It was nice that both prez candidates ended the night on the same note; ie - now that the campaign is over, let’s all make a real effort not to be jerks to each other.  I feel our ability to do that here in MA may be hampered somewhat by our continued payment of state income tax, but at least the odds of passing through a second-hand marijuana cloud will go up a little.  Kumbaya, we shall overcome, this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it…abolish affirmative action?

On the flight tip, I have a stage check on Monday that will thumbs-up or thumbs-down my progression to the solo cross country section.  That is: piloting a gas tank with a huge sword on the front, alone and basically unsupervised, above you / your loved ones / your property.  To the residents of Maine and NH: please try to keep your normal “firing rifles into the air in celebration of your freedom” to a minimum.

Wednesday night’s XC flight to Sanford Maine didn’t quite go as planned.  It was sort of hazy out, the winds aloft weren’t really doing what I’d expected based on the forecast, and Boston cleared me into the Class-B unexpectedly.  But the root problem was that I’d chosen ground reference points that weren’t as clearly distinguishable at night as I’d expected them to be.  Lights look like, well, lights.  I found out later that what I thought might be the town of Dover NH was actually a Mall.

Lesson #1: If you’re going to navigate by ground reference at night, take a macro view and aim for really big, borderline unmistakable stuff.  Cities, lakes, coastlines, midsize airports with approach indicators.

Lesson #2: As a basic part of any flight leg > 50 miles or so, but especially a night flight, pick two VORs or other radio nav aids, get a solid feel for where they should be relative to you at a couple spots along your intended route, and just tune your two nav radios onto them before takeoff.  Fumbling with a sectional chart under the yoke in a darkened cockpit feels sketchy enough with an instructor in the plane, but could push one toward an unproductive emotional edge on a solo trip.  Make some bold marks on the sectional chart around the VORs’ compass roses.  Make a sticky note with the VORs’ morse code identifier strings in bold marker and put it somewhere easy to spot.  Overall, think creatively about how to construct a very high-speed level-1 cache for stuff you might really want to know right freaking now, particularly anything that could be stressful to look up in the moment.

Lesson #3: Do the above even when you have high-end GPS in the cockpit.  But when your GPS is working, don’t be ashamed to use it, because it’s freaking sweet.  When they’re in the plane, your instructor and/or FAA examiner want you to show them you know the old-school business.  When they’re not in the plane, they just want you to fly safely and relaxed.  There’s no shame in autopilot slaved to a GPS, especially if it frees up some cycles to be extra vigilant working the radio and spotting traffic.

I got to see a lot of new stuff on Wednesday.  I’d never been in Boston’s class-B airspace, flown over any neighborhoods East of Hanscom, or flown along the coastline.  Also, it was good to test my radio mettle against the unforgiving precision of the Boston approach and departure folks.  I didn’t get through them 100% mistake-free (they responded to one of my radio calls with “try again”), but I’ll be more prepared next time.  Neither of my solo XC flights will take me down that way, but the Cape is a pretty likely destination next year.

Last night was back to the practice area for some night time.  Stalls, steep turns, and a couple night landings to meet reqs.  My next flight will be a night XC up to Maine, which I think may be identical to the first leg of my first solo XC.  If I can follow my own flight plan in the dark, it should be trivial to fly the same route in the daytime.

The FAA check ride is getting close enough to make me kinda nervous.

1. My sister Maria got engaged to Eduardo in July.  They’re great people who are even better together, and I’m psyched to have Edu and his peeps joining the family.

2. If the weather holds, I’m flying with my instructor down to Hyannis this afternoon.  I’m plotting two courses; one that assumes we get cleared into Logan’s class B airspace and another that takes us around it.

3. TJIC and I are both looking forward to seeing some off-duty cops get thrown in jail for punking civie flaggers on worksites.

4. The same economic events that are (rightly or wrongly) nudging people Obama’s way in the national election may also nudge people toward Yes on Question 1 locally (repeal of MA income tax).  Setting aside the whole “they promised to bring taxes back to 5% and ignored our ballot initiative to force them to” angle, I think there’s a decent case to be made for how repealing the income tax could not only help the regional economy, but lead to higher state tax revenues over the long term.  I understand why some state employee unions are flipping out over it, but hockey stick curves aren’t just some evil myth invented to prey on teachers.  Then again, easy for me to say.  Good luck, everyone.

My regular flight instructor had to deal with some car trouble last thursday, so I flew with this other guy.  We talked a bit about aerodynamics before we went up, and he mentioned something counterintuitive / interesting / tragic about dive-bombers in WWII.

We lost a whole lot of them, which in itself isn’t shocking, but what’s odd is why we lost so many.

The problem wasn’t that:

• They exceeded the do-not-exceed speed of the airframe, ripped it apart, and crashed.
• They were usually headed directly into a hail of high-caliber and/or incendiary ammunition, which riddled / ignited the aircraft and subsequently caused structural failure / more crashing.
• They misjudged their altitude and biffed the target / ocean / ground.

Despite the fact that a dive is the single highest-speed maneuver one can perform in an airplane, the problem was often that they aerodynamically stalled the aircraft while trying to exit the dive.

One of the “flying 101″ definitions that gets drilled into your head is that a stall will occur at any speed, and any gross weight if the angle of attack (the acute angle formed by the wing chord line and the relative wind) exceeds some critical upper limit (ie - the critical angle of attack).

That law makes all kinds of intuitive sense when you consider a plane flying horizontally, then pitching up to exceed the critical angle of attack.  The relative wind in that case is parallel to the earth’s surface, which feels natural.  But it somehow becomes much less intuitive when you consider a plane flying straight down, then pitching relatively-up toward the horizontal plane.  The relative wind in that case is headed straight up, “out of the Earth”-ward.  Irrelevant rationalizations enter your mind, like “he’s still going so fast, and there’s gotta be more relative wind coming from the right, yeah?”  Negative.  The law doesn’t care what direction you’re traveling in, or where the Earth is.  You exceed the critical angle of attack, you stall.

So there you are, some poor bastard in a 1940s-era warbird, hurtling toward Earth and well-armed enemy at somewhere near the speed of God, and you survive long enough to drop your bomb.  “Whew,” you think, “time to GTFO” and jerk back the stick to stop pointing at the ship, the thousands of rounds being fired at you, and the Earth.  Suddenly the controls get all mushy, and just like that you’re no longer hurtling forward, hands first toward the ground at insane speed, but tumbling down, ass first at nearly the same speed.  You can’t see it, but you know it’s coming.

Shitty.

The positive take-away, though, is that a combination of independent study and supervised training under controlled circumstances can allow a man to win battle after battle against unintuitive and potentially dangerous branches of scientific truth.

Had my first unsupervised solo on Monday night; second scheduled for tomorrow morning.  The checklists are the same, the plane is the same, the airfield is the same, but there are qualitatively weighty differences at the edges.

For example: In the supervised case, even when the student is running the checklists, the instructor is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the initial step from “aircraft parked” to “aircraft not parked” is made safely and in accordance with all laws and policy.  From an OSHA standpoint, a Cessna is sort of like a lawnmower on its side with no blade guard, blades extended by two feet in both directions, raised to chest level, on wheels, with the motor swapped for something 50-100x as powerful.  It’s with some gravity that one cranes his neck around and yells “clear prop!” out the window before turning the key on that monster.

And like, when the plane is back on the ground and you’re back at the ramp…where *exactly* is one supposed to park?

Now cleared for unsupervised solos in the pattern.  Time to turn up the gas on studying for / passing the written test.

First flight since February this morning; first time in a Cessna 172SP.  WOW…less like a 1975 VW Bug with wings and extra gauges.  Aside from the better seats and sun visors, it also had plenty of gear I’d never used before:

• Fuel injection (no need to manually pump-prime)
• Airbags (fwiw)
• GPS
• Auto-calibrating heading indicator
• Electric, yoke-mounted elevator trim adjustment
• Auto pilot

Did slow flight, power off stalls, power on stalls, steep turns, simulated engine out, a couple touch and go’s, a short approach, and a go around.  Overall, 3 take offs and landings, all landings buttery despite some early flaring.  Should be solo’ing again real soon.

A couple days ago, finally ordered rear struts for my car; Bilstein “HD” spec (versus “Comfort” or “Sport”).

While at the Sherman this morning, updated my hardware-accelerated mainframe crypto code to reference the correct library symbols when compiled for 64-bit addressing mode.  Resolved to merge shared code from my AES and DES modules into a single source file, but have not yet decided whether to bifurcate them via macros or function calls.  Function calls would be cleaner to maintain, but I wouldn’t want the cost of an extra method invocation to creep into the stuff that’s called in a very tight loop.  I bet the compiler will optimize out the extra function call, so I’ll probably do it that way.

Went out to Hanscom, put my updated airman’s medical and student pilot certificate on file, and got back on the schedule (x12, through September).  Stepping up to a 172SP with GPS in preparation for cross country training (versus “local”, i.e. taking off and landing at the same airfield all the time).  Also, it has a fire extinguisher installed, so you know, “bonus.”

Went out to Lowe’s (Saugus) with the wife, where she talked me down from Samsung SteamWasher™ territory to a pair of very affordable GE workhorse laundry machines.  Well done, honey.