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Last Tuesday, the Space Shuttle Discovery flew on its carrier aircraft from Cape Kennedy in Florida to Dulles Airport near Washington DC, where it will be housed at the Udvar Hazy branch of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.
Here they are taxiing out (I watched the takeoff on TV; the photos are of the screen)
And takeoff!
The Discovery is special for several reasons that I won't go into. She is currently the longest lived space vehicle that's ever returned to eath (space stations last much longer, but they don't re-enter intact). Discovery logged just over year in space total.
The other reason is when I visited NASA's vehicle assembly building,
Discovery was sitting in one of the vertical bays awaiting transport:
(This photo is of me, with my mobile, with Discovery in the background, taken by someone else on the tour.)
Sorry for the scruffy face. I'd planned to stay in a hotel the night
before during my drive, but it seems that every hotel in the entire
northern half of the state of Florida was booked that night, so I
ended up sleeping in my car at a rest stop.
There was a Mooney fly-in event at the Tennessee Museum Of Aviation last February. My wife and I went along to meet people, see the museum, and do the sit-in-the-cockpit game with some folks that I'd talked to before ahead of time.
My experience with our club's Cessna aircraft was that an iPad didn't
fit between the yoke horns. It seems that a Mooney yoke is wider; it
fits fine:
The museum itself has the usual stuff; engines, vintage fighters.
There's a fairly old Willy's Jeep, which was kind of cool. What
completely surprised me coming around a corner at the back side of the
museum was this:
It's a full-scale model that someone made of the
Airwolf helicopter
from the television show. The creator took a Bell 222 (upon which the
"real" Airwolf was based), made it into a model, then donated it to
the museum. It was utterly unexpected and I was totally floored.
It's nice to be surprised sometimes.
I bought some Mooney instruments from ebay last fall. They were from a late 1960s model, which is the sort of thing I'm hoping to buy in a few short years.
The turn coordinator in those Mooneys was dual powered; that is, it
would work powered by the airplane's instrument vacuum source, OR via
electrical power. The motor in the gyro is apparenlty a multi-phase
AC motor powered by a DC to AC inverter. In the TC that got, someone
had cut the cable from the inverter to the instrument itself.
You can sort of see the back of the TC chassis in the background.
That's the valves and plumbing for the "Positive Control" wing leveler
system. The post-1965 planes had a system that basically used the
TC's sensitivity to bank to kepe the wings level (and thus roughly a
constant heading). It was operated by vacuum; thus the hoses coming
off the back of the TC to controll the parts of the PC system.
The other half of the system. This takes DC input and creates 3-phase
AC to the TC.
So I cut up the cable and spliced each wire together.
Then I tested it by connecting the DC input to the inverter to a test
DC power supply. It worked! That was pretty fun.
The Experimental Aircraft Association in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, sponsors a series of two-day weekend workshops that each the skills for buildin Experimental Amateur-built aircraft. Before this year, I'd taken two of the weekend courses, and this January, I took a third, the avionics (Aviation Electroncs) and wiring course. The workshops travel around the country so that people in different regions can take the courses, but they always have a full set in Oshkosh at the end of January.
I drive around central Illinois a lot, driving on I-74 is pretty much
par for the course. However, when I exit onto I-39 northbound by
Bloomington, Indiana, it usually means I'm going to Wisconsin, and
more often, Oshkosh:
The last time I went to a January workshop, 3 years ago or so, the
travel up was horrid and snowy. That didn't happen this time, but
there was a dusting of snow both mornings I got up there:
Parking outside the EAA museum is always a good thing:
Here's what greeted participants at the start of the class. Yay,
wire and connectors!
The really nice thing about a class like this is that the bag on the
left contains fairly nice tools (crimpers and such) so that you can
get used to making the connections the way they're meant to be made.
We made a wiring harness for a cockpit intercom.
The connector at the left plugs into the back of the radio. The two
white wires at the bottom connect to power and ground. The two shielded
wires going to the two connectors at the upper right are for the
pilot's headset.
I've done lots of soldering work before, so this
part wasn't new. It was useful to learn the technique of setting up a
shielded wire. When we were finished, each of us plugged out harness
into an actual intercom to test it.
What I had NOT done before was some of the crimping techniques. A
piece of wire with some random connectors and crimps.
Also, starting with this, a piece of RG-58 cable:
stripping it:
attaching the center pin:
and finally ending up with a working BNC connector:
is something I'd never done before and was totally worth the cost.
The final project was a mini electrical system.
One power supply (a battery). One fuse. Two circuits, controlled by
a single switch. The black thing on the left of the panel is the fuse
holder. The thing in the middle is the switch to turn on the lighting
circuits. The light on the left is wired the same way as the
navigation lights on an airplane; on or off. The right light goes
through the rheostat (controlled by the knob on the right of the
panel) which acts like a dimmer. When you turn on the switch, the
"navigation" light comes on full brightness. The rightmost light,
which acts as an instrument panel light, comes on with them. You
control the brightness of the "instrument" light with the knob on the right.
Switch on, instrument lights at full brightness:
Switch still on, but instrument lights dimmed considerably:
One of the big pieces of infrastructure built during the Apollo moon program was the Vehicle Assembly Building. It's the really big building at the Kennedy Space Center where they stacked the rockets for the Apollo missions and also assembled the Space Shuttles for launches.
It's a really huge building, and an giant industrial space, and with things moving around inside occasionally, it's a safety issue as well. With all those issues, before recently it was a VIP-type tour that you had to at least know someone to get to see the inside of. Starting in November, NASA opened the building up to the general public. I drove down to Florida this last weekend to take the tour and see it.
It's pretty cool, and really really huge. I'm posting a few photos here. I took a lot more of the inside. While the experience is neat, the pictures don't really show much because there's no reference or scale.
Here's a photo of the outside of the VAB:
The VAB is on the left, and the two buildings on the right are two of the
Orbiter Processin Facilities, where they reforbished the Space
Shuttles after every flight. The two tall vertical grey sections on
the VAB are the doors that open to let stacked vehicles out. They go
most of the height of the building.
Here's a different angle. The next shot is goin to be from fairly
close to the building, showing roughly the area that's circled in
green on this photo.
This shows the bottoms of the two grey doors on one side of the
building. Notice the area between them, circled.
Those tiny openings highlighted in the last shot are three
double-width personnel doors. That gives you an idea of the size of
the VAB.
Now, the VAB is very very cool for a rocket nerd like me. However, I'd like to recommend the Apollo/Saturn Center at Kennedy Space Center for anyone who's even vaguely interested in space travel. It's a really well-put-together museum out on the NASA property. They have a really impressive collection. Apparently the way it works is that you take one of the bus tours to see the launch pads and stuff, which end at the Apollo Saturn Center. You can then take a bus from there back to the main visitor's center, where the big parking lot is.
The centerpiece of the Apollo Saturn Center is an actual Saturn V rocket, which was the rocket that took the Apollo missions to the moon. The first (bottom) stage of the Saturn V was powered by 5 F-1 engines, each of which developed 1.5 million pounds of thrust. This is a photo of the business end of the Saturn V there:
Here are a few goofy road-trip type pictures from the trip down and
back. Here's the interstate sign when I-75 splits off south from I-40
west of Knoxville.
I was pretty cranky on the way down, and I really horrid traffic
problems. That was apparently the spring break that everyone and
their dog was going to Florida. The rest of the pictures were from
the way back. Monday, April 2, on I-75 crossing I-10 northbound.
I saw this billboard a few times and managed to snag a photo of it.
I know the intention is that it means "We're Nuts!", but I can't being
suspicious that this is a front for were-nuts, as in were-wolves,
were-bears. Vegetable Lycanthropes! What insidious monsters would
those be!
The interstates splitting on the south side of Atlanta. I'm taking
the I-285 bypass to the west. That interstate goes very near Atlanta
Hartsfield airport; in fact, the highway goes UNDER one of the
runways.
An airliner on very final approach.
This was a very pretty cloudscape just before I turned off of I-75 in Kentucky.
It's so well-defined, it almost looks like a Terry Gilliam animated
head-of-God should pop out of and start dispensing commandments.
I went on a trip to the Mooney Airplane and Pilot's Association conference in October. In addition to attending the conference, meeting lots of new people, and soaking in a lot of great information about generaal aviation and Mooneys, I had offered to put on a seminar about electronic flight bags. I recruited people who were goin to be at the convention to present, and I had a camera showing what was on their tablet sitting on the podium as they talked.
I had expected that most people in the room would be wary of the idea of electronic charts, and so I structured the talks to try to sell the idea of EFBs rather than a specific application. It turned out that far more people wanted to know which one to get--I was astonished.
Here are a couple of the presetations that I got mediocre shots of
with my phone camera:
Thanks to everyone who did a presentation!
So I took a (business) trip in January flying my club's Cessna 182...and I got stranded nad had to play the I-hope-the-mechanic-can-fix-it waiting game. The club reimbursed me for the repairs, but it ended up being a long weekend nonetheless.
On the flight up, it amused me greatly that my heading for the flight
was 315 degrees; I had echoes of The Hunt For Red October goin
through my head.
Flightstar at Willard Aiport
treated me very very well--they had a red carpet on the ground when I
landed:
The weather got snowy while I was there, so I had them put my plane
inside (for an extra charge). Here it is, in good company. The plane
I flew is the closer one.
I had been there during the week riding the bus. When I went to take
off Saturday morning, I had a bad magneto check. So I ended up
staying over. Since it was basically going to be a three-day weekend
(MLK day), I rented a car to make it easier to get around. I once
again ended up not getting the car that I thought I wanted. I ended
up driving a Chevy Cruze. A nice little car, not as quiet as the
Malibou. Here's the dashboard at startup for the lights test:
And once it's running:
The center console had an aux jack for a radio and a USB jack (for
power--don't know if that would connect to the radio too):
The mag got replaced, then a weather delay, but Wednesday morning I
was finally on my way. It seems like most of the time when I'm
flying, I end up with a head wind, so I fly around 6 or 7 thousand fee
to maximize forward airpseed to fight the wind. On this trip I had
something like a 20 knot TAILwind, so I flew higher to take advantage
of it. I don't think I've ever cruised at 9000 feet before.
Here I am, with Louisville passing off to the left. Notice the
manifold pressure gauge on the right is only indicating 21 1/2 inches
of pressure (it's about 30 on the ground) because the air's getting
thin. That's with the throttle
wide open. At lower altitudes, you try to cruise at the top of the
green arc at 23 inches.
6 more hours of cross-country time, and 6 more hours of high-performance time. Despite the annoyances, a nice trip. Many playoffs watched.
I went to Kerrville, Texas in October for the annual convention of the Mooney Aircraft and PIlot's association. A lot of folks flew into the convention. The Kerrville airport closed one of the runways and used it for parking space.
On Saturday afternoon, a few people took a van out to the airport to drop off logguage and stuff. I tagged along. These pictures are fun; you don't usually get to shoot photos while standing on a runway.
A panorama:
And the panorama larger.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. I keep having these grandiose ideas of the really groovy stuff I want to blog about, but then I don't have the time to edit up the nice photo set, so the post gets delayed, and I don't write the post. I have trips in October and November that I have lots of photos that I want to document. Several interesting posts about airplanes and one about cars coming up.
One quick on that the pictures are ready for. I flew to a conference
in Seattle early in November. On the way back, from SEA to ATL, I
photographed this unique-looking river-convergence. Note the airport
marked with green dots:
I didn't have my iPad along on this trip, but I figured that this
formation of rivers, town, and airport had to be fairly unique.
It turns out that I was flying over "little Egypt", which is the very
southern tip of the state of Illinois. Here's that same spot on the
sectional on the screen of my iPad:
The town is Cairo (pronounced "kay-row", by the way). I find it often
tough to figure out where you are when you're looking at stuff from an
airliner, but this time I got lucky and managed to figure it out.
It all started when I went to renew my subscription to Flight Guide. It's a set of
publications put out by a company called "Airguide Publications".
They contain non-official information about airports in the US. The
great thing is they contain(ed) information about the airports that
wasn't in any official source. They list hotels and businesses at or
around the airport, and they have airport diagrams for airports too
small to have official diagrams in the official FAA stuff. They are
(were) awesome tools for the VFR pilot. Although I let it lapse a
couple of times, I had an active subscription for most of the time
between when I got my pilot's license in 2007 through last year.
After I got my instrument rating last fall, I realized my subscription had lapsed, and I went to renew it. Well it turns out that they were changing their format and the old format is no longer available. Huh. I started digging into their web site, and I noticed one of their products called Fight Guide iEFB. Hmm...I wonder what that is and would I want it?
There's a set of descriptions for Electronic Flight Bags (hardware and software), and Airguide has apparently decided to spend a lot of their time building one for the Apple iPad. An EFB application has and displays charting and reference informationt for operating at airports and flying between them. It can contain charts, frequencies and departure and approach information which before pilots carried in their flight bags (the big heavy bags that pilots carry onto the airliners).
At first I didn't feel a burning need to swtich to electronic stuff. While I certainly love gadgets, I have enough to think about when I'm flying. However, I thought about it and did some math. Instrument publications change over a lot faster than VFR publications, some of them every 28 or 56 days. The information in those publications is free (as a product of taxpayer money), but getting them on physical paper costs money. I realized that keeping myself in publications for the parts of the US that I would want to fly in would cost me something on the order of $300 per year. The electronic EFB applications generally require a subscription service; Flight Guide's cost like $75/year for everything I want. Given the great cost efficiency increase by going electronic, I went ahead and invested in an iPad.
The flight guide app does have charting, but I don't think it's the
best app. The one that I use when I'm flying is ForeFlight. It's a great
interface, it's very smooth, and it's very very SIMPLE. I find it's
great to use in the air. Here's ForeFlight on my iPad displaying
instrument en-route charts with a highlight flight plan:
And displaying an instrument approach:
This is roughly my setup when I'm flying:
I have the iPad on my left leg mounted on an leg
mount from Ram Mounts. That's a kneeboard on my right leg
(basically a clipboard with a strap). I have a note pad clipped in it
for writing down clearances and frequencies and stuff. This is
obviously not taken in an airplane; I just took this at home for
illustration purposes. When I'm flying, normally there are rudder
pedals and things in front of my feet instead of, in this picture, a
cat. I've flown with this setup for real, lots in VFR, and also in
simulated instrument flying for practice and in on case an actual
instrument approach. It works very well for me.
What's interesting is that air carriers that carry passengers for hire have been working on getting FAA approval for using iPads for charting devices. This February, a company called Executive Jet Management got approval from the FAA to use iPads (with Jeppesen Mobile TC application) as their charting source (article on Wired) (article on Gadget Venue). The second article is interesting because it says that they have approval to use the iPad as a sole source of charting information.
The reason that I bring this up is that yesterday, United Airlines announced that they are going to be issuing iPads to their pilots to replace bound paper charts and publications. So, for once, this is one trend that I'm actually in on the ground floor!
I've been figuring out how to make proper bar graphs in gnuplot, so
that I could make this chart. This type of bar graph doesn't work
with "with impulses" if you make the line width wide; the bars extend
below the horizontal axis and it looks like crap. Instead, you use
the plot command thusly:
plot './hours_flown_quarters_2011aug06a.dat' with boxes fs solid title
'hours flown per quarter'
Here's the graph of my flying hours through the present. I've done
pretty well over the last year. The important thing is to keep a
steady level of hours to stay current.
I spent a little time walking around the fly mart at Oshkosh. Since it was the last day, the booth selling nice models of airplanes was selling them off fairly cheaply.
I bought a very nice model of a B-52 Stratofortress
bomber. I've always had a connection to that airplane because my
uncle flew them in Vietnam for the US Air Force.
I find the sticker on the bottom terribly ironic:
My wife isn't necessarily a fan of all airplanes, all the time.
However, since the model is made of WOOD, it has a place in our living
room, at least for now. The important thing is, though, that the box
is just the right size for Pangur:
I mostly visited vendors I was interested in and stuff like that at
Oshkosh, and I didn't walk the flight line looking at pretty airplanes
hardly at all. But one thing I did do is take a look at "Fifi", the
only B-29 currently flying.
On the drive back from Oshkosh to Illinois, I got to see a tow
airplane towing a glider aloft. I got a great view of it, but this is
the only photograph of the event that I got. My phone camera (the only one
I could get to easily) kept focusing on the windshield.
The blog software is working (mostly). I don't have the sub-blogs linked from the main page I just realized; I'll have to take care of that soon.
I've made this goal before, but I'll make it again. Now that I have a basically-functional blog, I'm going to post every day here for a month. I won't always have photos, but at least every couple of days have something pretty to look at.
I went to the Airventure Oshkosh airshow Saturday and part of Sunday. It was cool, what I saw. I ended up not walking around and looking at planes very much because I had specific things to do and people to talk to. So I didn't take very many photos.
One I did was some sky writing that was going on. My mother once said that "skywriting" didn't actually write, they generally just did circles. This was probably in response to something in a children's book that had an airplane producing perfectly ligible writing. This writing isn't as good as if you printed it, but it's pretty good considering it's smoke suspended in the air and is at the mercy of wind.
Here the airplane is just finishing the "G" in "Oregon", which is a pretty long letter to write on a windy day, particularly when the "E" has 4 separate segements. Most of the time when I take pictures of stuff at Oshkosh, it tends to be of specks which are too far away to see clearly. Most of the time I want more zoom on my camera. This is one of the very very first times I've wanted a wider-angle lens at Oshkosh.
Since getting my instrument rating last September, I've become interested in "electronic flight bag" solutions for charts and instrument procedures. I looked at different applications and platforms, but what I'm using at the moment is the Foreflight application on the apple iPad.
When I went looking for applications, one feature I felt was very important was the ability, when flying IFR, to switch between the IFR en-route chart and an instrument procedure and back with the minimum amount of interaction. You can do that in Foreflight with a single click in either direction.
Here's a video of me demonstrating two things on Foreflight. First, bringing up a new instrument procedure from the en-route chart, and then flipping back and forth between that procedure and the chart.
