Tag: flying

Categories
Aging Living

The Manufacture of Emergency

The screens at Visa never went dark. Somewhere in a data center, transactions were clearing at a rate that made the number itself feel abstract, and our job was to sit inside that river and notice the one drop moving wrong. A fraud ring testing stolen numbers in ascending increments. A merchant category code that didn’t match the geography. A velocity spike that looked, if you squinted, like nothing at all, until it didn’t. The work had a shape to it: quiet, then a pattern surfaces, then the chase, then the catch or the near-miss, then quiet again. I didn’t think of it as drama at the time. I thought of it as Tuesday.

It took me a long time to notice that the shape of that work was also the shape of something in me, and that I’d built a career, without quite meaning to, out of environments that manufactured the same cycle over and over. Fraud detection was one. A Piper Cherokee is another — not because flying is reckless, it isn’t, competent flying is the opposite of reckless, but because every cross-country trip contains a small structured emergency built into the planning itself: the weather that might close in, the fuel math that has to work, the decision point where you commit or you divert. You solve it. You land. The relief is real and it is, if you’re honest with yourself, part of what you came for.

Retirement removes all of that. Nobody hands you a fraud queue. There is no fuel gauge counting down over Ohio. What retirement hands you instead is something much harder to sit inside: an undifferentiated stretch of days with no built-in shape, no crisis with a clock on it, no adversary to defeat by five o’clock. I did not expect this to be difficult. I had spent decades, if you’d asked me, wanting exactly this — quiet, unstructured time, the absence of alarms. And for the first while it was wonderful. Then I noticed I had opened a second screen.

The options positions started small and reasonable, the way these things do. A covered call here, a defined-risk spread there, sized so that nothing could actually hurt. But I noticed the pull on days when nothing needed attention. I’d be three-quarters through a walk around the pond, the morning doing exactly what a morning is supposed to do, and I’d feel for my phone anyway, not because a position needed managing but because the quiet had started to feel like something unresolved. I would open the app looking, if I am being precise about it, less for information than for a small manufactured stake — something with a clock on it, something I could watch move against me and then, with luck, defeat.

This is not a confession about trading, which when done with defined risk and a plan is just a hobby with numbers attached. It’s an admission about what I was actually shopping for on those walks, which was the old shape. Tension, then resolution. Fear, then relief. The problem with the shape is that it doesn’t ask whether the underlying situation warrants it. It just asks to be fed. A market that is genuinely quiet gets treated the same as a fraud queue with a live threat in it, because the appetite doesn’t distinguish between real stakes and stakes you went looking for. You can tell yourself you’re staying sharp. Sometimes you’re just bored, and bored, for a person built the way I apparently am, does not feel like rest. It feels like a low hum of unfinished business, and unfinished business is a thing I have spent a working lifetime being paid to resolve.

I don’t think this gets solved so much as it gets noticed, and noticing changes the ratio a little. The phone is always in my pocket; that isn’t the part I can negotiate with. What I’ve started doing instead is naming the moment my hand goes for it on a walk that doesn’t need interrupting — catching the reach itself, mid-motion, and asking what exactly I’m expecting to find. Most mornings I still open the app. But I open it now as someone watching himself do it, which is a smaller thing than stopping, and also, it turns out, not nothing.

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 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
Aging Living San Francisco/California Street Photography

The Zone

Sail Away - San Francisco - 2014

I have been alive for nearly a third of the time this country has existed. It arrived the way facts do at a certain age, sideways, while I was thinking about something else, and it sat me down. Two hundred and fifty years, and my own decades take up a third of it — whether I meant to claim that much room or not.

I used to think the road was where I went to escape the smallness of a life. Now the road doesn’t call the way it once did. Some of that is willingness. More of it, if I’m honest, is a body that’s less steady, a bladder with a mind of its own. The body files its objections. I used to override them. I no longer do — not because I’ve grown wise, but because the overriding costs more than it used to and buys less.

But I want to tell you about what I got instead, most Fridays, for not quite a decade, because it isn’t nothing.

Doug came across on the ferry from Larkspur, and I’d meet him at the Ferry Building — watching the boat come in, watching him pick his way down the gangway with his camera bag, before either of us had said a word or made a single decision about where to walk. Then we’d head out along the Embarcadero, sometimes up into the financial district, and for the first ten minutes my mind would do what minds do. It would analyze. It would compose. There, the light coming off that glass tower, wait for the man in the overcoat to cross into it, no — too late, gone. Appraising and timing, the way I’d once weighed a stock, or a runway, or a route.

And then, without my choosing it, something released. There’s no threshold you feel yourself cross. But sometime after the tenth minute, the appraising stopped, and seeing took over. Not looking for. Not looking at. The street would stop being a set of problems to solve and become only itself: a longshoreman on a break outside a pier, a gull working the same patch of pavement three times, fog sliding under the Bay Bridge like it had somewhere to be. Doug, a few yards off, would go quiet the same way, and we’d shoot for an hour or two and then find each other again at the end of the block.

By then we’d have worked up an appetite for something other than pictures. Tadich Grill, if we could get in — the linen and the old wood and the waiters who’d been there longer than some of our careers. We’d order something plain and good, and that’s when the talking would start. Not small talk. The real kind. Work, kids, the state of things, whatever had lodged itself in each of us that week. The seeing on the street and the talking over lunch were not two different activities. They were the same hour, extended. One was attention paid to the world. The other was attention paid to each other.

I have flown airplanes and driven through weather I shouldn’t have, and I loved both for the demand they made on me — the total, narrowing attention that leaves no room for the self that worries. What I didn’t understand then was that a boat crossing from Larkspur, and a Friday, and an old friend across a table at Tadich, could ask the same thing of me, for free, without a single mile of my own driving.

Covid stopped it. Not gradually — the way most rituals fade, through scheduling and distance and the slow drift of people’s lives — but all at once, the way everything stopped that spring. The ferry didn’t run. The restaurants closed. We never quite picked it back up, not the way it was. I don’t think either of us decided to let it go. It just didn’t survive being interrupted.

A third of the country’s whole life, and it took me most of my own to learn what those Fridays were teaching me — and then to lose them before I’d finished learning it. I still see the ferry pulling in. I still see Doug on the gangway with his camera bag, in no hurry, already half in the zone before his feet touch the dock.

Categories
Books Living Short Stories

Memories: The Chrysanthemums

Sometime this summer I was eyeing one of Stanford’s Continuing Education courses titled Short Story Masterpieces to be taught by Michael Krasny. For the course, Krasny was going to be using The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction edited by Ann Charters.

While I knew I couldn’t devote the time required to actually enroll in the course, I hadn’t heard of the book before – so I thought I might enjoy just getting a copy. As it turns out, the book is priced like a textbook – but I still decided to get it. For the last couple of months it’s just sat on a bookshelf in my home office – until today.

This afternoon – looking for a pre-holiday relief from work work – I picked up the book and found a cozy place away from the office to begin exploring. I read the book’s Introduction and its explanation of the book’s structure (Stories, Commentaries on specific stories, Casebooks on specific authors, and an appendix with Charters’ discussions about short stories, the genre, etc.)

One of my favorite writers – ever – is John Steinbeck. There’s one story by Steinbeck in Charters’ book – “The Chrysanthemums“. The story, like much of Steinbeck’s work, is based in California’s Monterey County – and, specifically, in Salinas.

Steinbeck begins the story:

The high grey flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the great valley a closed pot.

Many years ago I owned a small airplane and, from time to time, I would need to fly in actual instrument conditions to maintain my proficiency for instrument flight. I have vivid memories of one morning taking off and flying purposely to Salinas – which was fogged in at the time and, as a result, would provide me the opportunity to shoot an instrument approach into Salinas Airport in actual instrument conditions. Steinbeck’s story – and his opening sentences – brought those memories flooding back.

That morning was just as Steinbeck described – the fog was a lid on the valley. It was a closed pot. Approaching Salinas, I was in clear blue sky above but I needed to penetrate that fog to get below it and land at Salinas. As I was communicating with the approach controller, he cleared me for an instrument approach and I began descending into the fog – transitioning from clear blue sky to only flying from the instruments in the cockpit of my airplane.

My approach began normally – me feeling good about getting into actual IMC. But then something happened – the directional gyro suddenly began spinning. This was not supposed to happen!

The directional gyro provides the pilot with information on the heading the aircraft is pointed. It’s one of several important instruments which pilots need to continuously scan when they’re flying in the clouds. One of the risks pilots face when flying in instrument conditions is a failure of one of these critical instruments. So – here I was – in the fog, descending into Salinas, but with a spinning directional gyro.

Pilots are taught that maintaining the scan of all of the critical instruments is vital while flying on instruments. If one of the critical instruments fails, a pilot can become fixated on the failed instrument, stop scanning the others, and lose situational awareness. When I was flying, there were circular plastic covers with suction devices on the back that you could use to quickly slap over a malfunctioning instrument to prevent it from becoming your sole focus. I had a couple of those – but when the moment strikes they’re not handy – being tucked away in a flight bag in the back seat!

So I forced myself to just ignore the damn spinning directional gyro – and figure a way out.

The fog layer was perhaps 1,500 feet thick – maybe even less. I knew I had blue sky above me. If I could break off the approach, applying power and keeping the wings level, I could get back up to that clear blue sky air. And that’s what I did. I radioed Salinas Tower that I was breaking off the approach. He responded with “State your intentions” – and I cancelled my instrument approach as I climbed above the fog and headed back home. I never did land at Salinas that morning. I also never trusted that directional gyro again – and had it replaced.

As I read the opening sentences of Steinbeck’s story, the memories of my foggy morning encounter with Salinas came flooding back. In Steinbeck’s story, Elisa has her own challenges with the Salinas fog as a metaphor for her life. She lived there. For me it was just a close encounter. I made it back.

Looking at Krasny’s course syllabus, I think I’ll begin exploring the other writers he’s featured in Charters’ book – as I move beyond this initial Steinbeck story. The book is such a treasure trove of stories – I know I need – and want – to dive deeper. I’m sure more memories await!