Category: Aviation

Categories
AI Aviation

Buffer Overflow

There is a moment in a stall, before the airplane actually stalls, when the controls go soft. The yoke stops talking back. You can still pull it toward you, and the nose will still come up, but the airplane is no longer answering in the language it used thirty seconds earlier, and if you do not recognize the change in dialect you will keep asking questions in a tongue the airplane has stopped speaking. Pilots have a phrase for the general condition this belongs to, which is broader than stalls and covers weather, traffic, radio calls, checklists, an unfamiliar airport with three runways and no tower: getting behind the airplane. The airplane is still flying. It is you who have stopped keeping pace with what it is doing.

I flew a Cherokee 235 for years, a airplane with enough useful load to make it forgiving and enough control weight to make it honest, and I only got behind it twice that I can remember with any precision, both times on approach, both times because I let a secondary task — a frequency change, a passenger question, a glance at a chart — eat the attention that the airplane needed at exactly the moment it needed it most. What is strange, looking back, is that the airplane never sped up. The airplane was doing what it always does on a three-degree glide path. I was the one who fell behind a constant.

I have started to notice the same falling-behind, unrelated to constants, in conversations with a language model.

It happens on the good days, which is the part that took me a while to understand. It is not the model being slow or confused. It is the model being unusually generative — pulling a thread from something I said four exchanges ago, connecting it to a domain I had not mentioned, offering three candidate framings where I had expected one — and somewhere in the second or third of these, I notice that I have stopped actually absorbing and started merely receiving. The words are still arriving. I have quietly stopped being the kind of reader who can do anything with them.

The name I have for this, mostly because I spent some years around fraud systems and payments infrastructure and the vocabulary never entirely leaves you, is buffer overflow. In a computer, a buffer is a fixed patch of memory set aside to hold data until a program is ready to process it — a loading dock, essentially, sized for a delivery truck of a known dimension. A buffer overflow is what happens when the truck backs in and keeps unloading past the edge of the dock. The classic and dangerous version of this is not that the extra data spills onto the floor and is lost. It is that the extra data lands on the memory sitting just past the dock, and overwrites whatever was stored there — a return address, a variable, something the program needed intact to know where to go next. The failure is not loss. It is corruption. The fifth insight does not politely fall away; it lands on top of the second insight and changes what the second insight was.

This is, I think, the more accurate complaint than “overwhelm,” which is the word I would have reached for a few years ago and which suggests simple excess, more water than the glass can hold. What I am describing is not excess. It is a rate mismatch between generation and integration, and the damage happens specifically at the boundary — not in the ideas that never arrived, but in the ones that arrived and were still being turned over when the next one came in and knocked them loose.

Aviation, as it turns out, has more than one name for this family of failure, and the names are not redundant, because they describe different mechanisms. Task saturation is the CRM term — Crew Resource Management, the discipline built in the seventies and eighties largely in response to accidents where a competent, rested, well-trained crew flew a functioning airplane into terrain because attention had been consumed by something lower priority than staying alive. Task saturation is measured, in training, less by how much is happening and more by whether the pilot can still prioritize — whether they know which thing to drop. Channelized attention is the adjacent and opposite failure: not too many things competing for a narrow channel, but one thing filling it entirely, a fixation on the landing gear light while the airplane, unflown, descends into the Everglades. And John Boyd’s OODA loop, developed for fighter pilots and stolen since by nearly every field that has ever needed a name for out-thinking someone under time pressure, describes what it feels like structurally to fall behind: you are not reacting to what the situation is, you are reacting to what the situation was, one iteration back, and every loop after that the gap does not close on its own.

I suspect what I am calling buffer overflow is closest to task saturation, with the wrinkle that in a cockpit the incoming data is at least all real-time and load-bearing — the runway is where the runway is — whereas a model in full flow is producing a mix of load-bearing insight and elaboration that only sounds load-bearing, and no light comes on to tell you which is which. Sweller’s cognitive load theory gives this a cleaner anatomy than aviation does: intrinsic load, which is the actual difficulty of the idea; extraneous load, which is how badly or well the idea is presented; and germane load, which is the effort of building the new idea into the structure of what you already know. My buffer does not overflow on intrinsic load — the ideas themselves are usually not hard. It overflows on germane load. The model can generate connections faster than I can lay the track that would let each new connection actually attach to something.

None of the aviation solutions to task saturation involve asking the airplane to slow down, and this is the part I keep returning to, because slowing down is the intervention that occurs to me first and is also, I think, the least aviation-like response available. A pilot who is task-saturated on approach does not usually ask the tower to widen the pattern. He drops something. He un-couples the autopilot from one axis and flies it by hand so the workload becomes tactile instead of cognitive, or he tells the passenger the question will have to wait, or he reads back only the clearance and lets the weather advisory go unacknowledged for ninety seconds because the weather advisory is not what is going to kill him in the next ninety seconds. The skill is not deceleration. It is triage performed at full speed, which looks, from outside the cockpit, indistinguishable from calm.

I do not yet know what the triage move is for a conversation with a model that is generating faster than I can integrate. I have a guess, which is that it looks less like asking the model to slow down and more like periodically stepping outside the exchange entirely — not to catch up on what was said, but to write down, in my own words, the one thing from the last five minutes I actually want to keep, before asking it to continue. That would make the move not deceleration but discard: choosing, the way the saturated pilot chooses, which incoming data does not get processed at all, on the theory that a buffer with something deliberately thrown out of it still holds its shape, and a buffer that tries to keep everything is the one that overflows.

Or maybe the real answer is the one the checkride examiner gave me in Springfield, on a September morning in 1978, when I came in too fast and too high and asked, afterward, what I should have done differently. He said the airplane had told me everything I needed to know about forty seconds before I noticed, and that the only skill that mattered was noticing forty seconds earlier next time. Not slower. Earlier.

Categories
Aviation San Francisco/California

The Queen’s Last Climb Out of SFO

I watched the video this morning and felt that familiar tightening in the chest that only a certain airplane still produces in me.

It’s labeled simply enough: The Last 747-400 Departure out of SFO 5/31/26 LH455. The aircraft is D-ABVY, a Lufthansa 747-430 that first flew in December 2000. The passenger filming from seat 12K didn’t know it yet, but this was the final scheduled passenger 747-400 departure from San Francisco. Four engines spooling, wings flexing under the load, slats retracting, then the long climb out over the Bay — South San Francisco’s industrial lettering, the dark mass of Mount Diablo, two right turns, the airplane’s shadow racing across the ground, and the Pacific opening up ahead.

The Queen of the Skies, still doing what she was built to do, one last time from this airport.

The 747-400 has always sat at the top of my personal list. Not the stretched -8, though I flew one and respected it. The classic -400. The proportions are right. The upper deck still reads as a second story rather than an afterthought. The cockpit sits high enough that landing always seemed to demand something extra from the pilots. And those four engines have an authority in the sound that twins, however efficient, never quite match.

I first saw a 747 coming into SFO around 1970, watching something that size on final approach and finding it almost absurd. My first flight on one was a TWA trip from San Francisco to New York. I managed a few upper-deck seats along the way, which always felt like a quiet privilege. The last time I flew a 747 was 2016, a Lufthansa 747-8 from Bangalore to Frankfurt. I remember thinking the type still had years left, and being glad of it.

A few years ago, when Boeing delivered the final 747, I wrote a short piece called “Ode to a Queen.” I still feel the same way. The airplane made long-distance travel ordinary for people who’d never have managed it otherwise — and it was beautiful in a way pure efficiency rarely is. The -400 refined the original idea without losing its character. For decades it was the default long-haul workhorse, the one you hoped to see on the departure board.

Lufthansa has been the last major carrier flying passenger -400s into U.S. cities. The grounding is happening in stages now, with the last ones expected out of service next year. The 747-8 will hang on a while longer, but even that presence at SFO gives way to the A350 this coming winter. The video from May 31 caught something real closing: the last scheduled passenger 747-400 leaving the airport where so many of us first fell for the airplane.

I’m not usually one for nostalgia. The newer twins move people and cargo more efficiently and more safely, by almost every measure that matters. And still — something goes out of the sky when a design that carried this much of our collective imagination finally leaves the stage. The 747 never looked like a compromise. It looked like an answer to a question no one else had dared ask at that scale.

Watch the video if you have a few minutes. Sit with the wing flex and the engine note, the long view of the Bay Area falling away beneath a machine that made long-haul flight feel both ordinary and slightly miraculous, for more than three decades. D-ABVY did its job that afternoon in late May. The passenger in 12K, camera running, got something that airport won’t produce again.

I will miss her.

Categories
Aviation Memories

Overhead the Farm

This week is the annual EAA Fly-In in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. This brings back memories of a good time we shared over 35 years ago.

Our Piper Cherokee could hold enough fuel to fly well past what our bladders would tolerate, but we didn’t fly that way. We planned every stop — fuel first, restrooms too — and let the country reveal itself in the increments a small plane gives you: Rock Springs WY for the first night, Alliance NE next for gas and bathroom, Yankton SD to make a phone call, and then, finally, circling over a farm outside Alcester, South Dakota, that I hadn’t seen from the air before.

It was 1989. I was forty-two. My Dad was sixty-eight, sitting in the right seat of my 1974 Piper Pathfinder, painted red, white, and blue — an honest airplane that never asked for much and never gave us trouble. We were headed to Oshkosh, to the fly-in, the way pilots go to Mecca — except this time the pilgrimage ran straight through his childhood.

His people were Norwegian. His grandfather had crossed an ocean and then a good part of a continent to end up farming eastern South Dakota, and the family had stayed put the way families did then, generation folding into generation until my grandfather had more children than the land could easily absorb. Some of them farmed anyway. My father did not. He went into printing — Linotype machines, hot lead, the smell of a shop instead of the smell of a barn. But I remember the soil anyway. I’d visited that farm as a boy of ten or so, and what stayed with me wasn’t a story anyone told but a set of smells: hay and diesel and animal warmth inside the barn, the particular rattle of a tractor under me, dust rising gold in a shaft of light through a barn door left open. Did I want to help milk the cows?

We landed at Yankton for fuel and my father called his sister. I don’t remember what either of them said — it was a short call, the kind you make when you’re about to do something better shown than explained. Something like: we’ll be overhead in twenty minutes. Go outside. Look up.

And then we were. Alcester from a thousand feet is not much — a scatter of buildings, a windbreak of trees, fields squared off in the pattern only farmland makes — but down there was a farmhouse, and out in the yard were two people who’d stopped whatever they were doing to come out and watch the sky. We circled twice. My father waved — big, unmistakable — from a thousand feet up at his sister and her husband in the yard below. They waved back, two small shapes going back and forth, back and forth. Then we leveled the wings and kept going east, toward Wisconsin, and neither of us said much of anything, because there wasn’t really anything to say. It was just good.

Oshkosh itself is its own kind of pilgrimage, and if you’ve never been, the thing that’s hard to explain is not the airplanes — though there are more in one place than you will ever otherwise see — it’s the people.

And the crowd starts in the skies as you line up for the Fisk arrival into Oshkosh. The air traffic controllers are out in a field somewhere below and they’re talking continuously. “The red white and blue Cherokee rock your wings! Land on the yellow dot midfield…” Before you know it you’re turning off into the grass and being waved to your parking spot next to so many other airplanes.

Most pilots who fly in tent-camp right under their own wings, sleeping on the grass next to the machine that brought them. Dad and I opted for relative luxury: a dorm room at a local university, actual beds, actual plumbing. I don’t remember the room. Or how we got back and forth to the airport.

What I do remember is the grounds. Tens of thousands of people for a solid week, and no litter. None. If you saw a gum wrapper, you picked it up, the way you’d pick up a dropped tool in someone else’s shop. The shared bathrooms stayed clean not because anyone was assigned to clean them, but because everyone behaved as if they were company in someone else’s house.

It sounds like a small thing to remember thirty-some years later. It isn’t. I’ve described it as renewing my faith in humanity. Each afternoon we gathered along the flight line for the daily air show which was usually punctuated by the contrast between an old biplane and the sound of the latest American fighter aircraft. Amazing sights.

I had been once before, driven in with pilots who’d rented an RV, and learned mostly that I didn’t want to do that again — too many people, too close together, none of the ease of arriving on your own wings. That trip didn’t have the thing this one had. I couldn’t have told you what the thing was, exactly, except that being there with my Dad restored some baseline faith in how people can behave toward each other when they all care about the same unlikely thing.

The flight home took us back through Spearfish, where another of our relatives put us up for the night, and then on to Logan, Utah, for fuel and that bio break.

It was the leg after that — the crossing of the state of Nevada — that I still think about on rough days. The sky was clear. Not a cloud anywhere. And the air was some of the worst turbulence I’ve flown through, before or since. I tried up high, I tried down low, but there was no altitude in that whole stretch of sky that gave us any peace. No smooth air anywhere. Just wind. Dad didn’t get sick. Neither did I. We just held on and let the airplane buck and waited it out, the way you do.

After a time then we crossed low over the Sierras, and somewhere on the descent into the central valley of California the air went calm again, smooth as the farm pond back in Alcester must have been that morning, and the trip was, in every way that mattered, already over.

Categories
Aircraft Aviation

Sutter’s Balloon

At Pinal Airpark, in the desert north of Tucson, the airplanes sit in rows the way old men sit in rows at a clinic, waiting for something that isn’t coming. A great many of them are 747s, parked here because the engines are worth more than the rest of the airframe and somebody, someday, may want the engines. Somewhere among the rows is one that’s shorter than its neighbors by nearly fifty feet, the line of its fuselage interrupted just behind the wing as though a piece had been folded in and stitched shut. This is a 747SP, and there were only forty-five of them ever built, because the airplane was, from the moment it was conceived, a compromise built to solve one problem and no other.

The problem belonged to Pan American World Airways. In the early seventies Pan Am wanted to fly nonstop from New York to Tehran, a route that did not then exist because no airliner Pan Am owned could cover the distance with a full load of passengers and still land with fuel in the tanks. Iran Air had the identical problem in reverse. Boeing had, at the time, the 747-100, an airplane that could carry nearly everybody in the world somewhere, but not necessarily that far. McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed had the DC-10 and the L-1011, three-engine widebodies built expressly for the medium-haul market the 747 was too big to serve efficiently, and Boeing, watching two competitors carve into territory it had assumed it owned outright, needed an answer that did not require designing a new airplane from the keel up. There was no time and, after the financial near-catastrophe of developing the original 747, no appetite for one.

The man who supplied the answer was Joe Sutter, the engineer who had led the 747 program from the start and who brought to it an instinct for solving problems by subtraction. Sutter’s idea was not to add a third engine, which several engineers in the room had assumed was the path, since removing one engine entirely was reckoned to save a third of the fuel burn and nearly seven tons of weight in one move. Sutter’s idea was to leave the engines alone and shorten the airplane instead. Take fuselage out fore and aft of the wing, forty-eight feet four inches of it, lighten the structure to match, simplify the flaps from the standard triple-slotted design to a single-slotted one, lengthen the tail surfaces to keep the shorter airplane stable, and let the weight savings buy range instead of payload. Boeing’s engineers called the result, informally and a little affectionately, Sutter’s Balloon. The company filed it as the 747SB, for Short Body, before settling on a name that did the marketing for itself: 747SP, for Special Performance.

The first one, manufacturer’s serial number 21022, rolled out of the Everett plant on May 19, 1975, and flew on July 4th, ten days ahead of a schedule that was already tight. Jack Waddell, who had flown the maiden flight of the original 747 six years earlier, was in the left seat again, and on that first flight he put the shortened airplane through a stall and a run up to Mach 0.92, a speed that had no business being associated with anything called a jumbo jet. In November, Boeing flew the fourth airframe nonstop from New York to Tokyo, 6,927 miles, with two hundred passengers aboard, and landed in Seattle’s backyard with more than thirty thousand pounds of fuel still in the wings, a fact Boeing’s marketing department repeated for years the way a man repeats the one good thing a difficult relative once said about him. The FAA signed off in February of 1976. Pan Am took delivery of the first production airplane, named Clipper Freedom, on March 5th, and put it into revenue service in April.

What the SP was for, it did well. A South African Airways SP flew nonstop from the Boeing plant in Seattle to Cape Town on its delivery flight in 1976, a record for an unrefueled commercial airplane that stood for more than a decade. Pan Am flew SPs around the world in well-publicized record attempts, and for thirteen years, until the 747-400 arrived in 1989, the SP held the title of longest-range airliner in the world. It is a title that means something only to the small number of people who keep track of such titles. Boeing had once projected sales in the neighborhood of two hundred. Fuel prices rose through the back half of the seventies and into the eighties, and the SP, despite its range, cost more to fly per seat than the standard 747 it had been built to outdo on a narrower set of routes. Twin-engine widebodies were coming that would solve the same range problem with half the engines to maintain. Production ran from 1976 to 1982, paused, and then opened once more in 1987 for a single VIP-configured order from the Abu Dhabi Amiri Flight, after which Boeing closed the line for good. Forty-five airplanes, full stop.

A handful of them found second careers that outlasted anything the airline business had planned for them. One, a former Pan Am airframe, was hollowed out by NASA and the German Aerospace Center and fitted with a hatch that opened in flight to expose a reflecting telescope two and a half meters across, an arrangement that let astronomers fly above most of the water vapor in the atmosphere and look at the sky the way the ground never quite allows. It flew as the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy until 2022. As of this year, the airplanes still capable of flight number three: two belong to Pratt & Whitney Canada, which uses them as flying engine test beds, bolting experimental turbines onto a wing built half a century ago to prove an idea about subtraction; the third belongs to a casino company in Las Vegas, configured for fifty passengers, which is roughly the inverse of what Joe Sutter had in mind. The rest are scattered in places like Pinal Airpark, sitting in rows, shorter than their neighbors, waiting on engines somebody might still want.

Categories
Aircraft Aviation Dayton Ohio

The Gravity of Wright Hall

There’s a building in Carillon Historical Park in Dayton, Ohio, that I walked into as a child and never entirely walked out of.

It’s called Wright Hall, and it was designed by Orville Wright himself — his last major project before he died in January 1948, two years before the park even opened. He didn’t live to see anyone walk through the doors he helped design. But he had a very specific idea about what the experience should feel like when they did.

He wanted you to look down at the plane.

Not up at it, the way the Smithsonian would later hang the 1903 Flyer from the ceiling. Down. The 1905 Wright Flyer III sits low in that room, close to the ground, positioned so a visitor can lean over and see exactly how the pilot lay across it — stomach-down, nestled into a hip cradle, with a joystick-like lever in one hand and a paddle in the other. No seat. No cockpit. Just a man flat on a machine made of spruce and muslin and wire, trusting himself to the sky.

I didn’t understand any of that when I was a kid. What I understood was that you didn’t talk loudly in that room.

The feeling was immediate and hard to name then, though I can name it now: it felt like a church. The building had been made for one thing and one thing only — to hold this object — and that specificity of purpose had given it a kind of sanctity. Other museums have artifacts behind glass with plaques. Wright Hall had a presence at its center, the same way a cathedral has an altar. Everything in the room was organized around the plane. The light. The silence. The way adults moved more carefully than they did outside.

The Flyer III is the one the Wright brothers themselves considered their most important aircraft. Not the famous 1903 machine at Kitty Hawk — the one that made the front pages, that answered the question of could it be done. This one. The one that asked what came next. By October 1905, Wilbur flew it for nearly forty minutes before running out of gas. It could bank, turn, circle, come back and land where it started. It became the first practical airplane — the proof that flight wasn’t just a stunt, but a technology, the first tentative sketch of the world we’d build on top of it.

Eighty percent of the materials in that plane are original. The rest were made to replace parts lost or borrowed. The 1905 engine is in there. Orville oversaw every detail of the restoration and then, before it was finished, died. The plane was completed without him. It opened to the public on June 3, 1950, and the crowds swarmed in.

What I keep thinking about, decades later, is the deliberateness of Orville’s final act — the decision to spend his last years not flying, not inventing, but making sure one specific machine would be seen correctly by people who hadn’t been born yet. He chose the building. He chose the angle. He chose to put the plane on the ground so you’d have to lean over it, so the mechanics of it — the hip cradle, the geometry of control — would be legible rather than merely impressive.

He was trying to explain something.

Growing up in Dayton meant growing up in the long shadow of a thing that had happened there before you were born. The Wright Brothers were not myth in Dayton the way they might be elsewhere. They were local — specific, biographical, connected to real streets. The bike shop where they worked the figures out. The cow pasture at Huffman Prairie where they practiced. The house where Orville lived until he died. All of it still there, or mostly there, embedded in the ordinary geography of a mid-sized Ohio city.

But Wright Hall was different. Wright Hall was where the thing itself lived. And the thing itself, seen up close, was smaller than I expected and more fragile and more terrifying. Two pusher propellers driven by chains. A twelve-horsepower engine. Gaps in the ribs of the wing you could see daylight through.

The altar, when you finally stood over it, turned out to be the most improbable thing in the world: a contraption that barely looked like it could stay together, let alone in the air. And that, I think, is exactly what Orville wanted you to feel. Not awe at the achievement from a safe distance. Proximity to the audacity.

He made a room for it. I walked in as a child and it got into me somehow, that room, that plane, that deliberate act of making something matter. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

Categories
Aviation Business Materials SpaceX Uncategorized

Carbon Fiber to Steel

A recent video on the Cheeky Pint channel includes a deep-dive conversation with Elon Musk, Dwarkesh Patel and John Collison (released February 5, 2026).

This interview includes one of the most lucid explanations of the “Carbon Fiber to Steel” pivot Elon took with the SpaceX Starship because Dwarkesh pushes him on the manufacturing and economic implications, not just the rocket science. It contextualizes the “Steel vs. Carbon Fiber” debate as a masterclass in Elon’s 5-Step Algorithm (specifically Step 1: Make the requirements less dumb):

The “Sunk Cost” Pain
One of the most human moments in this discussion is Elon describing the sheer pain of abandoning carbon fiber.

  • They had already built massive, expensive composite mandrels (molds).
  • They had already ordered the raw material.
  • The team was “in love” with the high-tech aesthetic of black carbon fiber.
  • The Lesson: The switch to steel wasn’t just an engineering challenge; it was a psychological one. It required the leadership to say, “I don’t care that we spent millions on these molds; if they are the wrong path, we scrap them today.” This is the ultimate rejection of the Sunk Cost Fallacy.

The “Counter-Intuitive” Thermal Graph
Elon often sketches in the air during interviews, and he describes it vividly here:

  • Carbon Fiber: Great at room temp, but weak at high heat (resin melts) and tricky at cryogenic cold (can micro-crack/leak).
  • Steel (30X): The “miracle” is that it’s the only material that gets stronger at cryogenic temperatures (holding the fuel) while simultaneously resisting high heat (re-entry).
  • The Insight: He highlights that if you look at the properties at both extremes (–165°C and +800°C), steel is actually the lighter system because you can delete the heat shield on the leeward side.

“The Machine That Builds The Machine”
The choice of steel wasn’t just about the rocket; it was about the factory.

  • Carbon Fiber: Requires a clean room, autoclaves, precision placement, and slow cure times. If you make a mistake, you scrap a $2M part.
  • Steel: You can weld it in a tent in a muddy field (which they literally did at Boca Chica).
  • Velocity: Elon explains that steel allowed them to iterate faster. They could build a tank, blow it up, sweep up the pieces, and weld a new one in 3 days. With carbon fiber, that loop would take 3 months. Innovation per unit of time is the true metric, and steel maximized that.

Cost Per Kilogram
He reiterates the brutal economics:

  • Carbon Fiber: ~$135/kg (plus ~35% scrap rate).
  • Steel: ~$3-4/kg.
  • When you are building a “railroad to Mars” and need to build 1,000 ships, the material cost difference is the difference between a bankruptcy and a self-sustaining city.

Elon frames the steel decision not as “finding a better material” but as identifying the bottleneck. The bottleneck wasn’t the weight of the rocket (which carbon fiber solves); the bottleneck was the cost and speed of production (which steel solves).

It is a great example of his philosophy: “The best part is no part” (deleting the heat shield) and “The best process is no process” (deleting the autoclave).

Categories
Aviation Living

Pan Am Flight 843

Yesterday I came across a random tweet on X about an incident involving a Pan American Boeing 707 departing from San Francisco International Airport back in 1965.

The incident is seared into my foggy memory banks because the incident occurred one afternoon when I was walking home from high school (we lived in Daly City, California at the time).

I vividly remember seeing that 707 with its wing in flames juxtaposed against the hillside of San Bruno Mountain. It was trailing black smoke and didn’t seem like it was going to make it. I stood there an just stared, feeling totally helpless as there obviously wasn’t anything I could do to help.

I watched as it crossed over and out of my view. I didn’t know what to expect but fortunately there wasn’t any signs of a crash, no column of black smoke coming over the horizon etc.

As the Wikipedia entry describes, the pilots were able to turn the 707 out over the Pacific Ocean, across the Golden Gate and eventually landed at Travis Air Force Base. Fortunately the fire on the wing was extinguished and the landing was without incident.

Funny how these memories come back to you – triggered by serendipity having randomly seen that tweet about this incident which happened sixty years this month!

Categories
Aircraft Aviation Memories

My Ride in a Goodyear Blimp

Today’s Sunday New York Times has an article written by Ken Belson about the 100 year anniversary of the Goodyear blimp. Curiously it’s titled “No Drone Can Compare With The Goodyear Blimp”.

Many years ago – in high school I think – I took a ride in a Goodyear blimp. We departed from the Oakland Airport. My friend’s father had entered a contest at a Goodyear tire store and he won a ride for two on one of their blimps. He was gracious to suggest I join his son for the ride instead of taking it for himself.

My memories are faded but I do remember a few things. Like how weird it was having a team of guys catching ropes to land and moor the thing. How it had one wheel at the rear of the cabin and it would weathervane in the wind around its mooring mast. How the interior of the cabin had these sloping sidewalls and we could look down easily out of the windows.

But what I most remember was how the cabin of the blimp swung gently side to side. It was such an unnerving movement to be floating and rolling at the same time (and not silently as the two piston engines on the side of the cabin made quite a racket!).

I’m sure I have some pictures of our ride somewhere but so many of those old pre-digital era photos are pretty much lost to history in the depths of storage boxes somewhere at home! Maybe one day I’ll find them before I’m gone and delight in a new flood of memories that they bring back!

Meanwhile it turns out there’s an Instagram feed for the blimps that’s mentioned in the New York Times story today.

Categories
Aviation Weather

Salinas

Suddenly, I was enveloped in a thick, impenetrable fog. One moment, I had been cruising through clear skies; the next, I was relying solely on my instruments to make an instrument approach into Salinas. The transition was abrupt, and my heart raced as I scanned the gauges in front of me.

“Scan and scan again,” my flight instructor’s voice echoed in my mind, a mantra drilled into me during the long hours of instrument flight training. I forced my eyes to move, to keep scanning, but they kept drifting back to the directional gyro — suddenly its compass rose was spinning wildly, round and round, sort of hypnotizing me, capturing my focus. My gaze felt stuck, refusing to budge as the gyro whirled around and around, 360 degrees of chaos. I knew the airplane wasn’t actually turning but I was very confused.

“Focus, focus!” I yelled at myself. I wrenched my gaze away from that directional gyro, my heart pounding in my chest. That instrument had become a black hole, threatening to suck all my concentration into its dizzying vortex. I needed to maintain control, and not let things get away from me. I needed to stay “in front” of the airplane, not “fall behind”.

Pilots in the clouds must keep scanning across four primary flight instruments — or risk being seduced by their inner ears into believing they’re in a turn and need to correct. Instead, the correction puts the airplane into a turn, and a deadly spiral begins. I knew this, but the malfunctioning gyro made it hard to trust my instruments.

I forced my gaze to the attitude indicator, my eyes locking onto the horizon line. The wings were level — good. But I needed more confirmation. The altimeter showed a descending altitude flying the glide slope; the airspeed indicator reassured me I wasn’t descending abnormally. Finally, I checked the turn coordinator — no turn, the wings still level.

I resumed my scan, fighting the urge to glance back at the gyro. I pushed the throttle full in for maximum power, broke off the glideslope and began to climb. I knew there were clear blue skies above me. The altimeter, airspeed indicator, and attitude indicator became my anchors, each pass feeling like an eternity. My palms were sweaty, my breath coming in shallow, rapid bursts.

The cloud seemed endless, a suffocating blanket threatening to overwhelm me. The instruments became my only reality, their steady readings a tenuous grip on sanity. A voice in my headphones said “You’re not on the glide slope. State your intentions.” I quickly said “Cancelling the approach, equipment problem.” He gave me a new altitude to climb to and a vector away from the airport.

Then, I broke out above the fog layer and into the clear air above, the oppressive gray giving way to blue. The horizon reappeared, a welcome sight after the endless void of the clouds. Slowly, the tension in my muscles began to ease, though the threat of the spinning gyro loomed in the back of my mind. It continued to spin.

As I reflected on the incident later, I realized that my flight instructor’s relentless emphasis on scanning had not only guided me through that moment of crisis but also ingrained a deeper understanding of what it means to be a pilot. It’s not just about flying the plane; it’s about staying composed, making quick decisions, and always being ready for the unexpected. The sky can be very unforgiving, but with training and determination, a pilot can navigate even the most daunting challenges.

In that moment, I felt like I had dodged a bullet — I wasn’t just someone flying a plane, but had faced a serious challenge and been able to safely recover from it. I felt thankful to have escaped the failure, not fallen victim to its mechanical grasp.

The best flights always end with a smooth touchdown back home. I was relieved to taxi back to my parking spot and shut the engine down, looking forward to flying another day. With a new directional gyro installed!

Categories
Aviation Travel

Ode to a Queen

A few days ago, Boeing rolled out the last production model of its 747 line of wide body aircraft. Wikipedia noted:

The first flight took place on February 9, 1969, and the 747 was certified in December of that year. It entered service with Pan Am on January 22, 1970. … The final 747 was delivered in January 2023 after a 54-year production run, with 1,574 aircraft built.

I have many fond memories of this great airplane – from seeing it for the very first time flying in to land at San Francisco International Airport (which must have been in 1970) to my first flight which – best of my recollection – was on TWA flying from San Francisco to New York. My last 747 flight was on a Lufthansa 747-8 flying out of Bangalore to Frankfurt in 2016. 

I had a few flights in a seat on the 747’s upper deck – a special treat! The upper deck was also where the cockpit was located – it always seemed to be so high up off the runway that landing a 747 seemed to require some special skill and depth perception! On the other hand, the airplane’s landing gear really smoothed out landings as it had this swing mechanism where the rear wheels on the main landing great touched down first and then pivoted to smoothly bring down the front wheels. The early models of the 747 had a circular staircase to the upper deck where there was a lounge instead of seating. This upper deck cockpit design also facilitated adding a nose door which pivoting upward in the freighter version of the 747. In fact, the last 747 delivered was a freighter to Atlas Air.

Speaking of Atlas Air and that last 747, after delivery it flew from Seattle to Cincinnati as it was put into service. The pilots on the first flight of that last 747 has some fun on their flight – trading a lovely tribute to the “Queen of the Skies” on their radar track.

NASA used a special version of the 747 as the transporter for the space shuttle. In 2012, NASA flew a final flight of its 747 carrying the shuttle Endeavor to its new home in a museum in Los Angeles. Along the way, the NASA 747 toured the San Francisco Bay Area and I was fortunate to be able to make a few images of that flight:

While the last 747 has been delivered by Boeing, it will continue to be flown for many years ahead. Most airlines have removed 747s from their fleets but a few (including Lufthansa) continue flying them. I’d enjoy taking another trip on one of these beautiful aircraft. In the meantime, I’ve got lots of good memories about trips and sightings of the 747.

Update: February 03, 2023 – a few additional thoughts on the 747.

  • For many years, two 747’s have provided air transport for the US presidents – and the current 747’s are soon (?) to be replaced by two new models that have been undergoing customization for some time.
  • Wired added an article about the negatives of the 747 – saying it should have been retired “many years ago”. The article also adds more interesting details about the history of the 747. Fuel economy is the biggest detractor: “A Boeing 747-400, which was manufactured between 1989 and 2009, costs around $26,635 an hour to run. A Boeing 787-8, which is still produced today, costs $14,465 an hour to operate—45 percent cheaper.”

Update: February 04, 2023 – The New Yorker also has an new article about the 747 titled “The World the 747 Didn’t Predict“.

Because the 747 could now seat more travellers on a single flight, airlines were able to sell more tickets at lower prices. Suddenly, travel, particularly intercontinental travel, was accessible to people who had rarely, if ever, been in the air. The 747, in a sense, taught the world to fly.