotor RPM, you need to increase the amount of power (throttle).

That’s what the governor does: when you increase the blade angle, it automatically increases the power to maintain the same RPM. This is huge, because it basically removes the throttle from the picture, and means you only have to deal with three controls instead of four.

Finally, that’s behind us. If you are unbelievably interested in the principles of rotorcraft flight, I recommend the FAA’s Rotorcraft Flying Handbook, available at no charge courtesy of The Internet!

I seemed to be doing well with the controls in straight-and-level flight, so my instructor decided we could do the rest of our lesson over downtown. The city tour was an excellent introduction to the joys of helicopter flight.

We flew over Harvard and MIT, Fenway and the waterfront, and I was able to get a real feel for how to control the helicopter at various airspeeds, altitudes, and bank angles. It is apparently possible to do this same tour in a fixed-wing aircraft, but two important considerations make it impractical.

First, it would be illegal at our altitude. Helicopters are allowed to fly much closer to ground obstacles than fixed-wing aircraft. To put it in some perspective, I flew by the Prudential Center at about 2/3 of its height, close enough that the noise echoing off of the building caused some mild radio interference. Think about that.

Second, you can only slow a fixed-wing aircraft down so much. Slowing a helicopter too much can be dangerous, but at least it’s an option when you’re in close quarters with tall buildings. It is never an option in a fixed-wing airplane.

After our Boston city tour it was back to Hanscom for some hovering practice. Among my greatest achievements in life, this first attempt at hovering was not among my top ten solid gold hits.

I was told later that holding the hover for twenty seconds was, in fact, a tremendous accomplishment — that most people last five or maybe ten — but it didn’t feel that way at the time. There were very few instances during airplane training when the instructor had to take the controls, but I imagine this is something I will get used to.

In summary, however, lest you get an impression that is at all shy of accurate: helicopters are one thousand percent awesome, and I eagerly await tomorrow’s lesson.

Flying time: 1.1 hours

I listened to a voicemail this week, around midnight.

“I hate to be the one to tell you, but your car is missing a window.”

It actually wasn’t missing at all, it was still there, it was just all over the interior.

exhibit a

After the boys down at the crime lab were finished with it, I got the rock back.

exhibit b

It’s a very good throwing rock, they chose well. Heavy, fits nicely in your hand; a really good rock.

They were thorough, which is to say they appear to have examined every nook and cranny in the vehicle with some haste. As some kind of cosmic reward for their comprehensiveness they were able to locate (and abscond with) my GPS, which is a shame. They apparently weren’t aware of how expensive airplane headsets are, because they left both of those behind in plain sight.

Unfortunately they also took my backpack, which was not something I usually left in the car. It had a lot of little things that are annoying to replace, like remote controls and cables for my camera and laptop, and my Australian SIM card. On this occasion it also contained a cordless drill, two boxes of drill bits, and a stud finder. I’m a handyman now, or something.

It also contained my passport, which is the real drag. A pain to replace, although my next trip to Canada is two days before the US passport exemption expires. Unfortunately, the passport office keeps your proof of citizenship during the process, so I have to get another birth certificate to get into Canada.

I learned that although safety glass is pretty awesome, it does create the tiniest of glass slivers, like you might find in fibreglass insulation. My doctor said not to get them in my eyes.

This is bad, but it could also trivially have been much worse. I usually leave my flight bag in the car, the contents of which would be fantastically annoying to replace (though it drives home the backup value of a digital logbook). The aforementioned headsets, of course. Not to mention that my backpack usually contains an expensive camera and a bag of assorted foreign currency, which I just happened to have removed.

Good times.

I don’t think Joe found it particularly amusing when he rang the doorbell yesterday, and I began an exaggerated pantomime of looking through the bushes, offering to help him find his keys.

But when he came over today, he brought his keys.

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.

The new Air Canada section of Logan’s terminal B is terrible (jacob tells me it’s the former Delta space –ed). Though seemingly recently renovated, it’s way, way too small to hold waiting passengers for five flights — and it’s no longer adjacent to the United lounge in terminal C.

I hate it. But it’s just one more thing for me not to like about flying Air Canada, really. The camel’s back was broken long ago.

I’m talking about Geddy. Geddy Lee. You know, from Rush? Of salesmen? OF SALESMEN!

Rush formed a preponderence of my teenage musical tapestry, so when Jacob took the initiative to secure tickets to tonight’s middle-aged rock-out, it was not a difficult decision.

I should have known that they’d be promoting a new album, though. With relatively few exceptions, I am not really a fan of anything they’ve produced since 1991 (though some of Counterparts was ok). I think I enjoyed one of their new songs.

Even their selections from the vast Rush back-catalog were mildly perplexing. One Little Victory? Mission? Honestly.

But somewhere in those three hours, there was enough meat that I didn’t feel cheated. One Rush concert per decade is just about right.

I’ve been working on my instrument rating in the simulator for a couple of weeks, making progress at a pace that is startling to both of us. I was prepared for another lesson in the sim, but with a bit of real instrument conditions hanging around, John gave me an hour’s notice to plan a short cross-country up to Sanford.

Bedford, MA (KBED) to Sanford, ME (KSFM) — 67nm
(alas, that link will stop working in 5 or 6 days)

Although it was my first IFR experience in an actual airplane, it went really well. I started getting approach vectors before I even got to Pease — not unexpected — but what was unexpected was how misleading and almost unreliable the Pease VOR is. It would swing back and forth from centered to full deflection every 20 or 30 seconds, making me start to wonder about whether one instrument or another was failing, but John said that it’s behaved that way for years. Pretty startling for what is supposed to be a trusted navigational beacon.

Anyway, we went to Sanford, got vectored to the runway 7 ILS, did a touch-and-go to make it a legal cross-country, then flew the missed approach anyway and went back to Bedford partial-panel. We don’t have a GPS in the simulator, so we took the opportunity to practice the GPS 23 approach into Bedford, and circled to land on 11.

The runway lights fading into view right in front of you as you start to emerge from the clouds at night is a pretty special sight.

A homeless man asked me for change tonight and I said “sorry, mate” and he mocked me.

But I’m not accidentally turning the windshield wipers on very often any more.