where are your gloves and your helmet?

I saw a closeup of NOAA's 'Kermit' hurricane hunter P3 Orion aircraft yesterday, and for the first time in I do not remember how long, suddenly wanted to fly a multi-engine fixed wing aircraft. It was probably the most I had ever wanted to fly one.

And then, about five minutes later, the record was instantly surpassed, because I found out that the discovery of water on the Moon's sunlit side was made from NASA's SOFIA telescope, and SOFIA is a two-meter telescope mounted in a specially modified Boeing 747, and I wanted to LEARN TO FLY THAT THING RIGHT THE HELL NOW.

Man, I haven't been in the cockpit since 2019. It's getting to me.

I'm awake, which is something of an accomplishment this morning given that I nearly fell asleep all over again with my cat in my lap in between 'get out of bed' and 'get your socks on'. I've come up to full wakefulness, though, and I just finished my morning coffee, so that should help.

This past weekend had a flight lesson in it. Hover practice, mostly. And targeted landing- 'okay, see the square on the runway formed by the various patches and stripes of asphalt color? land in that specific spot'. And pickups and putdowns, which is to say 'take off but don't move forward' and 'land from about a foot above the pavement'. The instructor and I have found that the usual advice of 'pick something in the far distance and keep your eyes on it as you hover' has not been working for me; that's the kind of thing that results in swaying far too far to either side and then having to correct for it. Middle distance visual locks work a lot better, so I'm sticking with that for now. I've gotten to the point where the instructor is no longer trying to find a way to show me how to do what I need to do with hovering, but instead recommending that I get more practice in doing it. Which is promising, because he can't endorse me to solo until he teaches me a couple of things that have 'hover properly' as prerequisites.

I probably won't get another lesson in until the 28th, and the one after that won't be until the 11th of February, but at least I know what I really need to practice.

No flight lesson this weekend. The instructor had to cancel due to family stuff. I spent the time instead studying the chapter of the Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge on flight instruments and how they work.

Here's a thing you should know: instruments suck.

Well, okay. They don't, not really. But the instruments that take up the control panel of your average flying machine- the book is written primarily with fixed-wing craft in mind, us rotorheads have to make do with some adaptations- are all fundamentally approximations. They're crude human attempts at building sensory apparatus based on the phenomena we can manage to measure. The airspeed indicator, for example- that measures differences in air pressure between a tube that pokes out of the side of your aircraft, or occasionally the inside of your aircraft, and the air pressure being forced down the aircraft's tiny, tiny pitot tube of a throat by its forward travel. You can lose the ability to see how fast you're traveling if a single piece of crap happens to wrap itself over one of the openings involved. Your compass only works completely accurately if you're flying straight and level and if you're on a particular heading; if you're heading east or west, and you accelerate, your compass will swear on its very soul that you just turned to the north. If you're flying someplace where the air pressure is high and you fly into a low-pressure air mass it will result in your altimeter lying to you, because as far as it can tell, you just experienced a swift climb in altitude; it does its job based on air pressure differences and it really has no idea whatsoever where the ground is. Same deal if you go from warm air to cold air, since that's 'oh hey, the air's way denser now, we TOTALLY changed altitude' time.

And don't even get me started on the number of places along the coast of Maine with 'yeah, your compass is going to lie to you EXTRA HARD' notations on the map. Seriously, there's a bunch of islands that'll screw your compass up by an extra ten degrees on top of everything else you have to correct for.

Anyway, the point is: humans try to build things that let them perceive the world safely and correctly, but every single one of them has to be corrected in some way, or at least have its many limitations acknowledged and compensated for. It's kind of amazing that our machines let us manage as well as we do.

I can now forgive Heath Corson for the writing of Justice League: War and Justice League: Throne of Atlantis, because Assault on Arkham was awesome to a degree that kinda outshone Son of Batman and Batman vs. Robin. Corson got the dialogue right on all the characters I knew (Batman, Harley Quinn, the Joker, the Riddler, Amanda Waller, the Penguin, Captain Boomerang, etc.) and did what seemed like a damn good job on the others (Floyd Lawson, King Shark, Killer Frost, Black Spider). The story was pretty well plotted and the pace was great. I'm good with the writing.

However, tomorrow when I go to flight school I am going to have to tell my instructor about this, because towards the end my thoughts were occupied with 'wow, the Gotham PD has one hell of a budget if they can get what appears to be a military-grade personnel carrier helicopter- wait, Harley's only moving one control in the emergency effort not to hit the building- well, it looks like a realistic cyclic for modern models of helicopter, and they're not changing altitude- and it IS a glass cockpit with lots of unlabeled controls, maybe the autopilot is controlling the collective- nonono, dude, you grazed the building, that's going to damage several of your rotor blades and affect your flight- okay, she can't find the gas pedal so she doesn't know where the throttle is and she's not fiddling with the tail rotor- I'm seeing what looks sort of like LTE spinning but there's too much control to it- okay, they've crashed and that's fine, but the tail rotor is on the right of the craft rather than the left, what country was that helicopter built in? I need to rewind and see what direction the main rotors were turning to see whether they were being consistent or just careless'.

(This is being shelved alongside my reaction to a rewatch of Iron Man in which my reaction to Tony taking off for the first time was 'Um... isn't Malibu within spitting distance of LAX? Tony's going through class B airspace without even having JARVIS get clearance. The FAA is going to have guys waiting on his doorstep by the time he gets home.')

Back at work, after spending yesterday working from home. My cold symptoms are mostly abated but the sinus congestion yesterday was still in moderate drip mode, plus I was basically making croaking noises instead of being able to talk in the morning. Thanks largely to the good people at Reckitt Benckiser (they make Mucinex DM), I was able to put the worst of that at bay, and I even got to sleep properly last night, which was a nice change. I took one of the twelve hour tablets this morning before leaving for work, so hopefully it'll e all right the rest of today.

Unrelated to the illness stuff.... I'm taking an online course in introductory aeronautical engineering. It's an edX course and it's free so it's not for credit, just an honor certificate, but it seemed like it would feed into the helicopter training at least in terms of learning principles. We had a question we had to answer on class forums yesterday, during intro week- we had to name people we considered among the greatest aviation pioneers.

A lot of people named the Wright Brothers, obviously, and Chuck Yeager got some mentions, as did Amelia Earhart. A lot of students mentioned Alberto Santos-Dumont, which is only fair and right. (Btw, if you're into steampunk, you want to learn about this man, because Alberto Santos-Dumont gave you one of the most iconic modes of transportation in the genre. Alberto Santos-Dumont designed, built, and flew the first practical dirigible. YOU BETTER RECOGNIZE.)

*cough*

Anyway. Sorry. Um, there were plenty of others, obviously, including an Ottoman Empire genius named Hezarafen Ahmed Çelebi who developed an early form of glider, and Otto Lilienthal, and a lot of other people. My votes were for Igor Sikorsky, obviously- he didn't invent the heilcopter but he and his team were the ones who made rotary wing flight as we know it today reliable and practical- and Louis Bleriot, the first man to get a powered, piloted monoplane off the ground- and for one other person who wasn't actually a pilot: United States Air Force Colonel Doctor John Paul Stapp, whose contributions to aviation were of the "what horrible things can go wrong when the flying machine stops working, and how can the people on board survive it" variety. Most of which information was acquired by strapping himself into high powered vehicles, accelerating them to ridiculously high speeds, and then making them stop RIGHTTHEHELLNOW. All things considered, that's kind of important.

October 12th, 2014 was my first cross-country helicopter flight, where cross-country is defined as a flight of at least 25 nautical miles terminating at a different airport than the one I departed from. We had a GoPro camera in the cockpit the whole way. No headset sound, unfortunately, just engine noises- I suggest you turn down the volume or mute the video first.

Departure was from Lawrence Municipal Airport in North Andover, MA. The first place we stopped at was Portsmouth International Airport at Pease, aka "it looks like an aircraft carrier" and "the runway is *literally* two miles long, look it up".

In all of these- I had to break the hour-plus video into four segments- I'm the one on the right.

The first twenty minutes of 12 October 2014 cross-country flight from Camwyn on Vimeo.

The second twenty minutes of 12 October 2014 cross-country flight from Camwyn on Vimeo.

The third part of 12 October 2014 cross-country flight from Camwyn on Vimeo.

Last part of 12 Oct 2014 cross-country flight from Camwyn on Vimeo.

Went to bed around 10:30 last night; if the cats made any noise after that I didn't hear it. Doing MUCH better today.

Saturday's flight school lesson was pretty good. No ground training this time. My instructor told me he likes to give students a break from the area around Lawrence every five lessons or so. If I wanted, we could fly out to Boston and back. Or, since I'd already had ground training in it from him and from one of the other instructors, we could practice autorotations and I could start getting used to the idea. I wound up going with the autorotations; as cool as flying to something recognizable would be, I ultimately felt it was probably better to get back up there and start learning to handle those things before I forgot what I'd been taught. I'm going to have to be able to do one coming straight in and one with a turn in it for my check ride, and it seldom hurts to start getting an idea of what's involved early on. What's involved:

1. Be at a suitable altitude and speed for practice purposes. Emergencies will no doubt be very different but this is learning how to fly a helicopter, not learning krav maga; the school does not have a philosophy of 'throw the worst thing possible at them from the start', kthx.

2. You have one (1) second to lower the collective control all the way to the lowest position. Don't slam it in an eyeblink; you want to bring it down in the time it takes to say 'down collective'.

3. Roll the throttle towards 'off', so that the engine RPM needle on the tachometer plummets like a brick while the rotor RPM needle stays where it is. That last part is IMPORTANT.

4. Judiciously apply the right pedal to keep your nose pointing straight since you are no longer compensating for engine torque.

5. The cyclic control, the one in your right hand? Bring that aft somewhat so that your nose comes up a bit. Nose dropping is bad.

6. I hope you did all of that in the same second as bringing the collective down, because you were supposed to.

7. And now you should bring the collective back up a bit, just a bit, to check your rotor RPM.

8. Okay, great, now DON'T FUCK WITH ANYTHING.

Seriously, that's more or less how it goes; you spend the next several seconds gliding down from 1200 or so feet to 200 or so feet and you are well advised to just keep your eyes on the horizon so you maintain the correct heading and attitude. If it's falling at the correct angle and speed, don't worry too much about whether you've got exactly the right numbers or not. When you get to around 200 feet you'll be checking your airspeed, rotor RPM, and rate of descent and the horizon, but you need to keep your eyes outside a lot, so look at $GAUGE, correct any problems it may have, and move on to $NEXT_GAUGE- don't go back to the tach if you had to adjust your nose angle because your airspeed was a problem. Keep moving and keep confirming the horizon and your landing spot are in the right place.

Things change a bit at around forty feet or so but my instructor didn't want me to get too overwhelmed the first time, so instead of doing autorotations all the way into the ground (not in the sense of "SPLAT" but in the sense of "*BOMP* Okay, we landed") he had me bring my engine RPMs back up and take off again for another round of the air traffic pattern around the airport. On our last autorotation he took over the controls near the end and demonstrated what would be involved in a real one, and then we taxied back over to the flight school and he had me practice pickups and putdowns a couple of times before closing down for the day.

He said I was one of the better first-timers he'd seen in a while, which was nice, considering how much of a hard time I had with hover work at first. I'm debating exactly how much of this lesson to tell my parents about. They worry enough as it is; I don't want to give them too much extra nightmare fuel, you know?

Had another flight school session yesterday. Wasn't planning on it this weekend, as Saturday's weather forecast was horrific for flying, but Sunday was cool and clear and low on wind, and my instructor texted me to ask if I was interested in coming in. I figured why not. Turns out that my hovering is vastly improved by working through the process of direct pick-ups and set-downs- that is, straight vertical takeoffs and landings or near-landings. Which is good, because I was really having trouble with that. We're gonna be practicing that way for a while until I get the whole process more nailed down, but my instructor was happy enough with what I was doing to move on to more material. Mostly that meant radio work and landing practice, and getting me to make my turns shallower, since I have a tendency to try and turn more sharply than I need to. (You'd think it'd be the opposite, considering that we usually fly in an R22 with the doors off.) Some of it involved doing turns based on commands from the tower, as there were a lot of small planes in the area yesterday. Since we basically fly the slowest thing in the sky, planes get given priority for landing approaches and positions in the pattern around the airport; if a Cessna or small jet shows up wanting to land there's a good chance of getting told to turn for the base leg of my pattern early, or to-

Oh, right. Pattern terminology. Taking off from the airport to fly in the area usually involves joining a rectangular or semi-rectangular flight path, and usually they send helicopter traffic to turn in one direction and planes in another, because like I said, we're slow. (Cessna 172s, which are a pretty common small airplane, have a cruising speed of around 122 knots (for purposes of this post, a knot is 'a mile an hour plus a bit'). Robinson R22 helicopters, which are the two-person model in this icon, usually fly at around 65-70 knots. They will in fact stall at 102 knots- this is the official V_NE, or 'Don't Go Faster Than This Speed'.) The part of the pattern where you take off is the departure leg or the initial leg and is generally done into the wind where possible. the first ninety degree turn you make puts you on the crosswind leg; the next ninety degree turn is onto the downwind leg, and often the tower will ask you to 'report mid-field', which is 'when you see that you are roughly even with the runway that goes across the airfield please call in and get clearance for whatever you plan on doing next'. Turn again and you're on the base leg, and your next turn puts you on the final leg. Depending on what the tower told you is okay, you may get to land or you may get the option of 'land if you want, touch and go if you want, do a practice run of 'NOPE NOPE NOPE CAN'T ACTUALLY LAND TAKING OFF AGAIN NOW' if you want'.

*cough* Anyway. We did most of the usual practice stuff yesterday, and the pickups and set-downs, and those were good. And on one of our last approaches the instructor said he was gonna show me what's involved in an autorotation, since we'd covered the fundamentals of that in ground class. An autorotation is the helicopter equivalent of a glide. You have to know how to do it in order to recover from emergencies. In a fixed-wing aircraft it may be a little less nerve-wracking, I don't know, but in a helicopter it's the kind of thing that results in an instantaneous "Jesus, Mary, and Buddha!" from me. Remember a few weeks ago when I showed you guys the freewheeling unit and said it was the part that makes you not die? Autorotations are what that part is for. The engine RPMs plummet like a brick, and you have to take the next second and a half to make sure that you, personally, do not do the same.

It was an interesting experience. I have that part marked in my notebook as 'This Is The Chapter We Don't Tell Mom About'.

Had flight school on Saturday. Hour and a half of ground training, forty-five minutes or so in the sky. I need to get caught up on the ground training front; we're a little behind compared to what the instructor has me doing in the air. Not that we're doing anything all that fancy in the air yet. The instructor has me practicing landing techniques, which are kind of tricky, and I'm still not entirely sure how much of the stuff we do during the takeoff process is him and how much is me. I'm still trying to get the hang of hovering, too, although this week there was a point during stationary hover when the instructor took both hands off the controls and waved them in the air because I was doing well enough. Didn't last long, but still.

One of the things we covered in ground training was magnetic navigation, and all the specific ways you have to compensate for the compass's failings. Some of them are individual to a given helicopter, which is why any bird you get into will have a compass card indicating "if you wanna plot a zero degree heading, you'll have to aim for one degrees on the compass; ninety degree headings need eighty-nine, etc". Some of them are just because the magnetic north pole is about thirteen hundred miles from the geographic north pole, plus it moves, because otherwise it would be too easy. The farther east or west you are from an imaginary line drawn through Chicago and St. Louis (at the moment- like I said, the damn thing moves), the more you have to compensate when taking a compass reading.

Also the pole is beneath the surface of the Earth, a thing which I do not remember learning from school but do remember learning from H. P. Lovecraft, since "The Dunwich Horror" mentioned 'the hidden inner city at the magnetic pole'. This causes more compass screwiness in the form of magnetic dip, since it pulls the needle in different directions during turns and changes in speed- when a helicopter accelerates it tilts its nose down and its tail up and the compass needle suddenly goes "OH HEY YOU'RE GOING NORTH NOW" even if you're headed on a perfectly straight east-west course. Which would be fun enough in itself, but if you're heading northward and turn west or east, your compass needle is gonna lag behind, so don't try making a ninety-degree turn based solely on your compass readings because you'll wind up turning way too far. Heading south and making a turn, the needle overshoots what you've already done, although it falls back eventually. My instructor, who is from Tennessee, told me the easiest way to remember this was 'South Leads, North Lags', though of course that only works in the northern hemisphere.

It never ceases to amaze me that we jumped-up little monkeys have managed to get as far as we did by following splinters of rock and metal that point at an erratic wiggly arbitrary spot in the ground somewhere most of us will never see.

Got notified that HUMC was willing to send me the discharge records for my kidney stone in 2009, so I should be seeing those soon. Now I just need to get a notarized copy of my driver's license and the HIPAA release form and then have the Nashua FAA doc send something on his stationery to Jersey City Medical Center requesting it.

One step closer to my medical cert.