One regular reader of my blog, noting that I haven’t posted since August 1, wrote to inquire about my health. I’m fine. And Hurricane Irene was, to a first approximation, inconsequential for me and those close to me.
The reason I’m posting less these days is that I’m finding my patterns of communication changing. I’m simply using twitter more and blogging less. Accordingly, I’ve moved my sidebar twitter feed (look to your right) up closer towards the top of this page.
I’ll still be blogging here when I have something to post.
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I can’t get this cartoon by Matt Wuerker out of my head. Brilliant. More than brilliant . . . prophetic.
You can see Matt Wuerker’s most recent work at Politico. Reprinted with permission of the artist — thanks Matt!
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Technorati Tags: Freedom to Connect, Internet
This video, shot by Andy Revkin, shows Bryan Lovell, the President of the Geological Society of London discussing a line of independent evidence “from the rock record” on climate change. He says that those who say, “We don’t know what happens when you pump several hundred gigatons of carbon into the atmosphere,” are wrong. We do know. “The rock record” shows an event 183 million years ago that gives a benchmark for today. The planet warmed, the oceans turned acid, and there were many extinctions. These new findings, first published in 1999 and subsequently reconfirmed, give a clear model for what’s happening right now. The main difference is the source of the carbon.
Anyhow, watch this. It’s must-see. I’m still kind of catching my breath . . .
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My “Flying 101″ remarks in the previous post are based on my own first-hand experience flying small airplanes. Patrick Smith, an Air Transport Pilot who writes Salon’s “Ask the Pilot” column has some new information. I note this insight in particular:
All pilots experience stalls in their primary training, usually in light aircraft where the phenomenon tends to be tame. Stalling in a jetliner, on the other hand, is an extremely serious thing, and a fully developed stall may not be recoverable. For this reason, pilots always fly with a substantial buffer, at speeds and angles that are well clear of a stall onset. Nevertheless, if things go wrong, there is plenty of advance warning of an impending stall — not only aerodynamic seat-of-the-pants cues, but cockpit alarms as well. Should a crew ever find itself in such a position, the recovery technique is piloting 101 stuff, the gist of it being that you lower the nose, not raise it, while leveling the wings and adding power.
snip
It is easy to look at the early report, with its voice recorder transcript and summary of control inputs, and come away with a seemingly clear picture of the crew making a bad situation worse, to the point of catastrophe. They pulled up when they should have pushed down. But was it really that simple? Perhaps they did not react exactly as they should have, but bear in mind the greater context: They were dealing with serious equipment failures — including loss of primary airspeed data — degraded flight controls, in terrible weather, at high altitude, in darkness. I’m surprised they stalled, but not necessarily shocked.
I understand intellectually that a large jet in the Flight Levels has a much narrower “window” — the airspeed for optimal performance is substantially closer to the stall speed — than a Cessna at 5000 feet, but I have not experienced anything like that first hand. So my previous post may well not stand under close scrutiny. I’m standing by waiting for further facts and analysis on this matter.
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Update 1, below.
OMG, it looked like the pilots of AF447 did exactly the opposite of what they learned on their first flying lessons. When the stall warning goes off, a pilot is supposed to put the nose down. This is, at first, counterintuitive. The non-pilot thinks that the plane climbs when you pull the nose up. But in a stall, there’s not enough air flowing over the wings in an orderly (laminar) manner to get lift. If you get in a stall, you’re supposed to put the nose down so the plane starts flying again. This is especially important when you lose the airspeed indicator (which, it seems, they did). Pilots practice this; the instructor puts a rubber disc over the airspeed indicator (and often other instruments), sometimes two and three at a time, and there’s enough redundancy on the panel that flying can continue normally. The stall warning is one of the instruments redundant with the airspeed indicator.
The recently recovered “black boxes” reported by the New York Times today indicated
According to the report, the pilots’ first indication of a problem came three hours and 40 minutes into the flight, when the autopilot and auto-thrust functions of the plane — an Airbus A330-200 — disengaged; that was followed by the sounding, twice, of a stall warning . . . The co-pilot who was at the controls responded to the warnings by pulling up the nose of the aircraft. As the plane slowed down, it began to ascend, reaching a peak altitude of 38,000 feet. A third stall warning sounded, lasting for about a minute. Two minutes later, with the plane losing momentum and starting to roll to the left and right, the captain returned to the cockpit. The plane had fallen about 3,000 feet and its nose was pointing upward at an angle of about 16 degrees . . . Investigators said on Friday that the information gleaned from black boxes so far corroborated the hypothesis presented in a December 2009 interim report, suggesting that the plane plummeted to the ocean surface on its belly.
Assuming there were no unreported critical details, we’ve got the cause. The pilots pulled the nose up 16 degrees, and the plane landed on its belly. It fell from 38,000 feet to the surface of the ocean in a stall.
I repeat: I am assuming that I have all the critical details, and this may not be the case.
Update 1, 28May:
Today’s Vancouver Sun corroborates:
Aviation experts questioned why the pilot kept giving nose-up control inputs when the plane was about to lose lift from its wings (a stall in technical parlance), instead of the normal procedure of putting the nose down to recover speed and regain lift.
snip
. . . the co-pilots continued to increase the angle of climb, rising rapidly from 10,700 m to 11,300 m. When a third stall warning sounded, they continued to pull back on the controls with the engines set to full throttle and rose to about 11,600 m, at which point the plane stalled.
“A stall is the moment at which a plane stops flying and starts falling,” said David Learmount, operations and safety editor at the British aviation publication Flight International.
The Airbus training manual for the aircraft states, in large red letters, that in the event of a stall warning, pilots should “apply nose down pitch control to reduce AOA [angle of attack]“.
My conclusion: Commercial pilots need much more continuing hands-on flight training. They forget what they learned in flight school kindergarten.
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Only time will tell whether the e-G8 meeting in Paris this week may have been a critical event in the evolution of the Internet. After it, the battle lines are clearer than they’ve ever been. It was spurred by French President Sarkozy to convene what he called, “The major stakeholders of this ecosystem . . . the key players of the Internet and the digital universe [so they can] voice their vision of the Internet’s importance and impact on society and the economy . . .”
But e-G8 was quickly outed. Jenny.8.Lee of the New York Times tweeted:
@jenny8lee: latent theme of #eg8 conference: control of the Internet, a civilized Internet.
And John Perry Barlow, in a tweet that may go down in history, said
@jpbarlow: “The internet is the new frontier, a territory to conquer.” – Sarkozy. And I am in Paris to stop him. #eG8 http://bbc.in/lCSvEx
Several e-G8 participants (e.g., Lessig) noted that not all of the “key players of the Internet” were present. The original thinkers of the Internet — Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, David P. Reed, David Clark, Len Kleinrock, Steve Crocker, Scott Bradner and their colleagues — were entirely missing. So, as Lessig and others pointed out, were the great companies of tomorrow, the ones we don’t know about that will require that the Internet remain open, fast and free if they are to be invented, were also flagrantly absent. So were the rippers, the mixers, the pirates, the leakers, Anonymous, and the denizens of the darknet — despite the controversial nature of their activities, there is no denying that these are also “key players of the Internet.” Also missing — shockingly missing — was a representation of the recent freedom fighters of the Internet, the bloggers, skypers and tweeters who have bravely blogged and tweeted for democracy, who have fought to out and change their repressive governments, and who have been jailed, tortured, hunted and sometimes killed for it.
After e-G8, led by Jérémie Zimmermann organized a remarkable press conference featuring Jeff Jarvis, Larry Lessig, Susan Crawford, Jean-François Julliard (head of Reporters without Borders), and Yochai Benkler, to dispel any idea that Sarkozy and his assemblage of powerful incumbents represented any kind of consensus. They emphasized that the Internet must remain open, free, fast and accessible to all.
The video of this remarkable event is worth watching in its entirety.
[EN] La société civile s’en va t’en guerre à l’ e-G8 from OWNI on Vimeo.
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Matthew Kelly, a long-time member of the extended Grateful Dead family, is auctioning off Jerry Garcia’s “Lucky 13″ guitar, built for Jerry by Doug Irwin and (according to a letter by Bob Weir that accompanies this guitar) probably played by Jerry on his first solo album. Todd Robbins, who is coordinating details of the auction for Matt, contacted me because I had previously helped a friend sell another guitar that had been owned by Jerry.
The auction will be on eBay, June 5-12. It will benefit the Amicus Foundation, which Matt and his wife work with to help the destitute in Bhutan and Thailand. Todd has built a nice Web site with the details on the guitar, Matthew Kelly, the Auction and the Amicus Foundation.
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Google has just announced that Kansas City KS has become the first Google Gigabit City! First service is scheduled to begin next year.
