The Gadabout

A Different Tsunami

2012-02-11T11:25:00.001-06:00

"The truth is that those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded." ~ Herbert Spencer

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

Everyone knows about the tsunami that hit Japan last year. Narita International is not far from the coast where it hit and I frequently layover there. Often we fly over that coastline. Not too many months after the tsunami hit, I took what I think is a really interesting and pretty picture of the area that was hit very hard by the wave, but I've hesitated to show it to you. It seemed disrespectful. I've been waiting for an opportunity to share it.

Today I got that opportunity. Please click this 'Cloud Tsunami' link that is going 'viral'. When moisture laden air rises over a terrain feature, the temperature drops enough to form a cloud. That link shows this happening in the panhandle of Florida. These are some very striking pictures.

Here is the picture I took in August '11 showing the Cloud Tsunami effect on the very coastline where the real tsunami hit.

The top of the picture is pointed to the Southeast. The wind is blowing hard from the southeast over the leading edge islands of the Sendai Oshiki Peninsula. Here is a map to orient yourself. The map and my picture are upside down to each other. You can expand and contract the map and move it around to see where you are on Japan.

View Larger Map

To better orient here's some labels.

I hope you find this as interesting as I do.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Yoopers

2012-01-30T20:33:00.000-06:00

"Old boys have their playthings, as well as young ones, the difference is only the price."

~ Benjamin Franklin

Gentle Reader and Love Ones,

As I’ve mentioned before, in Minnesota in winter, if you don’t get out you will go bat-hanging crazy. Droughts make this worse – there is no snow. Generally one thinks of drought as involving a lack of rain – not so here in the frozen north-land. Now… most normal people who have a real life consider this a good thing. Lack of snow means generally safer driving, less shoveling, lower road maintenance costs and other such benefits.

I understand this mindset and in a small way agree with it. But in a larger sense, I don’t agree at all. Snow is what makes winter fun. (Yes, I know. Those of you who know my old southron self are chuckling. One adapts to one’s situation….) No snow results in living in a bleak, wind-blown tundra. Snow can be slidden upon in multitudinous ways.

I have been looking forward to firing up the sleds and going riding for months. As the dreary December rolled over into an even bleaker January, something had to be done. So, we decided to drive up to Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Yoopers always get good lake effect snow.

Further, they’ve built a winter economy around the phenomena. They have lots of active snowmobile clubs and they groom their numerous trails frequently. Copious bars and restaurants that cater to sledders line the trails.

So after a moderately detailed internet search Jaybo, Ann and I settled on the West Shore Resort on the western shore of Lake Gogebic, slapped plastic to hold a cabin and took off.

First we had to drive up to the cabin in Wisconsin and load the sleds on the trailer. We decided to take Velvet along. She loved every second of being in the back seat of the truck with us – shedding dog hair continuously and barking happily.

Lake Gogebic appears to be a natural lake. It is the largest lake in the UP, running north south and is maybe 1-2 miles wide and almost 15 miles long. Frozen completely over, the ice was roughly a foot thick. We had no concerns about riding or walking out on the ice. In fact, many people drive their trucks out to their ice house to fish.

Once we arrived at the cabin, we unloaded, set up the room, made sure Ann was comfortable with a good book then Jaybo and I took off to ride around the lake. There was well groomed trail system ringing the lake and we mostly rode on it. We did cruise for more than few miles on the lake itself. Because the UP was the only place in the Midwest with snow there were riders everywhere.

When we got to the eastern shore Mother Nature familiarized us with yet another northern concept – Ice Fog. The wind was generally blowing from the west. Snowmobiles throw up a rooster tail of ice and snow particles. Usually these dissipate but we discovered that these rooster tails seeded a low hanging fog that was blowing up against the eastern shore. We lost track of each other in the fog and had some problem finding each other. Once rendezvoused, we decided to slow down and get off the lake at the first opportunity.
We found the trail on the eastern side. Where the trail forked west, we encountered a sad tableau. A group of four sledders – two married couples - were clustered around a stricken sled. They had stopped to look at the map and during start broke the start rope. Jaybo saved the day.

He grabbed the spare starter rope out of our sparse tool kit and wrapped it around the drive clutch of and started it up. We felt all proud and civic minded and helpful as we drove the last 10 miles back to the cabin.

One of the things one simply has to do while sledding is to visit the bars servicing the trails. After a little research we went down the road to the Gogebic Lodge. There we discovered Keeweenaw Widow Maker Black Ale. Good stuff.

The next morning the plan was for Jaybo and I to ride up through Bergland and further north to Lake Superior and the Porcupine Mountain area. When Ann was a kid she used to ski there and it looked like a trail went up to the Lake of the Clouds overlook. Ann and Velvet would follow us up and I would trade with her after lunch so she could ride.

So we layered up and started up.

An expensive day-long tragi-farce ensued. Snowmobiles do not have a key. They have a lanyard with a encoded plug that the sled recognizes. Wrong code, the sled will not start. You clip the lanyard to your person so that if you fall off, the lanyard pulls the plug and the engine shuts down. Unnoticed, the plug had somehow gotten crushed out of shape – probably stepped on - since the previous ride and was not making a good contact with the sled. It would start but all the electronic indications were bad and the sled ran very badly and backfired.

This resulted in a scene I’m sure was hilarious were I not personally involved in it. Strong language and a haphazard trouble-shooting ‘process’ resulted finally in discovering the out of round bent plug. Luckily, we had a spare. Spare in place, the sled ran like a top.

We hadn’t gone 3 miles when disaster truly struck. Cruising north on Lake Gogebic Jaybo’s sled just stopped. This is not good. We took off the engine panel and discovered that the engine was jammed and would not turn over by hand. This is really not good. So we towed the stricken sled back to cabin and loaded it by hand onto the trailer to haul it up to Timberline Sports.

That’s when we broke off the plug that connects the trailer’s brake lights and turn signals to the truck.

We forlornly hoped the dealer would tell us the lanyard was the problem. It wasn’t and the fix would take days and cost a lot. Crushed and angry, we bought a replacement trailer plug and turned to leave the shop.

Then I noticed that the dealer’s wall advertised rental sleds. I asked some questions and the nice dealer said he would pro-rate the rental to an hourly rate as long as we had the sled back by 8pm. So we drove back down to the cabin, disconnected the trailer and collected our riding gear. Jaybo drove the remaining sled back up to the dealer while Ann and I returned in the truck.

We rented a nice little 4 stroke Ski Doo sled that was a lot of fun.

Setting a rendezvous point at the Superior Pub on the shores of Lake Superior, Ann took off with Velvet in the truck while Jaybo and I took off up Snowmobile Route 1 to meet her. It was roughly a 35 mile ride up. The first half was just gorgeous – the trails well groomed and thick with snow. When we came over the rise and looked down the 15 miles to Lake Superior it was a wonderful vista.

Then we hit the moguls. I have since researched what causes snowmobile moguls. Evidently when lots of sleds repeatedly hit a low spot the track digs in and throws snow back. Repeat this over time and you get a non-periodic sinusoid that can be feet deep. The only way to fix this is with expensive groomers and the club that was responsible for the route had fallen on hard times. The last 10-15 miles up to Lake Superior was bone jarring and miserable.

Lake Superior is fascinating in winter. Only in the most extremely cold winters does it ever freeze over. Which is not the same thing as saying it doesn’t have ice. The shores are lined with drift ice, piled ice and ice balls. These make the shore line an interesting and dangerous place to walk. Ann got up to the lake before we did and took Velvet out to explore the edges and collect driftwood. We met her out next to the lake and took some nice photos.

Then we went into the Superior Pub and had a nice lunch.

After lunch, Ann put on her snowmobile outfit and Velvet and I followed along the shore in the truck headed up towards Lake of the Clouds overlook. The last 7 miles of the run are closed to autos - snowmobile only. So while Jaybo and Ann ran up to the overlook Velvet and I had a nice walk in the snow around the closed Porcupine Mountain Ski Area.

Ann and Jaybo came back down with a glowing review and that I had to go up. So I swapped with Ann and she walked the dog. Lake of the Clouds is a natural lake between two very high, steep cliffs. It is beautiful in the summer and quite lovely in the winter. The trail up is really the two lane asphalt road that cars drive in the summer. It is a very nice snowmobile run.

At this point, it was about an hour to sunset and I really didn’t want to pay rental fees for riding after dark. So we set off back to Bergland to return the rental. I was not really looking forward to the moguls. I was very pleasantly surprised - Jaybo and I had the best 25 mile ride of our lives because we took a different trail. The trail was like the ride up to the overlook - a closed two lane road. We never got slower than 50 miles / hour and just skimmed along the wooded route. It was pretty and smooth and really quite wonderful. The early disasters seemed insignificant and I’m glad we did it.

After we turned the rental in, we decided to see what the Hoop N Holler Bar was all about. I took the sled back down to the lake and over to the bar. It was easy to find as it was well it up on the lake side with a big fluorescent “Hoop N Holler” sign. We had more Widow Maker and corn critters and a pleasant time discussing the day.

Then I got to navigate the inky black lake back to the cabin. It was a really interesting feeling. Gentle Reader, I have crossed both the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean many times, at night, in the weather. But the MD11 has modern GPS and INS systems. Being out on Lake Gogebic at night, by myself, with no navigational equipment was a totally different story – it was totally Ded Reckoning. I felt my way along looking at the lights of the cabins on the shore line and trying to remember what the lights of the West Shore Resort looked like. In the back of my mind, I realized that if this sled quit, I’d be out on the snow covered ice, a long way from the shore in the dark. I didn’t like it.

About the time I thought that I might be seeing the resort lights, Jaybo drove down the ramp and flashed his high beams at me. It was a comforting feeling.

Ann cooked a nice meal and we went to bed. The next morning I got up first and took Velvet out into the morning for her walk.

We packed up and started to repair the trailer brake light plug. That’s when we discovered that we had bought the wrong plug. So, we drove back west with the brake lights out, broken plug in my pocket next to the receipt from the dealer, hoping that if we got stopped the Highway Patrol would believe our story. Finally we found a NAPA parts store in Ironwood and fixed the plug.

We had a very nice meal in the very nice South Shore Brewery in Ashland, WI, just south of the Apostle Islands. I only mention this because there was a painting of the Edmund Fitzgerald breaking in half on the wall behind our table. It fit the mood.

We went back to the cabin and cleaned up. On the way out of Wisconsin we got these nice photos.

We called our snowmobile dealer back home on the way back and he stayed open for us to drop off the broken sled.

Gentle Reader, replacing a two cylinder two stroke snowmobile engine is not cheap.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Winter Sports

2012-01-15T11:37:00.001-06:00

Gentle Readers,

This month, Jan 2012, I'm completely off work. Because of my juniority in the Anchorage domicile I wound up 'getting' two vacations in the deep dark Alaskan winter. So, I need to find something to do here in the frozen Minnesotan tundra to fill the time. There hasn't been much snow so riding the snowmachines has been sparse.

Which brings me to this prediction by way of multiple choice question by John Leo sometime back....

The biathlon is a Winter Olympic event combining cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. Because of its popularity, the next winter games will add this event:
a. Sitz bath-and-shoot match. (Jacuzzis and Uzis)
b. Bobsledding and grenade throwing
c. Speed skating and bazookas
d. Ice dancing and fragmentation bombing.

None of those came to be, but we did get Red Bull's Crashed Ice, which is almost as suicidal. This year, Red Bull chose St Paul, MN to expand their racing and built a new track on the big hilly bluff that the city commands. It's been all over the news for the last weeks.

Click here, here, and here please to read some of these stories. That third link has some interesting videos.

This link has some great overhead pictures of the race course and the cathedral.

Last night was the final event. Ann, Jaybo and I decided to go down and see what it was all about. It was a clear, crisp cold night, 19°F or -7°C if you insist on measuring temperature in communist units. So we layered up in warm clothing, loaded up the urban assault vehicle and drove off to St Paul.

Once we were there, they announced that there were 80,000 attendees. Please imagine that for a minute gentle reader. It's dark, it's cold and 80K humans to include some children and a few dogs bundled up and went outside to watch a group of 100 or so unemployed hockey players skate down an icy chute at break neck speeds. The hillside around the St Paul Cathedral was a sea of humanity.

Red Bull puts on a good show - and sells a non-trivial amount of product. The layer of thin snow was ground into a dusty powder under the masses. You could smell the cigar smoke, alcohol and other by-products of a lot of people having a good time.

The race itself seemed to be a secondary interest for the vast majority of the attendees. Unless you position yourself so that you can see the several Jumbotrons showing the entirety of the race you only see small segments of the race course itself. Most people were there to watch the human race, methinks.

I forgot to take a good camera, but I did pull out my 'droid and gamely tried to record some of the scene. Here I am standing downhill from the cathedral looking back toward the course.

Here are Ann and Jaybo in roughly the same spot.

After that we moved up onto the cathedral steps to get a closer look. Note the state capital across the valley and the sea of humanity.

This put us in position to see this snippet of the final heats of the race.

After the race, we had intended to walk back up to St Paul's bar district and warm up in at The Happy Gnome, one of my favorite institutions offering adult beverages. It was everyone else's favorite too. They were doing a booming business so we left and and went to Eagan's Granite City Brewery where we arrived just in time to see the Tebow story die. But that's another tale.....

I'm glad we went to see this. If you are silly enough to live in Minnesota, you either sit indoors all winter and go quietly crazy or you find ways to enjoy the great outdoors. Good clothing is the key.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Not Another Sunset

2011-12-22T20:20:00.000-06:00

Gentle Readers,

Merry Christmas from Anchorage, Alaska!

While this may look like yet another sunset picture, it isn't. It's high noon on the shortest day of the year: the Winter Solstice. Since Anchorage sits only 5° south of the Arctic Circle, it never has a day without sun. However, the sun spends the short day just skimming the horizon never rising more than 6° above it.

I took this picture yesterday just afternoon and thought you might enjoy it.

Dad / Geoff

Yet another sunset

2011-08-08T06:31:00.000-05:00

“A cloud does not know why it moves in just such a direction and at such a speed...It feels an impulsion...this is the place to go now. But the sky knows the reasons and the patterns behind all clouds, and you will know, too, when you lift yourself high enough to see beyond horizons.” ~ Richard Bach

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones All,

I apologize up front for dumping two cliches on you at once. Sunsets and Richard Bach quotations - how boring. Yes, I am about to show you yet another sunset. I thought this one was special and deserving.

We took off yesterday from Guam in the western pacific and flew to Taipei, Taiwan. A tropical depression was forming to the northwest of Guam and we had to work our way through it. The clouds were layered and varied and it produced a really pretty progression of pictures.

This satellite photo may or may not orient you to the trip. PGUM in the bottom right is Guam and RCTP on the northern part of Taiwan is Taipei. The cloud mass to the northwest of Guam is the area these photos are from. Please recall that you can click on the pictures to blow them up.

I knew the sun was going to be in our eyes for the cruise west. But instead of being a nuisance, we climbed out of the lower cloud deck to see this. We are cruising at 40,000' above sea level an there is a fairly thick layer of stratus clouds above us.

I zoomed in on the center of the sunlit area to produce this next picture.

For some perspective, here is the sunset framed by the windscreen and instrument panel.

I like this next picture the best. It shows the layered nature of the storm. There is the status overhead and the cumulus clouds in the distance. In the middle are the translucent cirrus clouds and through them you can see more cumulus below. The cumulus are dark and unlit by the Sun as it has already set behind the clouds at that lower level.

As the Sun sank lower the clouds became more purple.

And finally, just before the sun set, this:

Because we were flying just slightly slower than the sun was moving down the sky, this whole process took about 45 minutes.

I hope you found these pictures as pretty as I did.

On that note, I remain,

Dad /Geoff

Omaha Beach - 67 Years Later

2011-06-11T12:51:00.000-05:00

"I couldn't be happier if we had the kind of world in which people in my profession were permanently out of job." ~ Dwight Eisenhower

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

I'm sitting in a hotel in Gay Paree, France as I write this. Four days ago I read this post in one of Ann's and my favorite blogs. Towards the bottom of that link is another link to an essay entitled: First Wave at Omaha Beach. If you could not stomach the opening scenes of "Saving Private Ryan" then I recommend that you not read the essay.

Yesterday, we flew from Indianapolis to Paris. The arrival routes you directly over the landing beaches of D-Day and Omaha Beach in particular. Having just read those essays, I was somewhat awestruck to be flying over the scene. I did remember to take a few snaps that I will share later.

To orient you, here are two maps:

View Larger Map

I stole that last map from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omaha_Beach

Here are the poor pictures that I took. In all them we are flying east towards Paris. We flew directly over the beaches.

In this first picture, we are due south of Cherbourg and looking directly at the landing beaches. Omaha Beach is closest.

I have flown into Paris fairly often in my career. The weather in Europe is often bad and this was really the first time it was clear enough to see these beaches. I lack the skills to convey the awe I felt as we flew down the beaches at 35,000'.

On that note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

San Francisco Walkabout

2011-06-09T17:50:00.001-05:00

"The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." ~ Mark Twain (Not)

Esteemed Readers and Loved Ones,

The Mark Twain quotation beginning this post is almost mandatory when discussing San Francisco. I've heard it all my life - which is why I was surprised to find this link on snopes.com debunking Twain. Pressing on into the murk, the weather in the San Francisco Bay area is notoriously fickle and can change several times during the day - more on that later.

This is going to be a long and muddled mess. I apologize up front. The post will be organized around my favorite walk along SF Bay and I don't know how to organize it any better than this. I’ve been walking this route for years and I intend to jumble observations together. The upshot is that in mid April, I spent a nice 24 hour layover in San Francisco at the Tuscan Inn in the Fisherman's Wharf district. On Saturday, My FO and I walked out the base of the Golden Gate Bridge and back.

First, for your orientation, here is a google map of our walk. I used the GPS in my droid phone to trace our walk.

View Saffron Cisco Walk in a larger map

I stole this picture from Wikipedia. It gives a visual overview of some of the route from the opposite side of the bay.

We started the walk in the Fisherman's Wharf area of San Francisco. There probably is no more "touristy" an area in the world. Since it was Saturday afternoon both the tourists and the locals were out in force on a very nice day. The range of folks walking around this area is huge - Tatooed, fat, skinny, old, young, Americans, foreign visitors - use your imagination - they are all there and thronging around the street mimes, restaurants and the street car station.

My favorite street mime really isn’t a mime - it's the San Francisco Bush Man. He's an older codger who has a pair of artificial palm fronds. He kneels down on the curb and crosses the fronds in front of his face. With all the confusion and hectic activity, this simple camouflage seems to work perfectly and he blends into the chaos. At random he spreads the fronds out and jumps up and screams ‘boo!’ It always works and he scares the clichés out of people – then they move on a bit and stop to watch the next sucker get startled. I have no idea how this works out to be a business model – there’s probably a government subsidy at work here - but he doesn’t appear to be starving to death.

As we went west towards Fort Mason and the basin just east, we passed a guy walking in a wet suit. The top of the wet suit was peeled back down around his waist and he was bare-chested. This being Saffron Cisco, my immediate reaction was ‘nice fashion statement.’ I had to revise this estimate as we approached the basin as there appeared a growing number of wet suited swimmers emerging from the frigid water. It was some kind of swim competition. We never did figure it what was going on.

Past the basin, you climb the hill up to Fort Mason.

Before I discuss Fort Mason, I want to discuss a “Pro-Choice Rally” I saw on this spot some years ago. This is from an e-mail I sent out to friends and family before I started blogging – I will italicize the early stuff. My observations back then were somewhat political for which I apologize.

I hadn't gotten a quarter of a mile before I ran into a "Pro Choice Rally". Well, it is Saffron Cisco, I expected to see all the usual suspects. There were somewhere in the vicinity of 150 sandal clad, wire rimmed, hairy legged, Pelosi voting, Bush hating patriots shouting various slogans.

I need explain no more, everybody's seen them. I did note - despite the fact that I am somewhat aged, I'm still a red-blooded American male – that short of a massive makeover or change in orientation, many of the protestors were not likely to need the services of an abortion doctor any time soon. I managed to escape getting any brochures or other consciousness raising literature and continued my walk up over the hill through Fort Mason.

Fort Mason is really a pretty vantage point for the San Francisco Bay. Big old trees - Eucalyptus, I think, but my arboreal identification skills are severely lacking - line the sidewalk and frame the Bay, the Golden Gate Bridge, all the sailboats, and Alcatraz.

Fort Mason is also a rough demarcation line. Most of the tourist types don’t/can’t climb the hill. You begin to run into the locals and physical fitness types.

At this point, I will return to my description of the walk years ago.

West of Ft. Mason is a long narrow grassy park in front of the waterfront district that used to be a landing strip – Crissy Field. There is a plaque there commemorating the pilots who flew airmail in and out of SF there.

As I walked down the hill towards the strip, I noticed several thousand people milling about. I thought "Great, more protests." As I walked closer, I noted that the signs being carried were "Pro-Life" signs and that bearers were more neatly attired than the previous activists I'd seen. "Great," I thought, "it’s a Pro-Choice rally with Pro-Life guys on the outside. Hope this doesn’t’ get violent. Maybe I ought to turn around.” But then I noted there were plenty of SFPD

That's when I discovered that all of the thousands of people milling about were Pro-Lifers: all of them. Imagine that: a huge Pro-Life rally and walk-a-thon in Saffron Cisco. They literally dwarfed the measly crowd of Pro-Choicers I'd just seen. There was a line of buses that had hauled them in. I counted 25 Porta-Potties set up to handle the crowd and a speaker system. This thing was well planned.

Then I saw the coupe-de-grace. Overhead, a Cessna 172 was pulling a huge banner up and down the San Francisco waterfront that said: "Stop Abortion Now!"

Gentle Readers, say your prayers and get right with the Lord because I think this is one of heralds of the end times. It's gotta be in Deuteronomy somewhere.

One final thing to note: There is a sociological concept called the "Roe Effect." The Roe Effect states that since Pro-Choicers reproduce at much lower rate that Pro-Lifers, Pro-Choice will lose political influence over the generations as their numbers decrease. I think I saw this at work today. First, the Pro-Choice rally was much smaller than the Pro-Life Rally by a factor of 10 or so. Second, there were no children at the Pro-Choice Rally. None.

On the other hand, children were running all through the Pro-Lifers. Some were carrying the same signs as the adults. Two little boys were having a sword fight with their Pro-Life signs. Most telling, I saw one cute little boy thwack his little sister with his sign. Once. Then his Mom explained to him in easily understood terms why he shouldn't do it again. I'm sure there's a parable somewhere in this, but I'll leave it as an exercise to the student, as my math teachers used to say.

The Marina area is wonderfully picturesque especially when there is no fog to obscure the view west.

The Presidio climbs to the south and is very lovely. Nor is the terrain and the Golden Gate Bridge the only view. There is a wide jogging path along the bay shore with lots of physically fit people jogging by in spandex attire. You see all sorts of folks splashing in the bay, many with dogs running around free with their tails whirling in happy arcs. Hundreds of tennis balls and Frisbees add to the bedlam getting happily chased and chomped.

There are lots kites too as the wind never stops blowing through the strait.

As I said earlier, SF’s weather changes. As we got further west, the fog rolled through the straits, the Bridge’s foghorn began blaring and the bridge disappeared. It also got increasing colder the further as nature demonstrated adiabatic cooling.

Soon you come to the main portion of Crissy Field which is just chock full of aviation lore. The old hangars that line the field are now used for several touristy kinds of businesses. Climbing Walls and Trampolines abound inside the old hangars as little and big kids have fun.

At the end of the walk is Fort Point. It is a fort that was built out of brick and mortar prior to the Civil War and intended to guard the entrance to San Francisco Bay. Now it sits at the foot of the south support of the Golden Gate Bridge. The literature says that it sits on the rubble of an even earlier Spanish Fort that occupied the same ground.

In the big scheme of things, standing alone, most of us would find this fort to be a huge artifice. It is 4 stories high and probably covers most of an acre. It was built to house a lot of soldiers under siege and is massively thick and looming.

At least it would loom if it didn’t sit directly under the Golden Gate Bridge. For looming purposes you can’t beat the bridge and it just dwarves the fort.

It was very cool at the fort and we were dressed lightly and somewhat sweaty from the long walk out. We did not tarry long, but got some interesting pictures.

On that happy note,

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Snowmachines

2011-04-18T15:26:00.000-05:00

"Winter is not a season, it's an occupation." ~ Sinclair Lewis

Esteemed Readers and Loved Ones,

I am writing this at Ilona's Bed and Breakfast in Anchorage, Alaska.

As I've written elsewhere in this blog, here and here, my family enjoys snowmobiling - or, as they say here in Alaska - Snowmachining.

Two days ago, as we were climbing out of Anchorage for Oakland, Ca, I was looking at the beautiful mountains and glaciers that are south of Whittier, Ak. Suddenly, I realized I was looking at snowmachine trails on top of the glaciers.

By the time, I got my camera out and set up, we had flown far enough southeast to make a good picture impossible. Still, I clicked this snap hoping to show you the trails.

It's a pretty picture, but doesn't show what I hoped. I loaded the picture into photoshop and messed around with the contrast hoping to come up with something. I got this picture which I hope is more informative.

These pictures are only moderately interesting and I wasn't going to show you them. But this morning at breakfast I read this story: Injured Snowmachiner pulled from glacier crevice.

Thinking maybe I had pictures of this saga, I went to google maps. I discovered I didn't. The Nelchina Glacier is north of Anchorage in the northern part of the Chugach Park.

View Larger Map

I hope you find this as interesting as I did.

On that note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Tanker Pilot

2011-03-22T09:43:00.000-05:00

"I found out that it's a whole lot easier to be brave while strapped in the cockpit of a plane 5 miles high, where you've got some control, than to be stripped of your clothes in a room alone and tortured while nobody else knows you're alive. That's when it's tough to be brave."
Col Leo Thorsness
Fear Can Be Your Best Friend

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

This is going to be a long, rambled mess. Sometimes life is like that. It's a story of several people that I admire greatly.

It started when I got an email today from a friend today linking me to this story from Sacramento.

Years later tanker pilot who 'saved' fighter pilot in Vietnam gets introduction.

Please click that link and read the story. The reporter seems to think he has resurrected an old musty story - it wasn't. When I first became a tanker pilot in 1979 this story was told often - it was part of the tanker driver's lore. Most especially the part where the fighter guys wanted to give Mr. Hague the Silver Star and SAC wanted to punish him. The compromise was the old SAC joke: "In SAC, the reward for good performance is no punishment."

Tanker pilots don't get many opportunities for heroism - the job is to fly in big circles and pass gas. It's an important job in a modern Air Force but you are a second stringer - you are support.

The few occasions where tanker drivers are called upon to go above and beyond the call of duty are stories of legend. In 1979, we young guys sitting in the Tanker alert shack on Okinawa, Japan's Kadena Air Base told them frequently.

Several years later, one of the guys telling those stories got his chance to add to the lore. The Air Force Academy gives the Jabara Award every year to an academy grad who does something remarkable in aviation.

In 1988, Major Marc Feldman (USAFA '76) won the Jabara award for a heroic save where he took the initiative to rescue several fighters. He took off in a KC-10 with low weather from a base in the Canary Islands, made an emergency refueling and 'dragged' them up to Portugal. If he had waited for permission, the fighter guys would have gone for a swim.

One of the first things I do when I start one of these posts is to go to my quote collection. I searched on 'bravery' for this one and the first quote I found was Col Thorsness' from above. He won the Medal of Honor. This is his MoH citation. A tanker has a support role in that story too. Sometime after that day, Col Thorsness was shot down and spent years in the 'Hanoi Hilton'. His full story is here. He also has just published a book.

As I said at the beginning, this is a rambling, untidy post about men who showed gallantry in the face of the enemy and adversity. In conclusion, I found another quote that connected with me:

"There are no brave men and cowardly men in the world, my son. There
are only brave men. To be born, to live, to die - that takes courage enough
in itself, and more than enough. We are all brave men and we are all
afraid, and what the world calls a brave man, he, too, is brave and afraid
like all the rest of us. Only he is brave for five minutes longer."

Alistair Maclean
The Guns of Navarone

On that note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Jim Jones

2011-03-15T09:12:00.000-05:00

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

This is not a travelog. My father-in-law, James David Jones passed away on Mar 6. He was fine, wonderful man and a great father.

His obituary is here. Please take a moment to read it - it was the featured obit today in the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

I don't think it does justice to his life and his accomplishments - I can not do justice to his life. He was born a normal kid and at the age of 5 lost his hearing, his sister and his mother to viral spinal meningitis. This happened at the beginning of the Great Depression.

His loving father enrolled him in the Indiana School for the Deaf where he did well and was chosen to attend the premier deaf college in the US - Gallaudet University in Washington DC. He graduated with a degree in Chemistry.

He met Eldora there.

He spent 20 years in research at the University of Minnesota Hospital and then dedicated the rest of his life to teaching and mentoring the next generation of deaf. He had an impact locally in the Twin Cities, statewide in Minnesota and nationally - a well known man in a community that we 'hearing' know little about.

Just last summer the family celebrated he and Eldora's 60th anniversary - the picture above is from that celebration. There is a wonderful biography that his children commissioned that tells the story of two lives intertwined and lived well.

Five children and 14 grandchildren. Manifold friends.

Requiescat in pax.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Brown Snake

2011-03-12T14:28:00.000-06:00

    "I have never been able to see life as anything but a vast complicated
joke, and it's better to laugh than cry."

         Robert A. Heinlein
         I Will Fear No Evil

Esteemed Readers,

This post continues the story of my trip to Guam.

We spent the next morning just moping around the hotel. Our bus time to go back to work was at 3pm. We went back out to Andersen AFB and began pre-flighting the airplane to fly up to Eilson AFB. As we were sitting there waiting for the last freight to be loaded a hangar door next to us opened. The Air Force began rolling out a Global Hawk drone.

I'd never seen one before. I casually mentioned that I hoped we'd get to see it take off. The guys with me told me in a disgusted tone that the drone was at least two hours away from being ready to start and taxi. It takes that long to get it ready and 'talking' to the remote controllers. These drones already have a huge role in the Air Force and I'm glad we have them. But I don't think they will ever replace the need for having a pilot. History will probably laugh at me.

I did not take any pictures of the drone as I was unsure of security issues and did not wish to learn them the hard way.

At this juncture, esteemed reader, we come to a discussion of the Brown Snake Infestation.

Please click this link to get up to speed on Brown Snakes and Guam.

The Air Force has Brown Snake dogs. Really. Dogs who have been trained to sniff out the mildly-venomous snake. Evidently, the snakes have been known to crawl into freight and even crawl out across the ramp and climb the landing gear. Can you say "Brown Snakes on a plane?"

Please recall that we were flying up to Eilson AFB, Alaska where the ambient temperature at landing was -33F. There was little danger of us being the vector by which the Brown Snake was introduced to the frozen Central Alaskan Tundra. A Malthusian snake population explosion will never be one of Alaska's problems.

Bureaucracies do not think that way. We were getting inspected and that is that. You have to report "Brown Snake Inspection complete" to Andersen Tower along with the time the inspection was completed. So we did.

In the last post, I promised to tell some personal stories. This is a no-kidding true story. I swear it.

Run the 'Wayback Machine' back to 1979. Newly promoted 1st Lieutenant Whisler is the copilot on a KC-135A that is returning from Guam to Okinawa. We've got all the inspections complete, engines started and are nearing the runway to take off.

Out of nowhere, a security police (SP) truck appears, sirens blaring, lights flashing. It stops directly in front of us and the two SPs jump out. One has an M-16 rifle and stands in front of our airplane, weapon at port arms. Obviously he desires that we stop the jet - so we do. The other SP runs under the jet, dragging a pair of tire chocks. He reappears without the chocks so we assume that we have been immobilized. This second SP retrieves his M-16 and positions himself in front also at port arms.

We don't know why this is happening. Tower Controllers have many stock radio call phrases that they fall back on to exude professionalism when some unforeseen event occurs. Apparently, there is no stock phrase to explain why armed SPs are standing threateningly in front of your jet to prevent you from taxiing. When we asked them why, Andersen Tower said "Stand By". This was not very helpful as being threatened with deadly force pretty much results in activity that looks a lot like 'standing by'.

Next we hear: "Exxon 27, we aren't sure what's going on down there. Contact the command post for information." Inter-cockpit communications ensue describing the helpfulness of this radio call - I'm shamed to admit much of it vulgar. In those days, the navigator was responsible for communicating with the Command Post. So, he calls them and explains the situation. This results in another 'Standby'.

After about a 5 minute wait, we hear, "Exxon 27, the SPs say that you did not clear the Customs and Brown Snake Inspection." We turn to glare at the Boom Operator, who being the junior enlisted on a KC-135 flight crew, got stuck with maintaining the paperwork and ensuring such inspections are complete. Ours was a very good, experienced Boom Operator. He had anticipated this very reason for our situation and met our glares by confidently holding up the duly signed and stamped paperwork documenting the completion of the inspections that the SPs claim were ignored.

The Nav explains this documentation to the Command Post. Command Post says "Standby". We standby. 5 minutes later, we hear: "Exxon 27, SPs say the inspection was not complete and the dog is on the way out to your aircraft. Open hatch to allow entry."

At this point, esteemed reader, I need to provide you with some background aviation knowledge germane to our story. First, KC-135s have two means of crew entry. First, there is a large cargo door on the left side of the fuselage in front of the wings. This door requires a staircase or a freight loader for entry. This is the normal way that a sniffing dog and handler would enter the jet. Once the engines are running this door is not ever used as the engines will suck in humans and other debris. This is bad for the both the debris and the humans - not to mention the engines.

This leaves the crew hatch located just behind the Aircraft Commander's seat on the left side. You must open the hatch on the bottom of the jet and the grate in the floor of the flight deck and stick a long ladder down the hatch. Then the ladder is locked into place so that one can safely climb up and down it. A 'Bag Drag' evolution to load the jet usually required one guy to go all the way up into the Flight Deck, another half way up the ladder and then one guy on ground to pass bags and so forth up the ladder.

The next salient fact is that the KC-135A - we called them A-Frames - did not have the new quieter turbofan jet engines of the KC-135R. It had the older GE J-57 Turbojet engines. These engines running at idle made an extremely loud, dog whistle whine that was painful for humans. We 'A-Framers' all wore hearing protection any time the airplane was running. The noise was much worse directly in front of the running engines as the compressors emitted the whistle in a cone out the front of the jet.

Keep those two salient facts in mind as we turn back to our saga.

Soon, a new SP truck appears in front of our parked jet. It has a chain link cage in the back. In the front left corner of the cage is a forlorn huddled lump of doggy haired protoplasm, her paws held protectively over her once cute German Shepherd ears. One can only imagine the aural pain that she is in.

Military Dog Trainers and Handlers achieve a rapport with their animal charges that we mere dog owners can only be jealous of. They love their dogs and the dogs love them. When our hero opens the cage to take the dog out, the dog balks. Actually, the dog goes ballistic and the Handler is bitten manifold times about the face, neck and arms. Clearly, the dog does not want to go near our screaming jet. Gentle Reader, it shames me to admit that I joined the laughter on the flight deck. Finally, the handler drags the dog out of the cage and down on the ramp and begins dragging her over to the hatch. I say drag because I will go to my grave with the mental image of a large German Shepherd, feet splayed out in front, collar pulled up around her ears producing three folds of skin, being forcibly dragged across the concrete - growling, whining and leaving a trail of scared doggy urine.

The handler arrives at our hatch and the extended ladder. We can barely hear him scream, "I'll hand the dog up to you" to our Boom Operator over the jet noise. The Boom Operator just shakes his head "no". His mama didn't raise no dog-bitten fool.

So the handler loads the dog into his arms into a dog carry that allows him to climb the ladder. This places his head and the dog's head in close proximity and the dog begins biting him again. (Yes, I laughed again.)

Once they are inside the jet, the handler runs the dog through the aircraft. It is obvious that this dog would not smell a Brown Snake or other contraband if you rubbed it on her nose. The dog is in pain. The handler is not happy, but he's got orders to run the dog over the plane.

Once the farce is complete and the handler begins to complete the paperwork documenting this new inspection, our Boom Operator shows the Handler the old paperwork. As you might surmise, this results in an angry exchange of insults between the bleeding handler and the smug Boom Operator. The handler takes the dog back into the carry / biting position and descends the ladder. More bites ensue.

The next thing we see is the dog exploding out from under the jet, dragging the handler towards the truck, the cage and blessed silence. The dog does not bite his beloved handler as he is loaded back into the truck. The dog truck leaves.

The original chock SP goes under the jet and removes the chocks. We receive a respectful military salute and are cleared for takeoff to climb into the long, delirious burning blue.

I remain confident that we did not introduce the Brown Snake into the Okinawan ecosystem.

Next post, I will discuss the return flight to Eilson AFB and the frozen tundra.

On that note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

ps, A friend just emailed me two brown snake stories. Click Here and Here with some trepidation.

Narita, Earthquakes and Tsunamis

2011-03-11T09:24:00.000-06:00

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

As you probably know, Japan just had a huge earthquake and tsunami. The epicenter was just off-coast of Narita International where I layover often.

I was not there. It was my huge luck to be at home. I just got an email from official sources saying that all our crews are safe in the hotel which has power but limited phone and email.

The news sources say that all US military are safe - my son George and his wife Brook left many friends there when they came back to the states last September.

My heart and prayers go out to the local citizens who weren't so lucky.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Offutt AFB

2011-03-10T11:39:00.024-06:00

'War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest thing; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war is worse -- a man who has nothing for which he has to fight, nothing which he cares for more than his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself" ~ John Stuart Mills

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

Recall that the main reason for this blog is to share with you things I see as I travel. Sometimes, I share things I've never seen but I usually try for an aviation theme.

I got an email from my eldest cousin today. He grew up in Nebraska and has a deep and unabashed love for that state and his country. Like me, his first career was in the Air Force. Offutt AFB lies just outside of Omaha, Neb very near the Missouri River and therefore it's nestled right in amongst some of the best farming land in the world.

Farmers are usually patriotic fellows whose land lies fallow during the cold Nebraska winter. The farmers who live off the end of the runway at Offutt have evidently been using their fields to make billboards supporting the aircrews flying in and out of Offutt for some years now.

Here is the email:

As the fight song says, "There is NO place like Nebraska!"

WHAT PILOTS SEE WHEN LANDING AT OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE...

This is on Hwy 75 south. A farmer does it with his tractor; not sure if he uses a plow or a disc. He uses GPS to get the letters readable. He has done this every fall for several years now.

Here's the view from the flight pattern into OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE (Bellevue, NE just south of Omaha). This is what our servicemen see when landing at Offutt AFB. Hat tip to the Bellevue farmer who made it happen!

Of course this intrigued me and I went to the internet to see if I could learn more. The GeoEye website evidently posts interesting satellite imagery. I stole this image from their site. Click this link to learn more about it. According to GeoEye, this message was plowed just this year in 2010.

Next, I went to google maps to see if the satellite maps there could add more to the story. The Google maps images of Offutt were made back in 2004. I found this:

View Larger Map

So, 6 years ago a different field was used for a different message.

To conclude I give you Mark Twain:

"...the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation ALL the time, loyalty to the Government when it deserves it." ~ Mark Twain
On that happy note,

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Guam

2011-03-04T12:50:00.054-06:00

"The past not merely is not fugitive; it remains present." ~ Marcel Proust

Esteemed Readers,

This post could turn into a very long one. I will probably break it up into parts.....

Recently, I picked up a trip that was a military charter to move the 354th Fighter Wing's support equipment from Guam back to Eilson AFB, Alaska. FedEx is a member of the CRAF and as such we often fly military cargoes around the world. The Alaskan fighter unit deployed to Guam to be part of the Cope North exercise.

My first assignment in the Air Force after completing flight training was a 3.5 year tour on Okinawa. We often flew down to Guam for various reasons and I really like that tropical island paradise. So, I jumped at the chance to fly a trip there.

For perspective, the day I left for this trip our most recent snow here in Minnesota had just ended. I spent an hour or so removing snow from the driveway and in front of the mail box. The temperatures were in the teens. Ann took this picture of Velvet/Blond Fang II and I.

I'm over 6' tall and those piles came roughly to my shoulder level.

Commuting to work from Minnesota to Anchorage to start work is often my biggest headache. I like to be in position well before the trip show time to ensure that I am well rested. The showtime for the flight to Guam was at 2 am. My plan for this trip was to leave on a FedEx freighter the night before and turn through our Indianapolis Hub on our new B-777 freighter. Our 'Triple Sevens' have a very nice courier compartment with two built in bunks. Since I was the only 'jumpseater' and the crew would not use the bunks, I would be out very soon after takeoff and sleep away the 5 hour flight up to Anchorage. I would arrive in the early morning and have all day to catch another nap before the 2 am show.

"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley". I chose Indy also because the weather was supposed to be bad down in Memphis. Instead, a snow storm hit Indy after I got there - the same snow storm I'd just dug out of at home - silly me.

I met the crew and introduced myself and asked to ride. Since the snow would delay the take off, they invited me to get in the bunk. They would wake me up before push back so I could strap in. The flight was supposed to take off at 0430 am and arrive in Anchorage at 0830 am. When the crew woke me up, I looked at my watch and was shocked. It was 0930 am Indy time.

We finally got deiced and took off to arrive in Anchorage just after noon. I went back to the bunk and put another 4 hours on my sleep clock. I'm still legal for the trip since I will have just over 12 hours of rest in between the commute and the trip show time; but, I do not like cutting it this close.

When we took off from Anchorage for Guam in N593FE the jet was empty because we were 'positioning' it. In fact, we had to use 35K pounds of fuel for ballast to keep our center of gravity within limits. We burned about 150K pounds of fuel just to fly down to Guam.

Here is the route of flight: (Please recall that you can click on these pictures to expand them.)

The flight was boring and routine - I love that. On the map above there is a red waypoint dot north east of Andersen AFB. That represents a little island out in the middle of nowhere - the US used to call it Marcus Island and the Japanese who now own it call it Minami Torishima - "Southern Bird Island". We were cruising along bored out of our skulls. I had my nav display set up to show terrain while the FO had the weather radar up. I noticed this little green dot out in the distance where the terrain rose out of the ocean to a commanding height of 200'. This intrigued me and I found this wiki entry. The 200' tower is on the right side of the island.

Imagine being on that little spot surrounded by hundreds of miles of Pacific Ocean.

Guam itself is a relatively big island. It is the largest island in the Marianas Islands and sits very near the Marianas Trench - the deepest spot in the world's oceans. When we crossed over the trench, we were cruising at FL370. Considering that the trench is roughly 34000' deep, for one short time, we were flying over roughly the same amount of air and water.

View Larger Map

Andersen AFB sits at the north end of Guam and you take off over a very steep cliff. The landing is somewhat intimidating as you can see that end of the runway ends in air. There is an old story of two WWII pilots who got drunk, stole a jeep and went speeding down the runway. As they go off the cliff, supposedly one of them yelled: "Gear up!" It's too good a story to expose it to snopes so please don't send me scathing emails correcting it.

More on the runways later. Andersen AFB figures big in two of my favorite personal flying stories.

We got off the jet and left it with a FedEx loadmaster and mechanic to oversee the loading. Normally, our freight is containerized and very easy to load on and off. A fighter squadron has lots of different shaped things to load like power carts, tip tanks, engines and so forth and it took roughly a day to plan out and load the airplane.

I like this picture because it has the two airplanes I've landed at Guam next to each other.

We went to the hotel - The Guam Hilton Resort and Spa on Tumon Bay - a tough place to stay. There are lots of pictures here.

I spent most of the morning lazing on a deck chair, reading my novel, trying not to sunburn my pasty white epidermis and looking at this:

At this point, esteemed reader, I invite you to go back to the first picture in this post. As Ms Etheridge, my high school English teacher used to say: Compare. Contrast.

Guam has changed a lot since I was last there in 1982. Some time in the late 80s, the Japanese started regarding it as their Hawaii. Tumon Bay is much like a smaller version of Honolulu. There are big shopping malls, tourist guides and other such touristy stuff.

What I really found interesting is that there is a booming trade in gun ranges. Please recall that Guam is US territory. Japan is big into gun control and Guamanian entrepeneurs make a LOT of money letting Japanese tourists fire all sorts of weapons at indoor gun ranges and clubs. The advertisements are everywhere.

One billboard had a Japanese couple dressed in their wedding gown / tux holding weapons. I can't find it on the net though - more's the tragedy.

My son, George recommended several restaurants to go to. We went to Gyoza Yatai - which George claimed has the 'best gyoza in the world.' Given that he spent the last 3 years in Japan flying around Asia, we took this as a must see.

It was certainly the best I've ever had and I've had a few.

After Gyoza Yatai, we went back to hotel to discover a genuine Hawaiian Luau ongoing for the Japanese tourists out on the back deck. There were dancers with leis and fire twirling and hip shaking grass skirts. Let us not dwell on the fact that Guam is thousands of miles from Hawaii and may or may not share the luau tradition. We had a beer, and enjoyed the Japanese enjoying the dancers.

I did not take this video.

Then we went to bed. We'd been up by then for about 28 hours.

I'm going to post this now as it's gotten long. Next post will discuss Guam's Brown Snake infestation and the Brown Snake Inspection and some flying stories.

On that anticipatory note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Iditarod 2011

2011-03-03T22:28:00.006-06:00

"We can't all be heroes, someone has to sit on the curb and clap as
they go by." ~ Will Rogers

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

Frankly, I'm bummed. I'm gonna miss the Iditarod Ceremonial Start by one day. The start is two days from now on Saturday morning. It's a good time. I'll miss it because I have to "operate a revenue flight" down to Memphis tomorrow night.

You may or may not remember that I posted a gadabout two years ago about the Iditarod. Click this to see that post. I think it is one of my better posts here.

The Anchorage newspaper - The Alaska Daily News has a web site dedicated to the Iditarod.

It's a very nice web site and I recommend you spend some time looking at it.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

TSA

2011-03-02T22:52:00.004-06:00

"Among the most foolish, yet pervasive, ideas in America today is
that, if we are careful with our money and our votes and our diet, we can
live without risk. It's a fallacy that infects our financial lives, our
politics and our personal habits." ~ Louis Rukeyser

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

I offer this without comment:

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Discovery's Last Flight

2011-03-01T14:16:00.004-06:00

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

I did not take this video nor do I know who did. It's just cool. Looking at the geometry of the video, the airliner was cruising above FL300 and pointed north. Probably somewhere northeast of Orlando. Enjoy.

I found this video here and here.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Lunar Venus Eclipse

2011-02-16T00:54:00.023-06:00

"It has been conclusively demonstrated by hundreds of experiments that
the beating of drums will restore the sun following an eclipse." ~ James Gregory

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

As most of you know, I'm an astronomy geek. I've made one or two astronomical posts here on this blog. Tonight I saw this picture and it set my inner geek free. Please remember you can click on all of these pictures to blow them up larger.

What you see is Venus and the moon just minutes after the moon has eclipsed Venus in the daylight. Both Venus and the moon are relatively close to the sun so that they show as early crescents. I stole the picture from this NASA website. A Hungarian Photographer / Astrophotographer named Ivan Eder took this picture just after noon on May 21st, 2004.

I have a great astronomical mapping and planetarium program written by Chris Marriot called Skymap. This next picture is setup for Budapest on that date and will give you a rough idea of how the sky might have looked if you could see the planets and the stars in the bright blue sky. In fact, you probably would have needed a pair of binoculars at a minimum to have seen the moon and Venus. Mr. Eder used the very nice TMB 130 refractor at the bottom of this page.

This map faces due south, west is to the right east to left. The straight up zenith is at the top center. Therefore, the moon and Venus would have hung up high in the southeast.

Skymap will let you set the heavenly bodies in motion exactly as they would have in reality. As I set about doing that I discovered some new things. (Not the least being how to make an animated gif file.)

The astronomy of this eclipse is such that it could only happen in the day. But if it had been a deep dark night, this eclipse would have occurred over the top of some interesting deep sky objects. This image will show you that. When you click on it, it will move and show you the eclipse. Please do not click on it yet.

The green arcs in this picture represent the very faint supernova remnant Simeis 147 (Sh2-240). If you click that link you see a picture of it using a 25" telescope that dwarves the little scope that Mr Eder used. The link says that Sh2-240 is one of the faintest objects in the sky and requires hours of exposure using a camera just to 'see' it. At the bottom right of the picture are two green circles. These represent the open star clusters DoDz 3 and 4.

Back to the eclipse. If you click the picture, the moon and Venus will move and give you a taste of the geometry of the eclipse. The first frame starts a 11 am Budapest time and runs at one hour intervals until 3 in the after noon.

I filtered the star brightness to declutter these pictures. The dimmest (and therefore smallest star in the picture is about Magnitude 8 or about the dimmest you can see with a pair of binoculars. The brightest is about Mag 5 and would just barely be visible with your naked Mark I eyeball.

I hope you found this as cool as I did. On that note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Zoom and Boom

2011-02-13T14:01:00.013-06:00

It's better to be down here wishing you were up there, than to be up there wishing you were down here.

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

A friend just sent me this wonderful video. Please watch it now.

Like some others that read this blog, I have a little experience in zooming and booming. I found that video fascinating.

In general, one is not supposed to make a boom close to the ground unless one is operating in "Special Use Airspace" specifically set aside for such activity - these areas mostly exist in the western desert and off-shore. Booming San Francisco Bay is most definitely not such airspace - but the Blue Angels are special too so I guess they get a pass......

The perspicacious reader will have noted that the movies on the ships are way out at sea where such rules no longer apply.

As I have mentioned in other posts, I instructed in the T-38. The student syllabus contained one supersonic flight. It was regulatory to perform this boom ride over 30,000' above mean sea level so that your shock cone did not reach the ground and upset civilians and harm the environment. At that altitude, the only way you could tell that the T-38 was supersonic was by looking at the mach number on the airspeed gauge. If you started around 40,000' in a slight descent, you could get up to Mach 1.2 or so. It was in fact pretty underwhelming.....and you had to complete paperwork when you landed. Most guys didn't like doing it.

High speed, low altitude flight on the other hand is about as exciting as it gets.

When I was a cadet at the Air Force Academy it was accepted as gospel that a flight of F-105s had boomed the zoo in the 60's. As the story goes, they had broken a LOT of windows out of the glass filled architecture that is the Academy. We all retold the story not really knowing what we were talking about but loving a good story. This is the way of many urban legends.

In this modern day of google, I decided to see what the internet contained. I found this fascinating link and this picture:

So, it's not such a legend after all....

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Shinmoedake

2011-01-28T17:54:00.034-06:00

Bubba and Duane are repairing a neighborhood sidewalk. From nowhere, two small kids run crashing through the wet cement and disappear. Bubba says, "Duane, them kids is much cuter in the abstract than in the concrete!"

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

The Shinmoedake Volcano I wrote about yesterday, while exciting in the abstract, was underwhelming in the concrete. But I get ahead of myself.

I am sitting in the Sheraton Hong Kong Hotel & Towers in Kowloon as I write. We flew 11.9 hours in N575FE along this track.

As you can see, we went right by Shinmoedake. We decided to add more fuel during flight planning because we weren't real sure what the volcano was going to do and - as the old aviation saw goes - the only time you have too much fuel is when you are on fire. There were several mechanical issues to resolve before we could push back and taxi at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport, so it wasn't until well after level off at 32000' that I could finally contact our Global Operations Center on ACARS and find out about the volcano.

I wasn't very worried as there were plenty of places to land short of the volcano and over eight hours until we would be in Japanese Airspace. The report we got back was a densely packed page of Volcanology code. You will thank me that I do not post it here. It took us some time to figure it out - but we finally got the coordinates of Shinmoedake loaded in the nav computer and determined that the ash was only reported up to 25000' above Mean Sea Level. As we were planned to be at 38000' by that spot, I quit worrying.

As a side note - Shinmoedake is probably pronounced "Sheen Mo Ay Da Kay". Please recall that Japanese does not place emphasis on any syllable. Just rap it out like a machine gun. As a reminder, Shinmoedake lies in Fukuoka Control's Airspace. ( That's Foo Ko Ka - settle down there Beavis. )

In the hotel room here, I learned some more about the volcano. First, here is an interactive link to google maps to orient you to the volcano.

View Larger Map

The big round caldera between Mount Kirishima and the '1' is Shinmoedake. If it looks familiar to you, it should. It was the site of the underground lair of Ernst Blofeld, the evil madman that "Bond, James Bond" defeated in "You Only Live Twice."

Here is another link with some pretty cool pictures.

Now for the pictures I took. Gentle Reader, please recall that I said 'underwhelming.' These pictures are taken from many miles away with a little hand held point and shoot and shot looking into the sun.

The whole island of Kyushu was totally undercast with thick clouds. We never saw the ground or the ocean again after just south of Tokyo. Clouds from above on a brilliant sunny day are a very bright white. We could see a darker gray smudge on the horizon about 100 miles north of Shinmoedake.

As we got closer, the smudge started to resolve itself and you could see that the ash cloud was hitting equilibrium with the cool air and topping out just above the clouds. The cloud tops are roughly 20,000' and we are at 38,000 - or roughly 4 miles up and 7 miles up respectively.

This last picture is as we passed west of the volcano at the closest point. I think this is what you are seeing. Up at our altitude we were deep in the core of the jet stream. The wind was blowing 180 knots - roughly 200 mph - from right to left. The wind was less down at the level of the ash plume but I think it was still generally right to left. If you look, just right of the anvil shaped dark gray cloud there are smaller, 'bubblier' gray clouds. I think those are the most recent eruptions to break through the clouds and they are still climbing up. They will make another anvil shaped cloud later. The anvil shaped flat cloud is the ash that has climbed to it's highest altitude and leveled. I'm guessing that Shinmoedake itself is further to the right under the clouds.

Were I silly enough to descend down and fly into that ash, it would score paint from the airplane, pit the windscreen and most importantly foul and flameout the engines. I liked being offset 20 miles or so west and 3 miles up from this thing.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

ps, It was really hard to find a starting quote for this post.

Volcano in Japan

2011-01-27T10:53:00.002-06:00

Gentle Readers,

Just saw this news item: Shinmoedake Volcano.

I'm going to take off from Anchorage to Hong Kong here in an hour or so. I'll spend the next several days flying routes that go near this beast. If I get any pictures or stories I'll share them.

Note to self: Do not fly through Volcanic Ash.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Turnagain, Again,

2011-01-15T10:00:00.005-06:00

"Anything running counter to conventional wisdom is probably the right choice."
~ The Contrarian Philosophy

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

Most of us would not dream of surfing in Alaska in January in the dead of winter. This post is about contrarians who do.

Please recall that I fly out of Anchorage, Alaska. Anchorage is surrounded on 2.3 sides by water - The Cook Inlet branches into the Knik Arm and the Turnagain Arm and wraps around the city. I wrote about a day trip I took up the Turnagain here. There are also pictures of this general area in this post.

The Turnagain Arm is famous for it's tidal dynamics. It often produces a bore tide.

Please click this link now. Ann pointed it out to me yesterday and I knew my gentle readers would enjoy seeing it too. Roughly half way down the link is a video showing a group of intrepid paddle surfers out running the bore tide several days ago on Jan 13, 2011.

In the video you can see the road that runs along the north shore of the Turnagain and you can see a motorcade of cars following their progress. That is the same road I drove.

Note that the surfers are wearing dry suits - not wet suits.

I looked up the weather observation for Jan 13th and found the temperature rose to a blistering 18F for a high. For those of you who think in communist centigrade that's -8C. Both of those temperatures are below the freezing point of water.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

ps, I considered using this quote at the beginning here, but decided it would just confuse us.

"There are amusing mathematical relationships everywhere if you are
on the look out for them. In the ripples on the water, or the shapes of
busts - elegant fifth order functions."
"Huh? You mean 4th order."
"Fifth order. You omitted the time variable. I like fifth order equations,"
Libby said dreamily. "You find 'em in fish, too."

Robert A. Heinlein
Methuselah's Children

The Sun Rose In the West!

2010-12-22T11:48:00.023-06:00

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed." ~ Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

I beg that you turn your attention back to the post below this one, Sunset Launch.

The pictures were presented in chronological order. You probably noticed that the sun rose in the west. In the picture of the icebreaker, the island and the volcanoes, the sun was below the horizon. In the next picture of my First Officer flying there was Mr Sun beaming bright through the windscreen. How can this be? Is it time to get right with God because the Apocalypse looms near?

Yesterday was Winter Solstice and I have been meaning for some time to present the astrophysics of living at high latitude. I just realized that this last post presented a wonderful opportunity.

If you are unfamiliar with the reasons why the earth experiences seasons please look a this link built by the Allentown School District Planetarium. It does a bang up job of explanation. Recall that the Earth is tilted away from its orbital plane by 23° 26'. This latitude establishes the Arctic Circle. Everything on Earth above roughly 66° N latitude and below 66° S latitude will experience at least one day a year with no direct sunlight. Anchorage sits at just over 61° N latitude - it is not above the Arctic Circle but "you can see it from here."

The other side of this phenomenon is that the sun does not lurk very far below the horizon when you are this far north. As you climb up in altitude in an airplane, the horizon drops below where a ground observer sees it. Further, during the initial part of our climb, we were flying incrementally to the west. These two factors were enough to cause the sun to appear to rise just above above the southwestern horizon. My pictures do not do justice to what we really saw. The limb of the sun slowly climbed up above the horizon and I think I saw a glint of green flash.

Yesterday, Dec 21st was the Winter Solstice, the longest night of the year. I used Chris Marriot's estimable SkyMap program to produce these numbers all in Anchorage Local Time.

Civil Twilight began at 0912L.
Sun actually rose at 1014L and set at 1542L
Civil Twilight ended 1644L

So...yesterday we had 5 hours and 32 minutes of sunshine and one hour and two minutes of twilight.

Compare this to Honolulu, Hawaii, situated at 21°N Latitude.

Civil Twilight began at 0640L.
Sun actually rose at 0705L and set at 1755L
Civil Twilight ended 1819L.

Ten hours and 50 minutes of sunshine and 25 minutes of twilight.

Not to mention that it was probably around 80° F yesterday in Honolulu while it was a scorching 5°F here.

The good news is that it's all downhill to summer from here on out!

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Sunset Launch

2010-12-19T17:07:00.024-06:00

Men of the High North, the wild sky is blazing;
Islands of opal float on silver seas;
Swift splendors kindle, barbaric, amazing;
Pale ports of amber, golden argosies.

Men of the High North, Robert Service

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones All,

Last Wednesday, it was my privilege to take off during a gorgeous sunset here in Anchorage and I thought I'd share it with you. Some of these pictures are blurry because of the equipment I had was not up to the low level light challenge. But the colors are true.

This is what it looked like taxiing out to take off. I let my First Officer taxi while I struggled with this shot. We recently got Heads Up Displays (HUD) in our MD11s and I was trying to get the HUD in the image. (Amazingly, that picture is of the exact jet I was in - N593FE. Way to go, airliners.net!)

Please remember that you can click on these pictures to blow them up.

You are looking southeast and the mountains in the distance are the mountain range on the south side of the Turnagain Arm. At the end of the taxiway we turned left, set the parking brake and watched a venerable DC-6, operated by Everts Air take off for points in the Alaskan interior.

I took those two pictures with my cell phone camera and it just was not equal to the task. The colors, however, are true.

Soon, it was our turn to takeoff. Here is the visage.

I've inserted the map below to give you an idea of what you are looking at. We had just taken off to north from RW 32 at Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. We were northeast of Fire Island and looking at the island to the southwest. The Cook Inlet is frozen and there is an icebreaker ship leaving Anchorage. Note her trail in the ice.

On the horizon are three volcanoes in the chain of volcanoes that line the western edged of Cook Inlet and are over 50 miles away. The sun has just set.

View Larger Map

You can also refer to this map to see the layout of the volcanoes.

On the right edge of the picture is the Double Glacier volcano. Just to the left of it is the Redoubt Volcano which erupted last year. It is the tallest mountain in the image. Halfway between Redoubt and the sun is the Iliamna Volcano.

Our destination for this flight was the Fort Worth Alliance Airport. Before we could turn to the southeast and begin flying to our destination, we had to climb up above the Chugach Mountain Range. Air Traffic Control routed us out west of Fire Island in a big looping turn that took us just to the south of the Turnagain Arm. During that loop I took this picture which I am trying to decide is good or bad.

Finally they turned us to the southeast and cleared us direct to the Middleton Island radio navaid. This took us down the south edge of the Turnagain Inlet and we saw this.

These are the same mountains you see in the first image in this post. Note the ice on the surface of the inlet. Bird Point, which I discussed in this post is about halfway up the inlet on the left side of this picture. Up at then end of the inlet you can see the fork where you either go left to go through Portage Glacier Park and the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel to Whittier or right to take the road out through the Kennai Peninsula to Kennai and Seward.

The last picture I took this night was just before it got too dark to use my little camera. I took it abeam the Portage Glacier and Whittier area. I've tried to annotate the points of interest in the picture.

At this point we were flying downwind at roughly 600 knots away from the sunset. It rapidly got dark and we droned on for 6 hours down to Fort Worth and went to bed.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Toirettsu

2010-12-16T11:12:00.005-06:00

"When a thing is funny, search it for a hidden truth.'' ~ George Bernard Shaw

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

It may seem that my posts often contain potty humor at a higher rate than usually found in polite discourse. I apologize up front for that but good stories are found where they live. Mere mortals have no control over where life takes them and what they may observe. At this point, parents may wish to do some parental control over any youngsters reading....

You may or may not remember this post (Cosmo Crapper) about high tech toilets frequently found in Asian hotels.

Surfing the web today, I found this link describing yet another Japanese potty innovation. If you have not as of yet clicked that link, you will find that some industrious computer and software engineers have invented a computer game that one controls by aiming at specific spots on a bathroom urinal. Let us not sink into recriminations about the unfairness of this totally male oriented and female excluding invention but just relax and enjoy the whimsy.

(Although, one might wonder if Go Girl might not soon see a rise in their fortune.)

The perspicacious reader will note that this invention is called the "Toirettsu". I thought that this might be a good time to indulge in another short Japanese pronunciation discussion. As the cliche holds, the 'l' and 'r' sound in Nihongo (Japanese) are the same. It is a sort of lightly trilled "lri" sound where you hold the tongue at the roof of your mouth and sort of mush the l and r into one blurred sound. Not, as many westerners think, a transposition or 'l' for 'r' and 'r' for 'l'.

So, one would pronounce this gadget's name phonetically - "Toy lret soo" - a play on words for toilet of course.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Christmas Wish

2010-12-05T17:00:00.012-06:00

"It is my heart-warm and world-embracing Christmas Hope and Aspiration that all of us - the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage - may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss - except the inventor of the telephone."

Mark Twain
New York "World", 1890

Gentle Readers,

It has been some time since last I posted here. There are some reasons for that and I may even address them in a future post.

In any case, the point of this blog has always been to share with you the things I see as I travel around the world. Sometimes, I find there are things close to home that are also of interest. Just north of our home in Eagan, MN, the Minnesota River flows into the Mississippi River. The bluffs on either side of the river are steep, wooded and quite lovely in all seasons. Just a short distance from the northern bluffs lies the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (KMSP) and the Mall of America (MOA).

Just west of both of those worthy locations runs MN State HW 77. This road crosses the Minnesota River in a very scenic area. On the west side of the road and on the north bluff sits a lovely home with what must be a breathtaking view of the river valley. These lucky folks have a huge oak tree growing in their yard.

As you know, this is the season for christmas lights and sometimes lighting your abode can become competitive with your neighbors. The folks who live in the house described above could have taken that competitive road. Instead, they have transcended that base desire and have found a way to increase Christmas Good Will and Cheer.

Every year they spend what must be a lavish budget on lighting up this oak tree. They apparently hire professionals who must use a bucket truck as no mere amateur on a rickety ladder could light the tree the way they do. Everyone who drives along HW 77 is struck by the simple beauty of a huge oak tree outlined in mono-color white lights. It also stands out to the aviator landing at the airport. Quite striking, lovely and filled with Christmas Spirit.

My monthly commute to Alaska most frequently begins at the FedEx Cargo ramp on the west edge of the MSP airport. Driving up 77 and seeing this tree is often the last thing I see before I leave home and my first greeting when I return. I find myself anticipating the sight.

I stole this picture from this article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

This link has another very nice photo of the tree. This year, these wonderful folks have turned to using LED lighting and the improvement is fantastic.

I have never met these lovely folks and probably never will. But I thank them and wish them Merry Christmas.

If you want to see this tree, this map will help:

View Larger Map

On that note,
I remain,

Dad / Geoff

This winter

2010-02-07T14:49:00.013-06:00

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." ~ Robert Frost, "The Death Of The Hired Man"

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

As I've observed before, I started this blog to share interesting stories and observations about my travels with you. I did not travel much in January as my low level of seniority caused my Vacation bid to 'win' two weeks of vacation in one month - January. As you might surmise, few Anchorage domiciled pilots wish to have their vacation fall in the deep, dark, Alaskan winter. Therefore, I have not had a recent trip worthy of a post.

I have come to understand that one does not have to travel to see new and fascinating things.

The recent 'Snowmageddon' in the northeast US may have given some of you a taste of this. I realized this when my cousin - a frequent contributor and reader of this blog - sent me an email. He lives in a lovely location on the Chesapeake Bay - a locale one does not often associate with Winter Wonderlands. Here is his picture and email:

If you enlarge this photo, you will see a group of small birds near a large tree. It was snowing so hard their normal sources of food would be covered up. They are there because we scattered seed on the snow. But the snow buried that fairly fast too. The leaning metal disc you see to the right was a makeshift food shelter. It worked great. The birds shuttled, actually appeared to take turns, going down into the cavity where we put food that wouldn't be covered over. I like the picture enough (enlarged) it just might be our Christmas card this year. ~ Rex L. Fuller III

On the other hand, my wife and I do live in a place that is a Winter Wonderland.

Ann has been a provider of winter 'bird welfare' ever since we moved to Minnesota ten years ago. She learned this from her Mom and Dad who have had bird feeders for decades. Her feeders are on our deck just outside our dining room window and she loves to watch the birds. She gets special joy when the infrequent Pileated Woodpecker comes visiting.

The link to the Pileated says they are big birds. That is an understatement. This picture is the wallpaper on her desktop computer.

She also loves it when the Cardinals come to visit.

We are lucky enough to live on the edge of very large county park system and there is a wilderness very close by full of wild and ferocious fauna. Ann had been in the habit of keeping the bird seed outside on the deck in a galvanized 5 gallon aluminum can with a lid.

She went out one morning to replenish the bird seed and found this:

Mama Raccoon had discovered the mother lode of seed and moved her family right in. We still wonder how she managed to get the lid off of the can but it explained the loud thump in the dark of night. Mama was watching fearfully from nearby.

Ann says she got up one night when I was on a trip, flipped on the lights and caught the Raccoon standing on the rail, with bird feeder tipped up in both hands, pouring the seed into its mouth. Note how fat the Raccoons are.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Dogs

2010-02-07T13:48:00.005-06:00

"Money may buy you a fine dog but only love can make it wag its tail." ~ Kinky Friedman

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

Many of you love dogs but often wonder about their behavior. I know I frequently find my dog, Ricochet, fascinating.

Recently, I flew a trip to Oakland, California. Near the hotel was a Barnes and Noble. As is true in most B&Ns, there was a bookshelf containing staff recommendations. On that shelf was this book:

Intrigued, I picked it up and began skimming it. The author, Alexandra Horowitz, is a cognitive scientist who has studied Gorillas and such in the wild. She claims that one day she looked at her dog and realized she did not need to travel to wild and exotic locales in search of rare animals to study. Her dog was an easily available subject for study.

This book was the result. I have yet to read it in it's entirety, but I have ordered a copy from my local county library. I look forward to getting it.

Click here to read a review.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Polar Bears with Hockey Sticks

2010-01-17T12:03:00.005-06:00

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

You may or may not recall this post where I linked to the Fairbanks Nanook's Opening video.

The Polar Bear is back here and here.

Frankly, I still find a Polar Bear with a hockey stick very frightening.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Turnagain Walkabout

2010-01-08T12:41:00.040-06:00

"When you're doing real research, you never know what it will cost, how much it'll take, or what you will find. You just know there's unexplored territory and a chance to discover what's out there."

Luis Alvarez,

The Cuckoo's Egg (Cliff Stoll)

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

This post is from an email I sent on Oct 11, 2007. I hope you enjoy it.

Howdy All,

I'm in still in Anchorage, but I leave tomorrow am for a quick Pacific trip to Korea, Beijing, Shanghai and back. I got here last Wednesday and I had two days off. So I rented a car and explored Alaska a little. Mostly I drove up the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet.

The Turnagain Arm experiences some truly amazing bore tides. I didn't see the bore tide since it wasn't the right part of the lunar cycle.

On the other hand, The Arm also has some truly awe inspiring views and I'm going to share some with you.

The weather looked like it was going to be bad: temps in the low 40’s or upper 30s and rainy and drizzly. But when I got out on the Arm, it cleared and I had some truly panoramic views of the mountains on either side of the arm with low hanging clouds blowing around them. The road runs up the northern coast of the arm and along the southern border of the Chugach Park. At its eastern end, the road forks. You can continue to the southwest down to the Kenai Peninsula; but, instead, I went southeast through the Portage Glacier Park then the Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel over to Whittier. A railroad track closely parallels the road all the way to Whittier.

As I drove down the Arm, the first place I saw was the Chugach Park HQ. Outside the HQ is a static display of the engine / snow blower they used to keep the railroad clear of snow and in many cases, avalanches.

The red rotating circular blower fan of this train is about a foot taller than I am. You would not want to have gotten caught in that bad boy. There is a little covered board walk along the side of the snow blower and park HQ that looks out over the opening of the Arm. The clouds broke about the time I arrived here and the view was just awe inspiring.

These pictures are scenes I shot as I drove along the road to the east. It rained on and off, and I would either snap pix through the windshield or stop at turnouts, jump out, shoot the shot before the camera could get too wet and then jump back in the car and dry the camera off.

About half way up the arm is a turnout called "Bird Point". It is well named. Just as I drove past it, I caught movement from the right of the car and looked to see a white headed Bald Eagle fly over. It's an awful picture, but I thought I'd show you my laughable attempt to get a picture of it. Driving and fumbling with a camera is not a good idea, grasshopper. I saw lots more eagles as the day progressed, but I didn't get close enough to get a good picture. This one is as good as it gets.

Just past Bird Point, I passed a train on a siding waiting for another train. I thought it made a striking picture.

Just past that is another turn out that has signs explaining that the sound is full of Beluga Whales and how to search for them. So I did, but didn't see any then because the tide was almost at it lowest point and the water was too low for them.

That afternoon - as I drove westward back to Anchorage - I stopped again as the tide was flowing in furiously and sure enough, there were Belugas everywhere. You could see their wakes in the water, highlighted in the low sun and then they would sound and blow big jets of foggy breath. I really wished I had a pair of binoculars as they were way out in the arm. About all you could see of them was a white flash as they stuck their heads out of the water to sound. I did catch a quick flash of a fluke one time. I probably sat there watching for an hour. This picture was the best of the pictures I took and it is not so good. The white speck in the middle right is the whales head. They all looked to be pretty busy eating fish.

Over at the far east end of the arm, I took the road to Whittier. The low sun was really lighting up the mountains and water. These are two of the best pictures I've ever taken. This one is looking southeast into the sun.

This one looks back to the west. The sun really lights up the grass and the dark gray sand and mud that is the trademark of the Turnagain.

Several hours later when I passed this same point, the tide had turned and the water had covered up the sand almost all the way to the grass. There are signs all up and down the arm warning you not to go out on the mud. It is very soft and sticky and if you get stuck in it while the tide is roaring in, you will probably drown. Evidently this happens fairly frequently.

The road and railroad to Whittier follows Portage Creek to the southeast. There is a relatively low mountain range with a pass that separates Whittier from the Turnagain Arm Valley. In this pass is the Portage Glacier and Portage Lake. As I understand it, in the old days, Voyageurs traveling from Prince William Sound to Anchorage would have to cross the Portage Glacier and the pass. Now it is the site of the Portage Glacier Park. This is me in the parking lot.

The park HQ was closed but I could wander around a little. I'd never seen the glacier and I still haven't as it was covered in clouds. These are scenes of the Moraine Pool that is formed by melt water from the glacier.

This pool the source of the water that flows down Portage Creek to the Arm. The water itself is very interesting. Because of the over cast sky, the water was a very dull gray color and opalescent. This is because the glacier takes up a lot of dust from the rocks it flows over and when the water melts it carries this very fine dust with it. On a bright sunny day, the water turns a very striking milky blue color that is characteristic of glacier caused moraine pools.

It was very pretty. More on the Portage Glacier here.

Past Portage Glacier Park, there is a one lane tunnel carved out of the mountain for several miles that services the town of Whittier. The Anton Anderson Memorial Tunnel carries both auto/truck and railroad traffic. When you pay the toll, you get a schedule and a firm briefing. The tunnel runs one way into Whittier for an hour and then back the other way the next hour so you have to plan your trip carefully.

I never realized this before, but train tracks are exactly the same width as an auto wheel base. Driving through the tunnel required some attention to keep from getting caught in the train track. There was a firm 25 mph speed limit and even a radar gun halfway through to make sure you obeyed. The bare rock sides of the tunnel were very close. Having a blowout at a high speed in this thing would be Princess Di stupid.

Whittier is a pretty little place. It is at the end of a long arm of Prince William Sound and striking mountains rise on either side. They are much closer and much tighter than on the Turnagain.

It looks like there is a busy harbor there in the summer; but this late in the season, many boats were out of the water. Whittier is also a ferry terminal to points south like Cordova, Valdez and Juneau and a busy tourist stop with tour ships doing glacier tours in the summer. None of these operations were on-going on my visit and there was only one restaurant open for business. All the kitschy tourist places were closed and boarded up.

I started writing this travelog in Anchorage but now I am writing at 34000' - 10600 meters to be precise - over Siberia and the Sea of Okhotsk as we cruise to Seoul. I finally found a way to plug my computer into the airplane's power system.

I enjoyed my two days off, I guess, as I saw a lot of new stuff, but it was kind of bittersweet. I hate giving up my time at home with my family and I really wish Ann could have been with on this trip as this is exactly the kind of trip she likes to take. One day, we'll do it together.

In any case, I remain,

Dad /Geoff

A Little Scotch and Perspective

2010-01-06T09:52:00.037-06:00

"The way to get really stressed out is to go mountain climbing over molehills." ~ Unknown

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

It has been an interesting week in the World of Aviation. We live in a wonderful world full of marvels. Too often we forget this. I just saw this interview with comedian Louis C.K. Please stick with it, the link to aviation comes at the end of the clip.

Click this to see video

You gotta love: "You're sitting on a chair in the sky!" and "Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?"

I have been looking for an opportunity to include this email I sent to friends and family back in January of 2007 and watching that interview clicked with me.

Jan 19, 2007 from N619FE

Howdy All!

When I wrote about this trip earlier, I truly did not expect that I would see or do much that would merit reporting to my loyal readers. I was wrong. Several things of merit have occurred.

Nothing much happened to report up through start and taxi at Anchorage departing for Indianapolis. As we approached the hammerhead for takeoff, Anchorage Tower told us we were to "Follow the Alaska 737." Sure enough, off to the left was a 737 approaching the same hammerhead as us. So, I stopped the airplane, set the brakes and let them pass in front of us to take the runway. As it got close we noticed it had a really interesting paint job, especially when taken in juxtaposition with the snow, ice and gray wintry conditions predominating at the Ted Stevens International Airport. Here's a picture:

Pretty cool we thought.

The 'drive' down to Indy was uneventful. The sun set a half-hour after takeoff and we droned in the dark for 6 hours. The route took us over Edmonton, through Northwest Montana, just south of Fargo, ND, just south of Minneapolis, over Rochester and into Indy.

I have often heard that flying long haul is a lot like sitting around an electronic campfire. Instead of staring into the flames, you stare at the gauges, get semi-hypnotic and occasionally conversation springs up. Just west of Fargo, we had what I hope you will find an interesting exchange. But first I have to set the scene.

(Note: When I sent this out as an email, I included the name and history of my FO. I am uncomfortable with including names in this public venue. So he is ‘Bob’.)

A new hire, 'Bob' is a recently retired AF Lt Col who spent his career in the AF. He's a really fun guy to be around and joy to fly with.

About the Canadian border we flew into the core of the jet stream and we easily had a 120 knot tailwind, which means our ground speed was 600 knots (nautical miles per hour) or roughly 660 mph. That means that I and the 200 plus tons of metal, plastic, freight and kerosene strapped to my butt are moving over the ground at about 10 miles every minute. That's really "hauling the freight."

I had the Nav Display set to the 640 mile range so that I could see how our track into Indy would progress in relation to all the airports within a 600 mile circle of us. It also meant that I was looking at all the stuff we would fly over in the next hour or so. Most of the time I'm pretty jaded about how fast jets move, but that night I could see where the Minneapolis and Rochester Airports fell in relation to our track. And, I could see that the distance between those two airports only took up about 1/6th of the distance we would travel in the next hour. That's when the scale of the thing hit me. I takes me a little over an hour to drive my car from home to Rochester and I was about to fly 6 times that distance in the next hour.

I mentioned this to ‘Bob’, one thing lead to another and I wound up pointing out how awed I am when I fly from Memphis out to Oakland, CA. That route of flight takes you over the California and Oregon trails for a short 4 hour flight. There in my air-conditioned cockpit, sitting on a sheepskin covered seat with 5 way comfort controls that I have adjusted to my precise requirements, drinking chilled bottled water and eating a catered meal, I look down on that rough terrain and am in awe of the struggle and hardships the pioneers who made their way in wagons out to California and the West underwent. Those guys were tough.

This prompted ‘Bob’ to tell a really cool "It's a small world" story.

The next piece of background info is for my non-family readers. My family's ancestral home lies in the upper northeast corner of Oklahoma with the surrounding environs of Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas thrown in, centered on the little town of Big Cabin - The Hay Capital of the World. Bob's home is just across the OK/MO border in Neosho.

His grandmother just turned 100. When she was a little girl, her parents loaded her in a wagon and made a several month trip from Ohio to Neosho. The hardships and boredom of being in that wagon for months, bouncing on the trails, evidently made an impression on the little girl.

Imagine:

"Are we there yet?"
"No, not for another month."
"Daddy, Jaime's bugging me!"
"Am not!",
"Don't make me stop this wagon!"

Convinced that world travel was not for her ever again, she stayed in her little town for the rest of her life - never leaving.

Well, until recently. There was a family reunion in Ohio last year and the family finally convinced her to go. Being the Matriarch and knowing this family legend, they got her a first class ticket on the flight up to Ohio. After the short hour and half flight, the standard question: "How was your trip?" was answered with a very enthusiastic: "Boy, that was a lot nicer than the last time!"

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

T'was the Night Before Christmas.....

2009-12-26T11:27:00.017-06:00

Alert! Old, Bad, Santa Joke follows: Santa walks out to his sleigh and waiting reindeer. It’s the big night and he’s ready to go flying on his world-wide mission of good cheer. As he nears, Rudolph is glaring at a guy standing next to the sleigh. The guy is wearing hush-puppies, white socks, high-water slacks, a tie that is 10 years out of date under a dark blue blazer, all topped off by a bad haircut. He is gripping a battered old brief case and has a shotgun hanging over his back. As Santa walks up, the guy pulls out an FAA ID Badge, flips it open and says, “Hello Santa, I’m Inspector Smith, Federal Aviation Administration Inspector and I’m here to give you a route check tonight.”

Santa is less than pleased. “Ho Ho Ho! I’m glad you’re here…..but what’s the deal with the shotgun?”

The inspector pauses and says: “Well……I’m not supposed to tell you this….but…..you’re gonna lose one on takeoff.”

Esteemed Readers and Loved Ones All,

It is only infrequently that a line flying schmuck like me gets to share the airspace with one of the greats of aviation. But I get ahead of myself.

I’m sitting in the Air Operations Center in Memphis right now – it’s about midnight Christmas night and I waiting for my jumpseat ride showtime. I’ll finally be home tomorrow morning near sunrise. 24 hours ago, I was in Shenzhen, China. Because I have ‘juniority,’ I get to spend a lot of the holidays away from the warm bosom of my loving family and friends. This year was no different. In fact, due to the vagaries of the International Date Line, I got to spend two Christmases away from home this year.

We took off from Bao'an International Airport, Shenzen China, on Christmas night - which is Christmas Eve in the U.S. - on a nine hour flight to Anchorage, Alaska.

About halfway through the flight, we passed over the International Date Line, which reset our clocks back a day to make it Christmas Day once more. I’ve been away from home for about two weeks and – frankly – I’m tired. You’ll be able to tell that from the thousand-mile stare I have in the picture I’m about to show you. We’ve been airborne for hours, all the automatic systems are all working ricky tick, I’m dressed for cruise in my nice comfy windshirt and flannel jammie bottoms and my brain’s alpha waves are frankly going flat-line for fairly long periods of time.

Suddenly the TCAS warns “Traffic! Traffic”. The FO looks out my window, says “Holy Cow” and dives for his camera and takes this picture.

Yes, gentle reader, the Jolly Old Elf his-own-self joined up on us there on the wind swept heights near Shemya, Alaska and waved Merry Christmas to us old, tired, road-weary freight dogs. Then, quick as a wink, he flew out of sight.

On that happy note, Merry Christmas and to all a good night!

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Beauty and the Beholder

2009-12-15T01:31:00.016-06:00

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep. - Scott Adams

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

My goal as I write in this blog is to find things that tickle my fancy and to share them with you. Those of you who know me, know that I am not an artsy kind of guy. Yes, I enjoy good art, but I would be hard put to describe to you what I think constitutes good art. Were you to force me to describe good art, I would choke out words like 'beauty' and 'higher truth' and 'transcendental' and such in the hopes that you would go away and leave me alone.

Often I am presented with 'objets' that someone obviously considers to be art - and that may in fact be art - but they just beat heck out of me.

The Incheon International Airport is a case in point. If you click that link and look at the pictures you will see what I mean. The airport structure is very flowing and aerodynamic. I don't find it particularly aesthetic, but your mileage may vary.

Being a freight dog, we don't get to go through the main entrance that the passengers use. We go around to the east side of the airport to the teeming and busy cargo ramp. For those who do enter the airport normally, there is a large sculpture that greets them at the entrance. As us freight dogs taxi out to take off this work is very easy to see out on the horizon. At night, bright lights illuminate it - you can't miss it. It has elicited more than a few comments over the years in what is supposed to be a 'sterile cockpit environment.' I give you this picture:

As I have said before, good art encourages the observer to impose interpretations upon it. I suppose one could say that the sculpture engenders the soaring promise of aviation to the hopeful souls on the globe below.

You are looking at the front side of the sculpture as the artist intended you to first see it. Us freight dogs usually see this thing from the backside and trust me, it looks different from that side.

Personally, I think the artist is having a giggle at our expense. I offer this blog as evidence supporting my viewpoint. Feel free to agree or disagree in the comments section.

As always, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Gooey Ducks

2009-12-14T18:58:00.011-06:00

"Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic." - Frank Herbert, Dune

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

On Hanukkah, (Dec 12, 2009) we 'operated' from Anchorage down to Seoul, Korea. It is not often that a freight dog experiences whimsy professionally and I feel compelled to tell you about it when it does.

The last 'cans' to get loaded before we close up the jet are the 'Haz Cans'.

We make a lot of money flying Hazardous Freight that the people carriers are not allowed to have on their jet. 'Haz' is closely regulated and monitored by the FAA and the EPA. There is a huge 40 page or so chapter in our Flight Operations Manual giving me detailed guidance in how handle this sort of freight.

'Live animals' are included on the Haz paperwork because the proximity and location of the two needs to be considered and planned for. Usually, the First Officer goes back and inspects the loading of the Haz, does a 'bufoonery check' on the paperwork and brings it to me for approval and my signature.

On this flight, he has a goofy look on his face as he hands me the paperwork. He says something that sounds to me like:

"There are gooey ducks loaded on the main deck."

"Say whut?", sez I, somewhat stupidly.

"Gooey Ducks".

"Whazza Gooey Dux?"

"I think they are burrowing clams. They are a delicacy in Asia."

At this point, I am intrigued. However, there is a time and place for everything, and learning more about gooey dux ten minutes before push-back, start-up, taxi and takeoff is not a good idea. What is important is knowing what we have to do to maintain an environment conducive to delivering the gooey dux to the customer in the desired condition. So, I ask:

"Whaddawegoddadoo for the gooey dux?"

"Looks like it says keep the temperature at 60 degrees or so."

I can do that, so I sign the haz paperwork and we blast off into the long, delirious, burning blue and cruise for 8.5 hours to the mysterious Orient and Seoul, Korea.

Safely tucked away in the Seoul Hilton, I made it a high priority to begin researching the novel new concept of gooey dux. I found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoduck

So....a geoduck is a very large clam prized in asia as a delicacy. Ugly critters - although they may be genesis of the phrase: 'As happy as a clam.' On the other hand, maybe not.

I can now add geoducks to lobsters, seafood, baby chicks, horses and live turtles to my personal menagerie of animals I've flown with.

I ain't doing 'snakes on a plane.'

As a conclusion, I discovered this link:

http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/dirty-jobs-gooey-ducks.html

I pity da fool who ain't seen Mike Rowe's, Discovery Channel show, 'Dirty Jobs'. I post this link with some concern as I am not allowed to view this video in mysterious Asia. I have heard from reputable sources that the show plays off the prurient nature of the geoduck reproductive process.

You cannot say that you have not been warned.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Blue Eyed Soul

2009-12-06T15:22:00.009-06:00

A north wind in Texas didn't care whose ass it stung, just like a sad song didn't care whose heart it broke.
-- Dan Jenkins, Baja Oklahoma

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

You will find below a music video. I highly recommend that you don't play it if you are somewhere that you might find it embarrassing to get a little misty eyed. The song is about the 'Angel Flights' that return our fallen heroes home from the battlefield.

This song has a lot of connections to my kids in various ways. I found out about the song when my oldest son, George, sent me this email this morning:

Dad,

Normally, I think country music is a big bag of gay, but I know you guys liked Radney Foster from the Texas/Del Rio music scene.

Four fans of freedom!

-George

George - sensitive and sentimental soul that he is - is at present deployed to Kuwait and flying missions throughout the area in the C-130s you see in the video. The 'Four Fans of Freedom' is a motto of the guys who fly the Herks - one of the few airplanes in the Air Force that still have propellers. He has flown missions with fallen heroes in the back of his airplane.

On to Radney Foster and Del Rio. We lived in Del Rio, Texas for about 11 years. My youngest daughter, Katie was born there and both Jaime and Katie pretty much grew up there. Radney's family is a well established family in the city and well known. Radney's mom was both Jaybo and Katie's first grade teacher.

Radney Foster gave a charity concert once to support their schoo l. It was one of the best concerts I've ever been to.

I post this to tug on your heart strings a little. It certainly tugged on mine.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Happy Thanksgiving

2009-11-26T14:33:00.004-06:00

We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures. ~ Thornton Wilder

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

Happy Thanksgiving from Guangzhou / Canton, China!

Dad / Geoff

Sychronicity

2009-11-24T02:31:00.018-06:00

"A man who has a million dollars is as well off as if he were rich."
John J. Astor III

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

This post is a continuation of the trip I started discussing in Sun Dog's got Seoul.

FedEx puts us up in some very nice hotels - your Sheratons and your Hiltons and such. This is not so much because they love us and want us to have a nice time. It is more that they know that we are much more likely to get adequate rest and nutrition at the nicer places. This is especially true on the international trips I fly and is a direct reflection of an effort to 'protect the freight'. It is highly unlikely that they can replace me on a short notice basis since I may be the only pilot within 500 miles or so qualified to fly the jet to the next location. Protecting our 'Absolutely, Positively' reputation demands that we stay in establishments where we won't be woken by drunken brawls.

We landed, went through the customs rigmarole, loaded in the van and entered Seoul, South Korea's daunting traffic snarl for the hour or so ride to the Millenium Seoul Hilton. This Hilton is located in the center of Seoul, at the foot of historic Namsan Mountain, Home of the Seoul Tower. It is very near the Namdaemun Gate, a famous historical site. It is also a short bus ride from Itaewon street, a well known shopping, bar and restaurant district that butts up against the Yongsan US Army Post.

As, I say, we stay in a nice hotel, but normally we are on the lower floors where the lesser mortals breathe. I know, in general, that the upper floors of a hotel like the Hilton have some much nicer accommodations than I am used to - but I am pretty apathetic about it all. My requirements for a successful layover are a bed, a hot shower and a place to plug in the trusty ol' laptop.

When we checked in, the front desk staff had a surprise for us. We heard: "We are full today." Now, normally, these are words that strike fear, trepidation and hopelessness into the heart of your tired and oppressed professional aviator longing to sleep free.

Then we heard: "Except for a suite. You'll have your own room, but you'll share a common area. It's our nicest place! Will that be ok?"

Okeydoke, whatever. So, the bellman escorted us to our 'room'. First, we needed our plastic key to authorize the elevator to go the top floor. This piqued my interest. The second to the top floor in Millenium Seoul Hilton contains the "Business Lounge". The top floor holds the "Executive Lounge". The bellman then proceeded to escort us past the executive floor receptionist to the corner suite on the executive floor and open this door.

At this point, I must indulge in an aside to this story. Until very recently, I would have had to admit to not having your basic clue as to who or what a Swarovski is. I'm sure that I had seen more than one Swarovski crystal in my illicit past, but I remained apathetic - much like it took that stupid Devil wears Prada movie to penetrate my awareness that Prada was a brand name. I often get the strangest looks from my gorgeous wife and daughter when I admit to branding obtuseness such as this.

It is a fine example of synchronicity to experience exposure to the Swarovski brand name twice in such a small time frame.

Our suite as we walked into was purely and overwhelmingly "made with Swarovski elements." My first impression when entering this suite was to ask the bellman if there was a guest book somewhere. I wanted to know which heads of state and other such criminal elements had stood where I was standing. There were - I am not making this up - more square feet in this suite than in the house I am presently making mortgage payments on. Through the entry way, we turned right and climbed these stairs to see this 'Vista'.

At the bottom of the stairs are the small kitchen and the servant room areas for the hired help to doss their weary heads.

At the top of the stairs was this sitting area that I can think of no reasonable use for. It just connected my room which you can see straight ahead with my FO's room which is invisible behind this picture.

Standing in front of that couch, I looked over the rail to see this.

My room had Swarovski elements sewn everywhere.

There were two - count 'em - two bathrooms with Swarovski Crystal elements outlining the mirrors.

Finally, even the light fixtures had Swarovski Crystals spreading a cheery light throughout the room.

At this point, please go back and review my requirements for a good room. "A place to plug in my trusty laptop" brings a chuckle to my lips as I type this. For it was obvious that the sort of well-heeled VIP who normal stays in the executive bedroom of a suite of this opulence has no thought of laptop connectivity - he has people for that sort of thing. After looking for 10 minutes or so, I had to call Hotel services to come up and pull the cable out from behind the decorative desk and connect it to the hotel network. It was obvious that I was the first guest in many a moon who had asked for a laptop to be connected in that den of luxury.

As an aside, the sharp look of appraisal that the tech geek who performed this task gave me, said, very plainly, "What is a mug like you doing in this room?"

As a final observation, the potties serving this suite were the 'Cosmo Crappers' I have written of before.

With that observation, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

A Mystery, Continued

2009-11-22T04:24:00.020-06:00

"We have not succeeded in answering all our questions. Indeed, we sometimes feel we have not completely answered any of them. The answers we have found only serve to raise a whole new set of questions. In some ways we feel we are as confused as ever. But we think we are confused on a higher level and about more important things." Anonymous

Gentle Readers and Love Ones,

Back in February, I posted this. It was about my quest to learn more about Marine Private First Class Gilbert H. Whisler. PFC Whisler's name appears on the marble wall of the Arizona Memorial honoring the Marines and Sailors killed on the USS Arizona during the Pearl Harbor Attack - A Day that will live in Infamy.

If you have not read that post, please click the link before you continue reading here.

First, I have an issue to set straight. I was completely out to lunch on the derivation and beginnings of the name 'Whisler'. Our family name traces its origins to Switzerland where it was spelled 'Wïssler' with the cute little double dots over the 'i'. The name made it's way to the US before we won our independence and the progress of the spelling change went thus: Wïssler -> Whisler -> Whistler....or so says the voluminous research my uncle did before he passed on. While my intriguing story of the grandfatherly argument and fallout is compelling, I have no proof that it is correct. I apologize for misleading you.

The next thing to tell is that after reading my post, an old friend and frequent esteemed reader sent me this link to a fine short history called "Battleship Arizona's Marines at War" by Dick Camp. I ordered the book from Barnes and Noble and found some interesting things.

PFC Whisler was a member of the ship's golf team.

In the back in the appendices is a copy of the "Muster Roll of Marine Detachment Arizona, December 1941." Footnote "C" applies to PFC Whisler and 15 other Marines to include Lt Simensen and says: "At about 8 a.m. killed in action on board USS Arizona while engaged in repulsing Japanese Air Attack at Pearl Harbor. Remains interred at Red Hill Cemetery, Oahu." Most of the names of the Marine dead on the muster show a notation of Footnote "B" which is "Missing in Action."

The book gives a fine account and confirmation of the story I related in the previous post of Lt. Simensen's attempt to rally the troops. I hope and assume that PFC Whisler was in this party and died on his feet fighting.

He was interred in Grave #519 where I assume he remained until he was moved to the Punchbowl in 1949. Red Hill is an area on the east side of Pearl Harbor.

This is a very interesting book and if you can get a copy I highly recommend it to you.

Continuing my research, I googled "Bloomfield, Iowa + Whisler" to discover that the American Legion Post 078 in Bloomfield is called the "Reed Whisler Post". This intrigued me highly and I got the post's phone number and called them. The phone was answered by a friendly lady working in the bar. I introduced myself and told her that I was curious about where the name of the post came from and why.

She told me that it was named for the first Bloomfieldians to die in combat in both WWI and WWII and that there is a Bronze Plaque memorializing them. I then asked her if there were any books or documents there in the post that might give me more information. She gave me the phone number of a Retired Navy Chief Petty Officer who was a submariner in WWII. He was the local expert on WWII and the men who fought it from the Bloomfield area.

I called him, introducing myself again and what I was looking for. He was very helpful and owned a rare copy of a book called "WWII Gold Star Boys" that lists of all the men killed in that war from the state of Iowa. He photocopied the page that detailed PFC Whisler and sent a copy to me.

Please click the image to zoom in and read the text. You will see that PFC Whisler joined the Marines in September of 1940. He had been a Marine just a little over a year when he was killed in action.

I asked the CPO if he knew PFC Whisler. He answered that yes he did but not very well. That Gilbert was a delivery man for the local grocery and that was when he often saw him.

I also contacted the Bloomfield Democrat, the local paper. I talked to a nice but harried newspaper lady there who promised me a copy of PFC Whisler's obituary if she could find it. Since it has not arrived, I assume that a copy does not exist.

I hope that you find this as interesting as I found it. In any case, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Sun Dog's got Seoul

2009-11-21T19:24:00.031-06:00

“Night's darkness is the bag that bursts with the gold of the dawn. Rabindranath Tagore

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

How do I say this? One the 'advantages' of being a professional aviator is that you see more than your fair share of pretty dawns.... This is doubly true in Alaska in the winter because dawn doesn't come until mid morning - you get the beauty without having to heave your sorry self out of bed so early.

Last Tuesday's flight from Anchorage to Seoul, Korea was a gorgeous exhibition of that. We showed to begin flight planning at 0900 local and took off at 1000 local. These are not times one would normally associate with a dawn launch, but the sun was just peeking over the Chugach Mountains. It was very cold, 5°F and tendrils of ice fog were making some really fascinating views possible. When we pulled out on the taxiway I saw this vista.

As I have noted before on this blog, sun dogs fascinate me. Note the subtle little sundog behind the Alaska Airline 737 in the picture. I tried the zoom feature of my little camera to get a better look and got this.

Finally, this photo after we got a little closer and the Alaska flight took off and got out of the picture.

We took off on Ted Stevens International Airport's Runway 32 in MD-11 N589FE. Make sure you click that link. It is from www.airliners.net and shows the exact jet we flew at about the point we broke ground on takeoff. The photographer was standing on the west side of the runway looking back towards the UPS ramp which is just adjacent to our ramp. This is a really cool picture.

For about 10 miles after takeoff we flew down the north coast of the Cook Inlet and I could see that the Mt. Redoubt volcano was still smoking.

Just a little later I could see Mt Foraker and Mt. McKinley/Denali out the right window.

We are flying at roughly 20,000' about 40 miles south and west of the peaks so we are just about level with them. Foraker is in the front on the left and Denali / McKinley is on the right.

After these sights, we settled down for the 8 hour cruise to Seoul, Korea. Because of the strong jet stream winds over our normal great circle route, we were flight planned by the dispatchers in the Global Operations Center down in Memphis to fly well north over Siberia. This requires an overfly clearance from Mother Russia.

This really lousy picture shows our rough route of flight.

Because we flew so far north, we could race with the sun for hours this time of year. The sun hung low back behind our left wing until well down south. Not quite a perpetual dawn but a very long one. The low sun painted the Siberian landscape in gorgeous color for us.

Here is the the east coast of Siberia.

The hulking metropolis of Anadyr sits on the west coast of the Gulf of Anadyr. If you look close you can see it in this picture.

About 30 minutes after Anadyr, I noticed this sundog out over the Siberian wilderness.

Below the sundog, down in the gloom under the clouds were these frozen rivers.

An hour or so later, we flew out over the Sea of Okhotsk, just off the west coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula.

After that, the clouds moved in and the ground was obscured by the undercast. We flew down the Okhotsk and over Sakhalin Island. After that we were in the Sea of Japan. Down just north of Korea, the airspace is divided up so that we actually and legally passed through a corner of North Korean controlled airspace.

The Russian controller turned us over to the Pyongyang control and we spent about 30 minutes cruising there. (25 years ago, young Captain Whisler of the USAF would never have thought that he'd write those words.)

Shortly thereafter, Pyongyang switched us to Incheon Control and we saw the southeast coast of South Korea.

Further north as we descended to land, we passed by the Yongpyeong Ski Resort. You can see the ski runs in the bottom right of the picture. You can also see the mist that makes South Korea's central mountains stand out.

After that, I put the camera up and we landed at Incheon International Airport out west of Seoul, Korea.

With that, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Ojigi

2009-11-14T09:58:00.002-06:00

"How many things, both just and unjust, are sanctioned by custom!"
Terence

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

I have occasionally started this blog with the words: "I don't want this blog to become a political one", and then proceeded to start some mildly political screed. That bit of misdirection will continue today. It is my fervent hope that I always tie in some kind of travelogue / Gadabout connection in these things in the hopes that you will see things in a different light.

In any case, I have spent a great deal of my lifespan in Asia and the vast majority of that in the Republic of Japan, specifically on the island of Okinawa in my first assignment in the Air Force. Further, on a whim, I chose to take Japanese / Nihongo as my language my freshman year at USAFA. So, while I would not hold myself as a great expert on Japan and the Japanese culture, I think I have more than average experience in the place.

Bowing or Ojigi in Japan is pretty much the accepted greeting. It's also - like two dogs first meeting - a way to establish who is higher in the social order. (Bad visual image there...sorry!) Generally speaking, the lower the bow and the more obsequious looking you make yourself, the lower you are in relation to the one you are bowing to. And vicey versey.....

I long ago opted out of the competitive nature of bowing. I do bow while in Japan, but it is a gaijin bow - a quick nod of my head, but lower than an American nod of affirmation. Say quickly lowering your head so that you almost touch your chin to your chest and just as quickly returning to an erect stature. It's important to maintain eye contact throughout while doing this. It's the kind of response that says: "Hey! How you? I ain't a total rube here. I know you guys bow in greeting and I know there is a social measurement aspect to it all. I'll greet you, but I ain't playing the social games."

Seems to work for me.

In general in Japan, people ignore one another. Osekkai is the custom. I wrote about that here. I find myself making eye contact in Japan more often than most gaijins do. I am 6 and half feet tall and somewhat large. This attracts attention in Japan. So I find myself doing the gaijin bow greeting fairly often.

With all that setup, I give you this link to www.powerlineblog.com - a truly political blog.

Personally, I think our President would have been much better served by the gaijin bow. I suppose one could argue that the lower bow shows the modesty and virtue that is supposed to be a hallmark of this administration's "Hope and Change". I personally don't want my Chief Executive to lower himself or raise himself over the other elected leaders of the world's democracies. (Don't ask me what I think of bowing to an unelected tyrant......)

But that's just me.

With that, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Hockey

2009-10-19T12:21:00.006-05:00

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

Without really knowing why - I offer this University of Alaska Fairbanks hockey video. It is touted as being "The Most Awesome Thing Ever to Open a Hockey Game."

Remember Tremors? Sure you do. Now think ahead to Tremors 3: Back to Perfection. I gotta say....A Polar Bear with a hockey stick is a whole lot more frightening than an A** Blaster is.

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Yokota Military Charter

2009-10-17T15:16:00.024-05:00

"Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold."

Andre' Maurois

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

This is not so much a travelog as it is a family story. As I tell it, I find myself fighting to not drop into long tedious explanations of details. I hope you enjoy it.

In September, I picked up a military charter out of ‘Open Time.’ FedEx is part of the Civil Reserve Air Fleet and in this specific charter we had contracted to fly freight for the Air Force from Yokota Air Base, just south of Tokyo, Japan to Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska and then a short hop down to Elmendorf AFB on the northern outskirts of Anchorage, AK. As my son and daughter-in-law live on Yokota AB, I jumped at the chance to trade my boring old 'been there-done that' trans-Pacific trip for this military charter and a chance to visit them.

One of the bigger headaches in my job is the problem of how to commute to work to begin each trip. As I’ve mentioned before, I live in the Twin Cities of Minnesota but am ‘domiciled’ in Anchorage, AK. FedEx expects me to be on-site in Anchorage, well rested, nourished and ready to fly at the beginning of each trip. This usually involves two legs of jump seats on company airplanes and about a day of lead time. I spend about 10 hours sitting in a long aluminum tube just to get to and from work each direction every month.

This charter was different. For operational reasons I don’t understand, the company chose to have one crew fly the jet into Yokota to ‘position it’ for the charter. They bought them a plane ticket home to the states then they ‘positioned’ my crew by buying us tickets to Yokota from Anchorage. My contract allows me then to cancel those tickets and use the money to buy alternative tickets. As long as I show up in Yokota in time to be fully rested, ready to fly and within budget, I can get to Yokota however I wish.

When scheduling approved the swap, I immediately called George and Brook. This is much easier than it would have been a generation ago. You taxpayers and the USAF have paid for them to have a US phone number and it only costs the caller US long distance rates to call them.

I knew George was due to deploy to Kuwait and the Iraqi theater for 6 months. I hoped that this charter would get me there before he had to leave but I was out of luck and I missed him. Brook answered the phone.

Readers Digest used to have a “My Most Unforgettable Character” story each month. Brook would be high on my list of unforgettable characters. As her Dad once told me, there are only two kinds of people in the world for Brook: Friends and Friends she hasn’t met yet. I have always enjoyed being around her – she is never boring and one of my favorite people.

When I told her I was coming, she said: “Great, Daddy Geoff! Since George is gone, you can be my date for the Air Force Ball Saturday Night!”

Those of you who know me well know that this filled my being with a joy and a light – Not. I didn’t even like AF Balls when I was still in the Air Force. The Uniform of the Day for one these things is Mess Dress. Since I am officially a retired Air Force Officer, I am legal to wear the uniform and I actually have a Mess Dress that fits.

I have one that fits because I bought the thing for George and Brook’s wedding. One of the requirements of a Mess Dress uniform is the complete display of the wearer’s medals, ribbons and other devices. I am very proud that I served in the Air Force long enough to earn the right to wear command pilot wings. However, the rest of my ribbons and devices reflect my mediocre career. In 1986, I chose to transfer to the Training Command from Strategic Air Command because at the time, SAC pilots were only getting 15 hours a month of very boring flying whereas an instructor pilot in the training command was getting a lot of interesting and rewarding flying time.

This means that – much to my late mother’s relief – I have never heard a shot fired in anger and if I wear a uniform my awards reflect that I was a REMF. In this day and age with so many young heroes and heroines serving voluntarily in our armed forces, I don’t particularly like to advertise that.

Don’t get me wrong….in my career I had the opportunity to put my personal thumbprint on the flying skills over well over 500 student pilots. I like to think that I gave them some perspective that stood them well later in their flying careers and that is a source of pride to me.

In any case, I chose to pack my suit instead of my mess dress despite Brook’s pleading and off I went.

My commute on this trip was the best I’ve ever had since I started flying out of Anchorage. I checked in with Northwest / Delta Airlines at the Minneapolis Airport, deposited my aging carcass in a Business Class seat on a 747 and ate and drank my way across Canada and the Northern Pacific while watching movies, reading my book and fitfully dozing. All while getting paid. This is a good deal.

On the ground in Narita International, I cleared the Japanese Health Inspection and Customs inspection in record time and found my way to the bus counter run by the USO. For $20 American, I found myself on a bus directly to Yokota AB where Brook would pick me up.

I got off the bus about 10 pm Japan Time. We had expected to go out to dinner but I had not slept well on the plane and the two hour bus from Narita to Yokota so I disappointed her and went to bed and crashed. Sorry Brook.

The next day we had breakfast, walked the dogs and got caught up. After a nice lunch at a local Indian Restaurant, we went to Yokota Base Operations to try and figure out how I would get to the airplane the next morning. A mildly funny story ensued.

I am wearing shorts and a knit shirt. I borrowed George’s flip flops. Base Operations is literally only a few hundred yards from the kid’s house on base. We walked over. I introduce myself to the sergeant and his staff behind the desk and started asking how I would make my way onto the FedEx MD-11 parked just out the large windows looking out on the ramp. After some initial confusion while trying to decide I really am who I am, the staff is a great help. It helped that I had my retired AF ID card and my FedEx ID badge.

They put me in contact with Nori-san who is in charge of getting the military charter guys like me on and off the base. I introduce myself to Nori-san on the phone and he immediately jumps to conclusions:

“You are in the wrong place! You are supposed to go to the Palace Hotel in Tachikawa! How did you get on base?”

“Nori-san, I’m not in the wrong place and I’m not going to the hotel. My son lives on Yokota and I’m staying with him. I’m just trying to find out how to meet up with you in the morning so I can be escorted onto the flight line and out to the airplane.”

We go back and forth one or two times before I convince him that I really know what I’m doing and I have a place to sleep. We agree that he will pick me up in the morning in front of base operations at 0500.

After that Brook went to get her face professionally made for the ball and I took a combat nap and ironed my suit. She looked fabulous when she returned.

Brook has been taking Taiko Drum lessons and she had invited her sensei to go to the ball. At the appointed time, Takako-san shows up wearing the traditional kimono complete with tabi and obi. Shi is a very friendly person who speaks wonderful English. I’m 6’ 6” and Brooki-san is around 6’ herself while Takako-san is under 5’ tall and very Japanese. We made quite the trio.

There are more pictures of the ball at this link. Be sure to click it.

The air force had buses going around the base picking up Ball-goers so they wouldn’t have to drive to and from the Ball. This was a great thing. Brook chatted with her neighbors and friends during the short drive over to the base Theater where the Ball was held.

The buffet layout was wonderful and had some really great sushi. (No Basashi!) I had decided that I was not going to drink that evening because I did not want to put me, the Air Force or FedEx in the position of wondering if I had quit before the appointed 8 hours from ‘bottle to throttle.’ The rest of the ball goers were having a great time.

Brook introduced me to a million people. Like most military bases, Yokota has a relationship with the surrounding community. The brass was hob-nobbing with the local government officials. The Four-Star Pacific Air Forces Commander was the guest speaker but since I no longer have to listen raptly to General Officer's give speeches, I didn’t. I’m sure he was heart-broken.

There were a lot of Japanese locals and they were having fun.

I will admit to a moment of disorientation here. I spent 22 years in the Air Force and went to a million parties just like this one. Although I knew no one personally, these were all my kind of people and I felt at home. They were talking about things I am used to talking about and behaving in ways I understand. They were partying hard. It had been 15 years since I had been to a party like this but I felt like I had never left.

Then suddenly…I realized that they were my kids - I was literally old enough to be their Dad. I still enjoyed myself, but that was a very strange adjustment to make.

At this point, I’d like to discuss party/aloha shirts. This was just starting about the time I retired. A mess dress is a very formal uniform. But somewhere around 1000 all the big brass leaves and an Air Force Ball becomes more informal. Off come the jackets and the dancing starts in earnest. A lot of guys and gals have paid tailors to modify the backs and sleeves of their Mess Dress pleated shirts to have loud and personalized designs. The best one I saw that night was a Colonel who had a nice Harley design on the back of his shirt. I wish I had thought to take some pictures. This one is of George at his wedding.

The Ball broke up around 11 and I was in bed by midnight. FedEx alerted me at 0430 and Brook made me a nice cup of coffee and walked the 100 yards over to the pickup place with me. Nori-san showed up on time and I hugged Brook goodbye.

It was a nice visit.

The flight from Yokota to Alaska was boring in the extreme - just the way you want it to be. On the west coast of Alaska we deviated from the normal track into Anchorage and flew north of Mt McKinley / Denali into Eielson AFB.

I suppose if I had asked they would have told me the details of what I was hauling but I really didn’t want to know. Freight is Freight. I did hear we had some equipment for the Japan Air Self Defense Force which was coming to Alaska for an exercise.

There was a mild icing foofaraw at Eielson AFB. It started snowing around 10pm or about the time we were full reloaded, refueled and ready to start, taxi and take-off. We had to be airborne by 11 pm local or stay the night as the base closed. Initially the AF said it would take 50 minutes for the deice vehicles to get to us. When I asked where they wanted us to stay for the night, 50 minutes turned into 10.

We got down to Anchorage and Elemendorf AFB at about midnight. There were no flights home at that time of night, so I went to Ilona’s Bed and Breakfast, got up at 0700 and had enough money left in my travel bank to fly home on Northwest / Delta.

It was a good trip.

On that note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Zero Tolerance

2009-10-14T12:56:00.007-05:00

"Actions are judged by their results, not by their intentions." Jean-Francois Revel

"To live is, in itself, a value judgment. To breathe is to judge." Albert Camus

Gentle Readers and Loved Ones,

I have often said here that I don’t want this to be a political blog. This entry will skirt the limits of that intention. I apologize in advance.

This article got me to thinking about flying, judgment and responsibility. Please click the link and familiarize yourself with it. It’s another story of Education and Zero-Tolerance run amuck. (Note, when I awoke this morning, I found this story has been overcome by events - the clue bird has landed on the school board. Still, I think I will post anyway.)

At present, I am sitting in the left seat of this MD-11. We are flying at 31000’ somewhere out in the middle of the Pacific, hauling 133 thousand pounds of freight from Osaka, Japan to Oakland, CA. Weighing in at a gross weight of 530,000 pounds of metal, plastic, freight, kerosene and pilots, we are cruising at .82 mach or 488 knots True Air Speed, with a tailwind of 120 knots. This means that effectively, after you account for the tailwind, we are traveling faster than the speed of sound over the waves below. Or, if you will, I am traveling about the same speed as 45 caliber pistol bullet but I’m a whole lot bigger.

On the other hand, this airplane is so automated that this is really just another milk run. The autopilot is on and connected to a set of cross-talking Flight Management Computers and maintaining my speed and altitude much more precisely than I could dream of doing. Through the Global Positioning Satellite system, we are maintaining a 95% statistically accurate position within 0.07 nautical miles of the required course. The Ground Proximity Warning System is armed and ready to tell ‘Bitchin’ Betty’ to scream at me if we should come in danger of hitting the ground. ‘Bitchin’ Betty’ is also watching the Hydraulic, Electrical, Pneumatic and Fuel systems and controlling their required parameters much more precisely than any Flight Engineer of times past could have hoped for.

I haven’t touched the controls in hours and the airplane really requires very little from me right at the moment.

But….I am most definitely not a passenger. I am the Pilot in Command and the Captain. If something goes wrong and I do not correct it, it will be my fault and no one else’s. My whole point of existing right at this moment is to sit above all the automation, all the organization and agencies on the ground that exist to keep me safe and watch it all. There are voluminous books that tell me how to do this and every 6 months I get classroom training and a check ride to prove that I am familiar with it all.

That familiarity includes this line in the Federal Aviation Regulations (FARs): “There shall be no deviations from applicable FARs or FAA Operations Specifications unless an exemption or deviation is approved by the FAA.”

Sounds like Zero Tolerance doesn’t it? But the next line is: “However, no policy or regulation shall be interpreted as a substitute for the exercise of sound judgment.”

So there you have it. It's my job to follow the rules unless the rules are wrong - in which case I'm expected to violate the rules. Said another way, my job is to step in and prevent buffoonery. I get paid a lot of money for this....and I don't know that I am all that special. Most of my gentle readers have jobs that require the application of judgment.

Tying this back to the news article: School boards and school principals also get paid a lot of money to prevent buffoonery.

I think back to Mrs. Britton, my First Grade Teacher in 1960. Had she perceived a danger from me taking my multi-tooled Boy Scout knife to school – I had one too, boy was it cool! - and using it to eat, she would have handled it thus:

“Hi, Geoff, that’s a nice looking knife you have there. May I see it please?”

(Little Geoff would be a nervous wreck at this point, Mrs. Britton had him cowed.)

“I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to it. I’ll keep it for you.”

(Little Geoff could no more say ‘no’ than fly.)

She would have either given it back to me at the end of the school day and told me to leave it home in the future or called my folks and asked them to come get it some time. Her choice would have depended on how she viewed the ‘danger’ of me having it.

Problem solved.

Instead, the kid in the news article gets a 45 day suspension and gets sent to reform school?

"Say whut?", Geoff asks, sarcastically.

I do not understand Zero Tolerance but I am firmly of this opinion: we taxpayers pay school officials pretty good bucks to administrate our kid’s education. If you have made the effort to get the PhD in Education and "paid the dues' to get the experience required to become a school administrator, why in the world would you want to give up your authority and experience and pay obeisance to some Zero Tolerance rulebook?

It’s just a matter of time until a knuckle-dragger like me stands up in a School-Board meeting and asks: “If you educators have an all-encompassing rulebook that knows all and sees all, why do we need you? Why don’t we get rid you and your payroll and just pay some dumb flunky to read the book and do what it says?”

I can’t wait to see that townhall video on Youtube.

On that happy note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

p.s. I see that the School Board thought about this and reversed their ruling. They were idiots for putting themselves in the public eye in the first place.

p.p.s. Make sure you click the first 'Bitchin' Betty' link. I never knew what she looked like until I researched this.

Dain Bramage

2009-09-29T12:29:00.000-05:00

"America loves football with an ardor that would dethrone reason,
were reason enthroned in America." - George Will

Esteemed and Gentle Readers,

I'm about to relate yet another flying story. Recently, my brother emailed me a video link that had me rolling on the floor. If you are 'of a certain age' you will remember it. As best I know, the comedian is the source of the term "Dain Bramage." (At this point, those of you reading this to young children will want to do some parenting and review the video before you let the kids watch it.) It's about 7 minutes long and fairly important to the story I'm about to tell so please watch this video before you read on or set this aside until you can budget the required time.

Ready? As is true with most of the tales related here, the setup will require some explanation.

My last assignment in the Air Force was to be an Instructor Pilot in the T-38 at Laughlin AFB in Del Rio, Texas. As I had achieved the lofty rank of Major, a lot of my time was spent in a supervisory role rather than as an active instructor. I am familiar with the details of this story because I was due to be the new Flight Commander of the student pilot who stars in this saga.

The T-38 was and is a great airplane. I really miss 'strapping it on'.

It 'kinda-sorta' had a pressurized cockpit. Unlike airliners, the pressurization supplied was NOT sufficient to keep the cabin altitude at a level where you could breathe without an oxygen mask once you were cruising in the stratosphere. The system's purpose was to maintain a cabin pressure at a level that would prevent 'the bends' in all of its varied presentations. If you took the airplane up to 40,000' above sea level - the airplane's best cruising altitude - the cabin-altitude would rise to slightly above 20,000'. Unless you are in Mt Everest climbing level training, you can only breath air this thin for very short periods of time.

Breathing oxygen is supplied to the pilot through an oxygen mask attached to a flying helmet. The helmet itself was custom built for each pilot and very comfortable and protective. There is a microphone in the mask for communicating between cockpits and on the radios. Headsets are attached left and right on the inside of the helmet using Velcro. ™   You can adjust the position of these earcups for maximum comfort.

Another piece to this puzzle is to understand that from the back seat of the T-38, the instructor pilot cannot see into the front cockpit. The only portion of the student pilot that is visible is about an inch and a half of the top of the student's helmet. When you instruct in the T-38, you quickly become an expert in piecing together verbal cues and the subtle movements of this small slice of the student to figure out what the student is 'up to.'

The next piece to understand is that the two cockpits are completely separate from each other. There is a Plexiglas ™ windscreen behind the front seat occupant's head and in front of the back seater's instrument panel. This is a safety precaution in the event that the front canopy departs the aircraft to prevent wind blast striking the back seater.

Finally, there are switches and controls vital to the operation of the T-38 that are only available to the front cockpit pilot. Every T-38 instructor has given a lot of thought to how to communicate with a student pilot in the front seat when they need one of those controls/switches activated.

This story happened almost 20 years ago - the main players are 'Capt Smith', the instructor pilot and 'Lieutenant Dain', the student pilot. Neither of these names are true - but 'Dain' is very close to the real name for reasons that will become obvious. Their mission on this fateful day was a 'Day Out & Back Navigation Sortie' with Lt. Dain in the front seat. They took off from Laughlin AFB, climbed high into the stratosphere and once they were north of the Big Bend in the Rio Grande River they turned west to cruise out to Davis-Monthan AFB in Tucson, Az.

They are smoking along at .90 mach, the best cruising speed of the T-38, when Lt. Dain begins to become aware that one of his headsets has become maladjusted and he is beginning to feel discomfort on the mastoid process behind his right ear. In short time, the Lt decides that the pain has grown to the point that it is distracting him from the quality training being provided by Capt Smith in the back seat.

So he says to the instructor, "Sir, please take the airplane for a moment." Capt Smith does this using the standardized terminology: "Roger, I have the aircraft." to which Lt Dain acknowledges "Roger, you have the aircraft." Everything is all ricky-ticky so far although this is not something that student pilots often do. As the puzzled instructor pilot asks: "What's going on?" he sees Lt Dain remove his helmet to adjust the earcup.

Lt Dain puts the helmet in his lap to do this. He is so consumed with the concentration required to adjust the earcup that he does not notice that he has jammed the helmet up against the stick thereby 'pitching' the nose down and starting a descent from the assigned cruising altitude. Capt Smith, on the other hand, is immediately aware of this and tries forcefully to bring the stick back with only moderate success.

Just that quickly, Capt Smith has been presented with a deadly emergency situation. He has three vital concerns: 1) Lt Dain could quickly become incapacitated due to hypoxia since he is not breathing through his mask. 2) If Lt Dain does not move the helmet, he will continue to be unable to prevent the uncontrolled descent of the aircraft. 3) The T-38 does not have a 'Command Sequenced Ejection System' - each cockpit must eject separately.

So, if the situation deteriorates to the point where Capt Smith has to eject to prevent his own demise he will be leaving Lt Dain to his fate.   There is absolutely nothing Capt Smith can do for Lt Dain.   Capt Smith finds himself doing two things simultaneously. First, he is on the radio with the air traffic controller, declaring an in-flight emergency since he cannot control his altitude and has - in fact - departed from his Air Traffic Control Clearance. There is a Southwest Airline 737 somewhere out in front of him at a lower altitude and it would be best to take steps to avoid hitting it. Second, he is futilely pounding on the windscreen in front of him trying to get Lt Dain's attention in the only method that remains available to him. It is very noisy in a T-38 at .90 mach as the wind rushes over the thin Plexiglas canopy. Removing your helmet exposes you to lots of decibels of noise. Lt Dain - if he is still conscious - does not hear this pounding.

We do not know this for a certainty, but your humble correspondent is convinced that at this point some vulgar language was expressed and there is a strong possibility that Capt Smith took the Lord's name in Vain.

This situation remained unresolved for many long moments and about 10,000' of altitude was lost. Capt Smith has grown both despondent and extremely angry - two emotions one would think would be mutually exclusive. At this point, Lt Dain dons his helmet and oxygen mask and says: "Sir, I have the aircraft", blissfully unaware of the drama unfolding around him.

We do not know the exact phrasing Capt Smith used, but his answer to Lt Dain was efffectively: "No, Lt Dain, you do not have the aircraft. I do. Further, I want you to place your hands on top of your helmet and do not take them down unless I give you express orders to do so." I'm sure it was a colorful exchange of information.

Our intrepid aviators - the emergency situation resolved - climb back to altitude. Because by this time they are closer to Tucson, they continue to their flight planned destination. It is mostly quiet in the cockpit during this period as Capt Smith does not trust himself to speak.

After landing, Capt Smith directs Lt Dain to go inside the Base Operations Building, sit down and stay there. Capt Smith then uses the Autovon phone system to call Major Jones, the existing Flight Commander whom I am due to replace the next day. I had known Major Jones for a long time - he was a well-respected friend. His command persona was excellent and the student pilots he commanded liked and respected him too. Capt Smith explains to Major Jones what had just transpired and said: "Sir, I want to put him on a commercial flight back to Laughlin and I'll bring the jet back solo."

Gentle Reader, what you must understand here is that if Lt Dain is returned in disgrace on a commercial flight, it has a couple of serious impacts and is a last resort option. First, the squadron has a limited travel budget that is only spent with alacrity. However, if this is truly a 'safety of flight' situation, budgetary constraints are only a secondary concern. More importantly, Lt Dain will probably find himself removed from flight training and probably will not successfully complete pilot training. At this point in Lt Dain's progress, he has been in pilot training for almost a year and the AF has invested a lot of money and resources in him. He has already jumped most of the fences in the training designed to eliminate unsatisfactory candidates. So, Major Jones is reluctant to approve this plan unless he is convinced that this event has precipitated Lt Dain into 'extremis'.

So, he proposes an alternate plan to Capt Smith. "Ok, consider this, please. Take Lt Dain into a private debriefing room. Debrief the sortie in a full and complete fashion and ensure that he understands the seriousness of the situation he placed himself in. Tell him that his performance was unsatisfactory and he will be graded as such on this sortie. Analyze his reactions during this debrief and make a further assessment of his suitability for continuation in training. If you aren't absolutely sure this is a career ending event, fly another training sortie with him and return here to base. Do not worry about your scheduled return time. Take all the time you need to perform this assessment. Call me back." Capt Smith says: "Yessir" and hangs up.

The return flight is uneventful. Lt Dain - now acutely aware of the danger he has placed his life and career in - is a model student during this flight. Capt Smith conducts a second professional debrief and orders Lt Dain to report to Maj Jones in a military manner while he completes the required post-flight paperwork

I am invited to attend this meeting with Maj Jones as I assume responsibility for Lt Dain's training on the morrow. At this point, I would like to direct your attention to the movie "Top Gun". In that movie, Maverick and Goose find themselves in a similar situation where they are standing tall on the carpet in front of the commander. In my opinion, the commander in that movie conducts himself in an unprofessional manner. Officers 'chewing the ass' of another officer - and specifically pilots - do not need to raise their voice.

No, there is a much stronger consequence available to the commander. Lt Dain's highest priority in life at that point is to graduate from pilot training. If it were not, he would not have progressed as far as he had in training.   Normally, a student pilot meeting with his Flight Commander is invited to sit comfortably. The Flight Commander is not normally the bad guy. He has an Assistant Flight Commander to be the bad guy.

This strategy is used to make the times where the Flight Commander does have to be the bad guy that much more effective. Lt Dain reported to Maj Jones and was not offered a seat but was kept at attention. Maj Jones calmly got up out of his seat and walked around his desk to stand behind Lt Dain, positioning himself about a foot behind Lt Dane's right ear.

Quietly he said: "Lt Dain, I don't know what to do with you. By rights, right now you should be dead in a smoking hole somewhere in southern Arizona. I would be dressed in a Class-A uniform and accompanied by a chaplain. We would be walking up to your front step to tell your wife that soon she would be attending a closed casket funeral in your honor. It would be a closed casket because we would only have found small scattered bits of your remains." He pauses. "I wonder if you have the native intelligence to be an aviator in the Air Force?" Another pause. "What am I going to do with you?"

By this time, Lt Dain was a whiter shade of pale. He wisely said nothing.

Maj Smith let this drama draw out for a long excruciating time. I am sitting over to the side, my hand covering my lower face, praying to God for the strength not to laugh out loud. Lt Dain grows even more pale.

Finally: "Lt Dain, it is with more than a little reluctance that I have decided to continue you in training. You'd better understand that this was your last error. You have about a month and about 20 training events before you graduate. I don't ever want to talk to you again unless it is in much happier circumstances. Have I made myself perfectly clear to you?"

Lt Dain acknowledged that the situation was very clear to him. He was a model student for the remainder of his training and successfully graduated and was awarded his silver pilot wings. To the best of my knowledge he had a successful flying career.

Now we complete this saga. Lt Dain was known from then on as "Lt Dain Bramage".

I remain,

Dad / Geoff

Autumn

2009-09-28T10:32:00.037-05:00

"It was one of those perfect English autumnal days
which occur more frequently in memory than in life."

- P. D. James

Esteemed Readers,

Autumn in Anchorage, Alaska, my domicile, but not my home, is something special. As the leaves change and the sun sets, the colors can be especially vivid. There are astronomical reasons for this and I cannot pass up a chance to talk astronomy.

Consider that Anchorage sits at latitude 61°. This is just a hair south of the Arctic Circle and therefore Anchorage is never the land of the 'Midnight Sun'. It always has a day and a night - but sometimes just barely.

There is a lesser understood consequence of being so far north. Because the sun never climbs very high above the horizon it rises and sets 'sideways'. Consider these two pictures. I generated them using Chris Marriot's estimable SkyMap program. The first picture is a depiction of the sun's track as it would appear in central Florida in September near Tampa at latitude 27°.

The blue is the sky, the gray is ground. The gray line is the "Ecliptic". The big yellow ball is the sun and the planets are labeled. The key notion here is to see that the sun plunges below the horizon at the fairly steep angle most of us are used to. The sunset would last the normal 10 - 15 minutes depending on clouds and atmospheric conditions.

Now look at this:

This is the same depiction of the sun's track in Anchorage. Note how shallow the sun's track is. Sunsets in Anchorage in September can last a long time - sometimes hours. Couple this with autumn's colors and you get some really vivid and long lasting scenery.

The pictures I'm about to show you are from a trip to Anchorage back in 2003. The weather was crisp and clear and it was just a special time. Anchorage has built a wonderful asphalt coastal trail system that starts downtown, goes south along the Knik Arm then around Ted Stevens International Airport and up the Turnagain Arm of Cook Inlet. It's a great place to walk and bike.

You can see these kind of vistas out over the mudflats that ring the Cook Inlet.

In this last picture, the low bluff extending out into the water is the northern extent of the airport. The trail clings to the edge of the bluff.

Shortly after you start your hike you come on Westchester Lagoon.

So far these pictures have been pretty but the autumn colors are not all that apparent. I was unaware of the views that would hit me that evening when we took off to 'operate' to Memphis.

As I did the preflight walk-around, the sunset was just beginning to light up the Chugach Mountains.

As we started to taxi out to take off, the sunset colors began to hit in earnest.

Shortly after takeoff, I looked over my right shoulder and saw this vista:

This picture is taken from roughly 3000' high over the place in the Cook Inlet where it splits into the Turnagain and Knik Arms. You are looking north at the Knik Arm. Anchorage is at the upper right of the picture. We turned right and began flying east to gain altitude to climb above the Chugachs.

After climbing high enough to top out the mountains, we were routed over the Eagle River Valley. Many of my fellow pilots leave at the mouth of this valley.

The sun continued to highlight the mountains as we climbed higher over the Chugachs.

As the sun finally set, it left a last light on the highest peaks.

On that beautiful note, I remain,

Dad / Geoff

The Cascade Lane

2009-09-21T16:07:00.038-05:00

"Vision is the art of seeing things invisible."

Jonathan Swift

Gentle Readers,

The Muse has finally moved me to post.

My friend, Patrick, whom - due to the magic of the internet - I've never met in person, lives down south of Portland Oregon. He has a blog where he recently posted a nice mental image: "I count nine vapor trails heading north, the Cascade lane."

The Cascade Lane....what a great phrase! I've cruised the Cascade Lane a number of times and made those contrails.

Normally, it being the Pacific Northwest, the ground is covered in clouds - or because I work for FedEx, it's dark. Yet for one glorious week in 2003, it was frequently clear and I got some great pictures.

The FedEx version of the Cascade Lane routes us from Oakland due north over Portland, Oregon to Seattle Washington. Here is a map. When you take off from Oakland, the noise abatement departure routes you over Oakland Bay. This is some of the most picturesque low altitude flying in the world. I apologize for the quality of these pictures..

In this picture, we've just lifted off from Oakland and you are looking directly north. Downtown Saffron Cisco is center left, the Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, and Alcatraz are also in the center. On the right is the runways from the closed Alameda Naval Air Station. If you've ever watched "Myth Busters" those runways are where they shoot many of their episodes.

The Golden Gate Bridge is under the fog north of San Francisco.

When the fog rolls into San Francisco only the tallest buildings stick up above the undercast.

This is one is from just north of San Francisco looking back south. The top of the Trans America building is just peaking out of the clouds. I think the California Center is the building just beyond that.

Further up the bay, looking back south, it looks like this:

Then you turn north and the first real landmark is Mt. Lassen,

and then Mt Shasta.

Mount Shasta begins a nearly continuous string of volcanoes caused by the subduction of the Pacific Plate under the North American Plate. You fly directly over the top of Mt Shasta.

Soon after that you pass what I think is one of the best volcanic features of the Cascade Lane: Crater Lake. It was formed by the collapse of a volcanic caldera.

Then comes the Three Sisters.

So far, these volcanoes have been smallish. (with the exception of Mt Shasta...) As you near Portland, Oregon, you begin to see the monsters. Here is Mt Jefferson and Mt Hood.

Mt Jefferson up closer:

Next you pass directly over Portland, Or.

This is a bad picture, looking east up the Columbia River. Mt Hood is just visible.

Just north of Portland, you pass abeam Mt St Helens and Mt Adams. In this picture you can see the gray area north of St Helens that is the ash lahar out-flow from the 1980 eruption.

Finally, you pass by Mt Ranier.

and land at SeaTac.

The Cascade Lane, I love it!

I remain,

Dad / Geoff