Long before J. K. Rowling began writing the wildly popular Harry Potter series of books on children and magic, Edward Eager wrote a similar themed book in the 1950s. In my child’s mind at that time, Eager’s book, Half Magic, was one of the most remarkable and memorable books I’d ever read. In fact, it is currently rated by some as #54 among the top 100 children’s books.
The fact that it was featured in our elementary school’s library did nothing to detract from the read. After all, that was the joy of school libraries — the ability to browse through the rows of books waiting for discovery.
There was another library book I remember, about a barnstorming pilot who for one reason or another kept crashing, and yet somehow surviving. It was exciting reading, and surprisingly did not deter me from my love of flying. But I digress.
Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I was able to identify Half Magic and download it, and read it. Presto, change-o, just like that!
But, it’s not at all what I remembered.
Here’s the thing about memory; it is ever so malleable, especially in children. All I really remembered in my teenage and adult years was that there was something in it about people who were half white and half black. Frankly I’d forgotten the whole magic theme.
What had colored my memory was the power of a vivid image found on the cover of that book, and the fact that it was popular during a time when racial integration was a frequent topic in the news. Somehow, those mental bits merged into what I believed the book to be. Many years after reading it I had the curious impression that it was a morality play of sorts, where people were in fact half black and half white.
Well, if that happened, racial profiling would be nonexistent, wouldn’t it? If you were of mixed race, with your body literally halved by distinct racial characteristics, then you obviously couldn’t be bigoted. And for that reason I held that book in high esteem. But due to my fragmented memory, I despaired of ever finding it again.
And then there was Google. While I may razz Google a bit for their intrusiveness, I do consider it a blessing to be able to Google the words “half black and half white” and see before me a panoply of related images. There, buried in the search results, was the image of a book cover that I instantly recognized from so long ago.
I had no conscious memory of it, but yet I recognized it among all the other less relevant images. (Yes, there really is such a thing as subconsciousness, just in case you wondered.)
Happily, the 50th anniversary edition of that book was recently published, so the book is available for another generation of young minds looking for magic with a moral. And indeed, it really is a morality play of sorts. But sadly, someone felt the need to modernize the cover, which is now far more visually complex. But I wonder; is it memorable?
If I had a book cover, I’d want that cover to be memorable enough to transcend the decades, and jump out of my seemingly inaccessible memory like a Jack-in-the-Box long after all other memories of the book had faded.
I am patiently waiting for my 6-year old grandchild to be still long enough to let me read her this book. As for the rest of you, real childhood magic as portrayed in Half Magic may not be as fantastical as Harry Potter, Hogwarts School, and the dark Lord Voldemort, but it seems a lot more believable.
They say that in comedy, timing is everything. Well, on this day my timing was badly off.
My older brother and I in Ft. Smith, Arkansas. I still remember those cowboy boots.
My brother was born five years before me, and of my siblings was the one with the most direct interaction with me as I was growing up. We shared life experiences, and apparently we shared the same quirky humor; the type that finds humor in everything, even dark moments.
I once visited him when he lived in New Orleans. During that visit he delivered a long and hilarious series of stories, most of them with a beautifully affected Cajun accent, à la Justin Wilson.
One story in particular captured my imagination, but was of unknown authorship. It started with “Here’s the story of Foot, Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot”. The story itself had been lost from my memory, but that lead-in line was never forgotten. Decades later my brother could not remember the story either, try as he might.
Last fall I was with my brother again and I was madly searching on my phone for all the Justin Wilson jokes I could find, and sharing them with him. I was reliving some wonderful times together, even though he didn’t respond. But I knew he was smiling inside.
You see, my last surviving sibling was in hospice, and it was approaching the time for him to “slip the surly bonds of earth” as John Gillespie MaGee said so eloquently in his poem High Flight. (My brother was one of the three Clarke boys who were all pilots).
Then I thought to search the Internet for “Foot Foot Foot”.
By Monique Haen (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsWhen I located the following, I read every word for the first time. In music they call this “sight reading”, and sight reading can often lead to surprises. This reading was no exception.
I started reading out-loud as I scrolled down through the text on my cell phone. I was so excited to finally find the story.
“One fine summer day, three rabbits named Foot, Foot Foot, and Foot Foot Foot were sitting in their rabbit den. Foot Foot Foot and Foot Foot were big rabbits and Foot was a little youngster.
Foot Foot said, “I’m hungry!”
“So are we,” said Foot and Foot Foot Foot.
(For full effect, this story really needs to be read out-loud, just as I was doing.)
Foot Foot said, “Foot Foot Foot and I can hop over to Farmer Brown’s cabbage patch. After we eat, we can bring some back for you, Foot.”
Little Foot stamped his little foot and said, “But I don’t want to stay here!”
“Foot,” said Foot Foot Foot, “Don’t make me put my foot down. You know that Foot Foot and I are bigger and faster and we can get away from Farmer Brown.”
So Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot hopped over to Farmer Brown’s garden and started munching away on the delicious cabbage.
All of a sudden there was a noise and Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot ran and hid, thinking it was Farmer Brown with his shotgun coming to get them.
“It’s just me!” said Foot, surprising Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot.
“Foot, you are a very bad little rabbit,” said Foot Foot Foot. “You know Foot Foot and I told you to stay home.”
“I know,” said Foot, “but I said to myself, ‘I should go join my brothers Foot Foot Foot and Foot Foot and eat the cabbage too.’ “
“Well,” said Foot Foot to Foot Foot Foot, “Since he’s already here, Foot might as well stay.”
So Foot, Foot Foot, and Foot Foot Foot again started munching happily away on the cabbage.
Then Foot Foot Foot heard a loud foot fall. “I see you rabbits! And this time I’ll get you for sure!” yelled Farmer Brown.
By this time I was reading to my brother as fast as I could scroll down on the little screen.
“Foot Foot Foot yelled to Foot Foot and Foot, “Run for your lives Foot Foot and Foot!” as he scrambled back towards the rabbit den.
Now since Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot were the older and faster rabbits, they made it back to the den before Foot did. Just before Foot reached the den, BLAM!! roared the shotgun.
After a bit, Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot looked outside. To their sorrow, there was poor Foot, shot dead by Farmer Brown.
Foot Foot looked at Foot Foot Foot and said, “We can’t just leave Foot there, Foot Foot Foot.”
“Quite right Foot Foot,” agreed Foot Foot Foot. “Let’s give Foot a proper rabbit burial.”
So Foot Foot Foot and Foot Foot dragged little Foot to his favorite spot in the meadow and started digging.
They were almost done covering Foot up when Foot Foot looked up at Foot Foot Foot and said, “All this work has made me hungry again. Come on Foot Foot Foot, let’s go back to the garden and eat more cabbage.”
Then I scrolled down to the last line; I was really excited by now.
“Foot Foot are you crazy?” exclaimed Foot Foot Foot. “Can’t you see that we already have one Foot in the grave?”
No sooner had I read that punch line than I gasped. I couldn’t believe I’d just said that, out-loud. My brother did have, at that very moment, one foot in the grave.
But then I was graced with a mental image of my brother rolling his eyes, smiling, and saying “John, you’re such a doofas! Your timing really sucks.”
Yes, I did accidentally have lousy timing, I admit, but I can laugh about it, as I imagine he did as well, somewhere deep inside. You see, that’s what brothers do.
And what better way to share the worst of times than by sharing the best of times.
Interesting flights and interesting dives provide an opportunity for post-event introspection; debriefing if you will.
Professionally, I am called upon to analyze fatalities and near-misses for the Navy and, occasionally, the Air Force. Personally, I spend even more time analyzing “what ifs” for my own activities.
For example, recently I was preparing a video of one of my more beautiful nighttime flights with a passenger, departing the coal-mining regions of Pennsylvania, heading south over the valleys and mountains of Appalachia as the early morning sun began to brighten our part of the world. Editing that video gave me a chance to reflect on the pre-flight and in-flight decisions I made that day. There were many decisions to be made, and those decisions resulted in not only a safe flight, but a spectacular flight.
But like most things, there was also a risk, calculated, and weighted, and recalculated as conditions in flight and on the ground changed in the face of aggressive weather.
In very real ways, single pilot IFR (instrument flight rules) flight is akin to cave diving. They are both technically challenging, rewarding solo activities. However, you better be on your game, or else not play.
I was cave diving before cave diving was cool; before it was considered a technical diving specialty, before safety rules and high quality equipment was available. Trimix, scooters, and staged decompression were all decades in the future, and frankly the safety record at that time was atrocious. I am alive because I had the good sense to limit my penetration; “just a little” was enough of a sobering experience, about which I have previously written.
But this posting is not about moderation; it is a warning to those who would, for whatever reason, deliberately make bad decisions, one after the other. If after a chain of such deliberate misadventures, a fatality results, then I would say that fatality is no accident. It is a procedure; a flawed process of decision making with a more or less guaranteed fatal outcome.
Dr. Tom Iliffe, Texas A&M University at Galveston
Lest you lose interest in reading this post because you believe all cave divers are loonies, rest assured that could not be further from the truth. Where I work we have four very active cave divers, highly intelligent, experienced, diving deep breathing trimix (helium/nitrogen/oxygen) when necessary using scuba and rebreathers. They are safe divers who are on the cutting edge of diving research when they’re not diving for pleasure. In fact, two of them are the U.S Navy’s diving accident investigators, so they know all too well about underwater misadventures.
Friends met early in my career have been the cave explorers of the 70’s and 80’s; names you may know like Bill Gavin and John Zumrick. Another long-time friend from the Navy’s Scientist in the Sea Program, and of whom I am quite envious, is Dr. Tom Iliffe, a biologist constantly on the front edge of underwater cave biology. (My draft novel, Children of the Middle Waters, includes a story about his beloved Remipedes.)
All these cave divers have survived due to their sane and balanced approach to risk management; moderation in all things. But sadly, not all divers I’ve come to know, one way or the other, have been so sensible and measured.
One was a wonderfully gracious man, a Navy diver who had a hobby: free diving. He’d tell me how he enjoyed surprising divers in the main cave at Morrison Springs, Florida when he would swim up to them and wave, while wearing no breathing equipment at all except that with which he was born.
I’m sure they were shocked; I know I would be.
After a while, as he gained experience with this solo recreation, he began to confide in me, and ask me questions about events he’d experienced. He told me how pleasant it was sometimes when he would surface. I warned him about shallow water blackout, loss of consciousness on ascent, and explained the physical laws that made breath-hold diving so dangerous; at least in the manner in which he practiced it.
Morrison Springs, Florida. Photo licensed under Wikimedia Commons.
The last day I saw him alive, he once again came in for consultation, and told me about the euphoria he had experienced a few days before. I was of course extremely concerned and told him that what he described sounded like a near death experience. The next time he might not be lucky enough to survive, I told him. Later I heard more of that story; the previous weekend he had been found floating unconscious on the surface, but was revived.
Soon after that, this diver was again found, but this time his dive had proven fatal. His personal agenda for thrills exceeded all bounds of either training or common sense. And those thrills killed him.
The only solace I could find was that he wanted to share his experience and bravado, but he clearly was not interested in really hearing the truth, no matter how hard I worked to educate and dissuade him. While some might call this young man’s mental status as a perpetual death wish, I would argue that he never consciously thought he would die; at least not that way. Life was good, in his perspective, and I suspect he thought he was smart enough to make sure it continued that way.
Unfortunately when we were talking, we did not know just how close the end was.
Jackson Blue Spring, Marianna, Florida. Photo by Paul Clark, released under Creative Commons license.
The same was true I suspect for another well-liked diver who was the subject of a fatality report I helped write several years later. It was a rebreather fatality at Jackson Blue Spring in Marianna, Florida. The decedent was reportedly an experienced diver. I won’t belabor the story because the NEDU report is available on the internet (released by his family and available on the Rebreather Forum).
Nevertheless, the sequence of events leading to his demise involved a surprisingly long list of decision points which should have prevented the fatal dive from occurring. As each opportunity to change the course of events was reached, poor choices were made. In combination those choices led inexorably to his demise.
By now we know that even the U.S. Navy is not immune to poor decision trees. In fact, I would argue that wishful thinking is a common factor among people with intelligence and technical ability, and those with a “get it done” attitude. People who fix problems for a living are seemingly resistant to admitting that sometimes the bridge really is too far, and some problems are better fixed in the shop than in the field.
Gareth Lock of Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, U.K. is currently collecting data on diving incidents through a questionnaire on “The Role of Human Factors in SCUBA Diving Incidents and Accidents”. Like me, he has both an aviation and diving background. Gareth is serious about trying to understand and reduce diving accidents. Links to a description of his work, and his questionnaire can be found here and here. If you are a diver, please consider contributing much needed information.
A Beechcraft Baron similar to the one used by Quest Diagnostics. (From Wikimedia Commons).
Every night a pilot from Atlanta makes a round-robin cargo flight to Albany GA and Dothan AL, then continues down to the coast to load cargo from Panama City FL, Pensacola, and Mobile AL before returning home. He used to fly a single engine Beech Bonanza, but now pilots a Baron, a twin-engine, 190 kt fast mover.
On really rough weather nights I’ve watched vicariously through FlightAware.com as he scurries away from lethal skies and diverts to any safe harbor. His cargo is your lifeblood, literally, but it’s not worth dying for.
He makes that flight each night because during the day in each of those cities patients had blood drawn at their doctor’s office. The samples that will tell the doctor the life and death stories of the day’s patients are whisked away to a large laboratory near Atlanta for processing overnight.
After taking off from Gwinnett County Airport near Lawrenceville, GA at 6 PM or so, the solitary pilot returns to his home base about midnight.
A Centurion 210; not your ordinary Cessna.
I was alerted one night that a plane I’d flown to Houston and back, a Cessna Centurion 210, had a gear collapse at the local Panama City Airport. I knew the plane well.
Unfortunately, shortly after the only runway was closed the Quest Diagnostics Baron approached the area, attempting to land. I turned on my aviation radio and heard the “850”, as it’s called, being told to hold, circling, while airfield crews attempted to move the damaged Centurion off the runway.
The original two-runway Panama City Airport, circa 2007. (Click to enlarge)
And that’s where the politicians come in.
Local Panama City politicians felt obliged to close down the Panama City airport with two runways (formerly known as PFN) and relocate to a larger facility, again with two runways. The new two runway airport, KECP, looked great in an artist’s rendition.
But artists don’t build airports. The reason why the second runway was not built is not a subject for this blog posting. What is the subject, is that promises made to the citizens of Panama City were not promises kept. And on that night as “850” circled overhead, there would be real consequences for the political decisions which had been made.
Once construction began on the main 10,000 ft long runway at the donated site, all mention of the second runway was forgotten; not by the local pilots, but by the local politicians and the land company.
Second runways serve important purposes. They are usually called “cross-wind” runways. I’ve landed many times on the cross-wind runway at PFN, and I’ve also been on Delta flights that used that runway when the wind across the main runway was dangerously high.
Cross-wind runways are not only a safety factor for overbearing wind conditions, but also provide an alternate landing site in case the main-runway is closed due to an aircraft being stuck on the runway.
That night as “850” was trying to land to pick up the day’s tissue samples from the Panama City area, the main runway was closed by the broken Centurion, and there was no backup runway. The pilot circled Panama City until his fuel became critical, and then he flew on to his next stop in Pensacola.
So all the blood drawn from patients in the Panama City area that day missed the trip to the Quest Diagnostics laboratory, due to a promise made but not kept.
But I suppose that is hardly news. Rather, it appears to be deeply woven into the very fabric of politics.
Lately I have been puzzled by news reports about fellow scientists who are thinking not just out of the box, but out of the universe.
The first news that had me struggling was the suggestion that a universe might be the projection of a hologram. Not our universe, necessarily, but some artificial, mathematically contrived universe. Of course, the news outlets added a more dramatic flare to that headline, which on further reading was wildly misleading. I don’t think any scientist was claiming that we are actually a hologram, a three-dimensional projection of a lower dimensional us.
A holographic Princess Leia in the 1977 Star Wars film, A New Hope
Try to translate for the popular press arcane notions of mathematical physics, and you’re bound to come up with some misrepresentation. We are not, I argue, like the projected holograms of Princess Leia asking Obi-Wan Kenobi for help in the Star Wars epics. However, it certainly would be interesting to think about. Who, we might ask, made the hologram, and who is projecting us and our galaxy into what we perceive to be a three-dimensional universe? Speculation could run wild.
Now there is another speculative and down-right mind-assaulting scientific proposition. As the press is representing it, it is proposed that we are “living” in a computer simulation. The actual human race may be long dead and vanished, but some technologically advanced civilization has coded a simulation of the defunct human race.
For what purpose, I have no idea. Unless of course we are not just a simulation, but a computer game wrought for educational purposes.
But perhaps that’s being too charitable. I would put odds on us being simulated for entertainment purposes.
If we be contrived entertainment, then perhaps that relieves us of some moral responsibility. We are not the ones bombing, beheading, and torturing our fellow man. The devil made us do it; with the devil being whoever made the sick part of the human simulation. Like Jessica Rabbit once famously said, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”
Or, perhaps the base part of the human simulation is not intentionally evil, but the result of bad coding. Coding “glitches” do occur, from the ObamaCare website to computer games, with sometimes unexpected results. Most computer gamers have experienced, or have heard of, bizarre things happening when the gaming software has a glitch. Game characters may unexpectedly launch into outer space, or disembowel themselves, when all they were supposed to do was take a step forward.
In spite of what this post title says, I’m not suggesting that the published scientific assertions are in fact true. However, as a species we should at least consider the implications if they were true. What if my love affair with a young woman were simulated, or a projected hologram? The way I felt was so palpable, so vibrant that it’s hard not to believe in its reality, and its uniqueness. What if the birth of our children, and their children, was simply part of a gaming script? What if our lives were simply an immersive simulation?
For me that would make life hollow and unsatisfying. However, in my simulated brain I would still have to wonder about the person or persons who created us, the coders of the simulation. They would be, for all practical purposes, our simulation Gods.
Now that is ironic. I do not actually believe the hologram or simulation hypotheses, but I do find it interesting that these brand new scientific propositions seem to force us into considering a creator, a God. And to think, mainstream science has been trying to force us away from the belief in God for most of the last century.
So, I have to wonder, is science changing its mind?
As a professional in underwater diving, and an amateur airman, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the causes of accidents and “near-misses”. If you’re reading this in early 2014, you are no doubt aware of several recent incidents of commercial and military jets landing at the wrong airport. In the latest case there was a potential for massive casualties, but disaster was averted at the last possible moment.
As they say, to err is human. From my own experience, I know the truth of that adage in science, medicine, diving, and the subject of this posting, aviation. Pilot errors catch everyone’s attention because we, the public, know that such errors could personally inconvenience us, or worse. But lesser known are the sometimes subtle factors that cause human error.
I can honestly tell you exactly what I was doing and thinking that caused errors at the very end of long flights. Those errors, none of which were particularly dangerous or newsworthy, were nonetheless caused by the same elements that have been discovered in numerous fatal accidents. Namely, what I was seeing, was not at all what I thought I was seeing.
The small but capable Cessna 150B.
Long before the advent of GPS navigation, cell phones and electronic charts, I was flying myself and an Army friend (we had both been in Army ROTC at Georgia Tech) from Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD to Georgia. I was dropping him off in Atlanta at Peachtree-Dekalb Airport, and then I would fly down to Thomasville in Southwest Georgia where my young wife awaited me.
Since it was February most of the planned six hour flight was at night. We couldn’t take-off until we both got off duty on a Friday.
I had planned the flight meticulously, but I had not counted on the fuel pumps being shut down at our first planned refueling spot. After chatting with some local aviators about the closest source of fuel, we took off on a detour to an airport some thirty miles distant. That unplanned detour was stressful, as I was not entirely sure we’d find fuel when we arrived. Fortunately, we were able to tank up, and continue on our slow journey. We were flying in my 2-seat Cessna 150, and traveling no faster than about 120 mph, so the trip to Atlanta was a fatiguing and dark flight.
As we eventually neared Atlanta, I was reading the blue, yellow and green paper sectional charts under the glow of red light from the overhead cabin lamp. Lights of the Peachtree-Dekalb airport were seemingly close at hand, surrounded by a growing multitude of other city lights. Happy that I was finally reaching Atlanta, I called the tower and got no answer. No matter, it was late, and many towers shut down operations fairly early, about 10 PM or so. So I announced my position and intentions, and landed.
The runway was in the orientation I had expected, and my approach to landing was just as I had planned. However, as I taxied off the runway, I realized the runway environment was not as complex as it should have been. We taxied back and forth for awhile trying to sort things out, before I realized I’d landed 18 nautical miles short of my planned destination.
My unplanned refueling stop in South Carolina placed me far enough off course to take me directly over an airport that looked at night like my destination, Peachtree-Dekalb, Atlanta. (Solid line: original course, dashed line: altered course.)
I had so much wanted that airport to be PDK, but in my weariness I had missed the signs that it was not. I had landed at Gwinnett County Airport, not Peachtree-Dekalb.
No harm was done, but my flight to Thomasville was seriously delayed by the two extra airport stops. It was after 1 AM before I was safe at the Thomasville, GA airport, calling my worried wife to pick me up.
She was not a happy young wife.
A few years later, I added an instrument ticket to my aviation credentials, and thought that the folly of my youth was far behind me. Now, advance quite a few decades, to a well-equipped, modern cross-country traveling machine, a Piper Arrow with redundant GPS navigation and on-board weather. I often fly in weather, and confidently descend through clouds to a waiting runway. So what could go wrong?
Piper Arrow 200B at home in Panama City, Fl.
Wrong no. 2 happened when approaching Baltimore-Washington International airport after flying with passengers from the Florida Panhandle. Air Traffic Control was keeping me pretty far from the field as we circled Baltimore to approach from the west. I had my instrumentation set-up for an approach to the assigned runway, but after I saw a runway, big and bold in the distance, I was cleared to land, and no longer relied on the GPS as I turned final.
As luck would have it, just a minute before that final turn we saw President George W. Bush and his decoy helicopters flying in loose formation off our port side. I might have been a little distracted.
In the city haze it had been hard to see the smaller runway pointing in the same direction as the main runway. So I was lining up with the easy-to-see large runway, almost a mile away from where I should have been. It was the same airport of course, but the wrong parallel runway.
I was no doubt tired, and somewhat hurried by the high traffic flow coming into a major hub for Baltimore and Washington. Having seen what I wanted to see, a large runway pointed in the correct direction, I assumed it was the right one, and stopped referring to the GPS and ILS (Instrument Landing System) navigation which would have revealed my error.
The tower controller had apparently seen that error many times before and gently nudged me verbally back on course. The flight path was easily corrected and no harm done. But I had proven to myself once again that at the end of a long trip, you tend to see what you want to see.
Several years later I had been slogging through lots of cloud en-route to Dayton, Ohio. I had meetings to attend at Wright Patterson Air Force base. It was again a long flight, but I was relaxed and enjoying the scenery as I navigated with confidence via redundant GPS (three systems operating at the same time).
As I was approaching Dayton, Dayton Approach was vectoring me toward the field. They did a great job I thought as they set me up perfectly for the left downwind at the landing airport. But then I became a bit perturbed that they had vectored me almost on top of the airport and then apparently forgotten about me. So I let them know that I had the airport very much in sight. They switched me to tower, and I was given clearance to land.
As I began descending for a more normal pattern altitude, the Dayton Tower called and said I seemed to be maneuvering for the wrong airport. In fact, I was on top of Wright Patterson Airbase, not Dayton International.
Rats! Not again.
Wish my electronic Foreflight chart on my iPad had these sorts of markings.
Well, the field was certainly large enough, but once again I had locked eyes on what seemed to be the landing destination, and in fact was being directed there by the authority of the airways, Air Traffic Control (ATC). And so I was convinced during a busy phase of flight that I was doing what I should have been doing, flying visually with great care and attention. However, I was so busy that my mind had tunnel vision. I had once again not double checked the GPS navigator to see that I was being vectored to a large landmark which happened to lie on the circuitous path to the landing airport. (I wish they’d told me that, but detailed explanations are rarely given over busy airwaves.)
Oddly enough, if I had been in the clouds making an instrument approach, these mind-bending errors could not have happened. But when flight conditions are visual, the mind can easily pick a target that meets many of the correct criteria like direction and proximity, and then fill in the blanks with what it expects to see. In other words, it is easy in the visual environment to focus with laser beam precision on the wrong target. With all the situational awareness tools at my disposal, they were of no use once my brain made the transition outside the cockpit.
To be fair, distracting your gaze from the outside world to check internal navigation once you’re in a critical visual phase of approach and landing can be dangerous. That’s why it’s good to have more than one pilot in the cockpit. But my cockpit crew that day was me, myself and I; in that respect I was handicapped.
Apparently, even multiple crew members in military and commercial airliners are occasionally lulled into the same trap. At least that’s what the newspaper headlines say.
My failings are in some ways eerily similar to reports from military and commercial incidents. Contributing factors in the above incidents are darkness, fatigue, and distraction. When all three of these factors are combined, the last factor that can cause the entire house of cards, and airplane, to come tumbling down, is the brain’s ability to morph reality into an image which the mind expects to see. Our ability to discern truth from fiction is not all that clear when encountering new and unexpected events and environments.
The saving grace that aviation has going for it is generally reliable communication. ATC saved me from major embarrassment on two of these three occasions.
I only wish that diving had as reliable a means for detecting and avoiding errors.
The recent Comcast Xfinity ad campaign featuring the animatronic tortoises Bill and Karolyn Slowsky reinforces the attitude that turtles, or tortoises to be exact, are slow moving.
Occasionally a surprisingly large turtle lumbers through our yard. Sometimes we spy a baby, or perhaps an adolescent. And true to expectations, they are all painfully slow. Well, let’s face it, they’re carrying a lot of baggage.
A presumed Suwanee River Cooter Turtle after its swim in our pool.
But one day this past summer I saw a black, turtle-shaped object on the bottom of our pool. It was probably an adolescent, clearly not a full grown adult. At first I thought it had drowned, but that notion was quickly dispelled. It was moving, or more correctly, it was walking, as if it was entirely normal to be walking on the bottom of a pool.
From a distance it looked like a Box Turtle, and I suspected it had fallen into the unkempt pool while taking a stroll through our yard, just like the baby turtle being held in a 6-year old’s hands.
Baby turtle pulled from our pool skimmer.
After observing this creature for awhile, I noticed it seemed to be in no distress whatsoever. He would occasionally walk up the sides of the pool, float at the surface taking a breather, and then at the first hint of something new in its environment, would quickly dive to the bottom, stubby arms and legs pumping mightily, seemingly in a near-panic.
What impressed me the most, was the speed with which he could move underwater. You think turtles are slow? Well, think again. The accompanying video will show you otherwise.
A Boy Scout Troop leader and amateur naturist helped me with a partial identification. It was not a Box Turtle at all, but a variety of aquatic turtle curiously named Cooter. Cooter turtles are aquatic turtles, but are known to travel considerable distances over land when it suits them, to relocate to another body of water. As they lumber over land, like their other turtle kin, they give no indication of their underwater agility. However, as the video shows, they can be very agile, and comically clumsy in their rush to avoid a potential predator.
After I’d netted the seemingly woe-begotten turtle and moved it to the lawn, I watched it just long enough to make sure it was alright, and then let it return to its wanderings. It never occurred to me that his visit to our pool may have been deliberate.
If I had detained it longer, and photographed it more carefully, I might have firmly identified it. But it really didn’t matter; whatever it was, it was soon on its way.
Webbed foot of an aquatic turtle.
My original thought that he was not an aquatic turtle but a terrestrial turtle accidentally fallen into the pool came from the observation that he walked on the bottom, like Navy salvage divers, and did not swim. I would have guessed that if he could swim, he would have. But apparently that assumption was wrong. Also, I was expecting an aquatic turtle to have webbed-feet, and this turtle’s feet were only half-webbed, as shown in the photos below. Maybe that’s why it could swim, but preferred to walk.
Although the turtle moved slowly and deliberately both on land and on the pool bottom, when spooked it moved very quickly. They are capable of a speedy get away when they feel threatened near the surface.
I don’t get the feeling that the Slowsky tortoises have that capability. But then, I could be wrong. Maybe I should ask Xfinity.
When it comes to vocations and avocations, I know of none more aesthetically pleasing than flying and diving. I’m sure there are many others, but I simply don’t know them.
My vocation is diving, and flying is my avocation. I also know commercial pilots who dive in caves simply for the joy of diving. Those two activities, flying and diving, are fairly similar, as I’ve noted before.
There are experiences in flying and diving that make them more than enjoyable. They are actually breathtaking, when one takes the time to appreciate them.
For me, the breath taking part is flying into and out of clouds; what is called instrument flying. It’s called that because when you’re in clouds you can’t see the horizon, and you can’t trust bodily sensations, so you are entirely dependent upon your aircraft instruments to make sure you, your passengers, and the aircraft, do not come to harm.
Granted, there are times during an instrument flight when you see absolutely nothing outside the aircraft. Some have compared it to flying inside a milk bottle, which is in my opinion an apt analogy. If it happens to be smooth flight, then there is no sensation of flight at all. The electronic equipment counts down the miles, but as far as you can tell you are in aerial limbo, seemingly suspended in time and space, encroaching on the edges of the twilight zone.
But when you eventually break out of those clouds, you instantaneously switch from sensory deprivation to sensory overload. The view can be spectacular.
When I was an instrument student, long before GPS navigation, instrument flying was hard work, especially when training. It still is in many ways, but technology has made flight in the clouds more precise, and frankly easier over all than it used to be.
But in the clouds a pilot is still too busy “aviating, navigating, and communicating”, to catch more than a brief glance outside, to enjoy the ever shifting textures of white clouds, blue sky and a multitude of grays in between. Occasionally you spy greens and browns of the ground, seen fleetingly through breaks in the cloud cover.
It is a grand theater in the sky not visible from the ground. For that reason, it is special, and to be seen in that moment and that place by no one else in the world except you and your passengers.
The video below gives a sample of such variable flows of scenery, with visibility ranging from zero to miles. The entire flight looped around my home airport in Panama City, FL, as I was radar vectored along a large rectangle, eventually joining a course bringing the aircraft back to a straight-in approach for landing.
This particular flight was a currentcy flight, so the departure and approach to landing was repeated several times. The video, however, ends just after I set up the navigation devices for the next approach. (I suggest you watch the video full screen at the highest resolution possible – 1440p HD.)
The only way I can hope to describe the beauty of such a flight is through the music which accompanies it. The quietness, the excitement, is all there. And from one who has experienced all those emotions during the flight, I can attest to the relevance of that music.
If you’ve planned a deep dive, to say 100 meters or deeper, you may have wondered just how your rebreather scrubber will handle that depth. Since pressure is equalized across a carbon dioxide (CO2) absorbent canister within a rebreather, it won’t implode. But what about the chemical absorption reactions occurring within the scrubber?
The rebreather scrubber is a vital part of your underwater life support system, so that question is a pretty important one. And the answer is very hard to find.
I recently traveled to Ireland to act as an external examiner for a Ph.D. student’s Doctoral Dissertation defense in the Department of Mechanical, Biomedical, and Manufacturing Engineering of the Cork Institute of Technology. The very talented graduate student was Shona Cunningham, and her dissertation was titled, “Carbon Dioxide Absorption and Channeling in Closed Circuit Rebreather Scrubbers”. She’s an athlete, musician, and perhaps most importantly for you readers, an avid diver.
Her work is the first computational fluid dynamic representation of scrubber canister thermokinetics. A portion of her dissertation work has already been published. Apparently, it was partially inspired by some of my computer simulation descriptions posted on this blog, which can be found here, here, and here.
Dr. Cunningham’s analytical approach (using Ansys CFX) showed that ambient pressure (depth) could reduce the effectiveness of scrubber canisters. In support of that finding were the words from the Dive Gear Express website regarding the Diverite O2ptima using the ExtendAir scrubber cartridge.
“As pressure increases the total number of molecules, the relative concentration of CO2 molecules in the loop is reduced, slowing the chemical absorption process. Thus as depth increases, scrubber efficiency will decrease.”
The U.S. Navy has no experience with the Diverite O2ptima, but they have information on other rebreathers using granular absorbent. That experience shows that there is no reliable depth effect across all rebreathers and all absorbents.
U.S. Navy MK 16. US Navy photo by Bernie Campoli.
For example, in one rebreather there was indeed a 17% decrease in endurance using large grain absorbent (Sofnolime 408) at 50°F in descending from 190 fsw to 300 fsw (58 to 92 msw) breathing air. However, there was no decrease in durationwhen using fine grain absorbent (Sofnolime 812) under the same conditions. (On an actual dive, air would never be used at 300 fsw, but air was used in this study for scientific reasons.)
In another rebreather using Sofnolime 812, for a change in depth from 99 fsw to 300 fsw (30.3 to 92 msw) there was a 29% increase in duration at 75°F, a 10% increase at 55°F, and a 15% decrease at 40°F. Although air diluent was used at 99 fsw, 88/12 heliox diluent was used at 300 fsw.
From another manufacturer, I obtained information on two of their rebreathers. At 4°C, 1.6 L/min CO2 injection rate (corresponding to a fairly heavy work rate), 40 L/min ventilation rate using air diluent, there was a 27% decrease in one rebreather in going from 15 to 40 msw (50 fsw to 132 fsw), and a 11% decrease in another of their rebreathers in dropping from 40 msw to 100 msw.
In another rebreather tested under the same conditions except for depth, the canister duration dropped 39% between 15 and 40 msw.
So, there is some support for a drop in duration with depth, but in other cases, there is either no effect or an increase in duration with deeper depths. Clearly, if the high number of inert gas molecules coming with a pressure increase makes it more difficult for CO2 to reach absorption sites, then that would be a simple and unavoidable fact of physics. But that cannot be the whole story. What is likely to be going on, a hypothesis, is being developed for a later posting.
Should the effect of depth on your particular rebreather matter to you? Logically it shouldn’t. Even on a deep dive, the majority of the dive time is spent shallow, decompressing.
However, consider the case where you conduct a deep dive with an anticipated short bottom time, but something bad happens on the bottom. You or your dive team becomes fouled, ensnared in lines. Or there is a partial cave collapse trapping you. The benefit of a rebreather over scuba is that it gives you time to sort out your problem. Gas consumption is not nearly as great a concern as with open-circuit breathing apparatus.
However, as the minutes tick by as you work deep to get yourself or a team member free, you might wonder, “How is my scrubber handling this depth?” In the middle of a crisis is no time to be making assumptions about the status of a major part of your life support system.
Ask your manufacturer how your canister performs at depth. You have a right to know, and that information just might prove useful someday.
There is a good reason why God and aliens (of the extraterrestrial variety) use telepathy to communicate. It is the only secure form of information transmission. Everything else is subject to capture, storage, and retrieval.
There is currently a frantic paranoia spawned by national and international agency’s collection of virtually everything we say and do. The only thing not open for capture are our thoughts and dreams, at least for now. (Yes, the Army’s working on that).
But governments aren’t alone in information spying — commercial industry is perhaps outpacing governments in their data collection efforts. Their motivations may be different, but the frenetic pace and implications are every bit as invasive. Privacy, as we’ve known it, is dead.
I’ve previously written about Google Noodling , which is a way of catching Google in their data-mining efforts. And like the tone of that article, you have to take a lighthearted view of such efforts. It is not going away. And if we don’t “get over it”, we may, in my estimation, go a little crazy.
But there is a positive side to all this, and a large and growing number of people are finding this side to be personally satisfying. That has to do with family connections, or genealogy. I’ve written about that topic as well.
My brother and I. He was five years older.
Last night I solved a very personal family puzzle through the help of Ancestry.com. Both my parents had brown hair and brown eyes. Both their younger children, sons, had blond hair and blue or green eyes.
I’ve spent a lot of time of late with my brother before he passed from a prolonged illness, and I was struck as never before with the purity of the blue color in his almost iridescent eyes. (I’m the one with the green eyes.) When young, both of us had blond hair, which eventually darkened with age. My brother was tall and thin. I was thin, but vertically challenged.
In the next generation, both my children have green eyes, perhaps because I married a green-eyed girl. Our daughter has blonde hair, and even a granddaughter has greenish-brown eyes. And a new grandson baby seems to have blue eyes and blond hair.
I have never ceased wondering, as did my parents no doubt, where those light colors came from. Having believed strongly in my mother’s fidelity, I kept assuming that someday I would discover the source of the blue/green eyes and blond hair.
That happened last night, thanks to the technology of digitization and data mining. I discovered a World War I selective registration document from my Grandfather who died in a hotel fire many years before my birth. At the age of 34 he had blue eyes and “light” hair. He was both tall and “slender”, pretty much a perfect description of my brother.
The next morning I was able to go through unidentified family photos, and there he was, identified at last, the Grandfather I never knew. So apparently it wasn’t the mailman after all!
Obviously this discovery is of interest to no one except my cousins and other relatives. However, it does point out the value of computers, computer databases, and the sharing of information that large databases make possible. There is a tangible reward, for both the company providing the product (the database) and the customers who benefit from the data shared.
I’m sure that when my Grandfather filled out his draft card in 1918, he had no idea that the digital image of that card would end up in the hands of his unborn grandchildren and great grandchildren 95 years later.
Which makes me wonder, what will the world know about each of us 100 years from now? We’ll be long gone, but the record of our existence will survive somewhere in the depths of a digital storage facility. Without a doubt our descendants will enjoy reading about the inane things which pleased or troubled us in 2013, and which we so freely posted thinking that no one was listening, and no one really cared.
Believe me, some people will care. And apparently, everybody’s listening.
Long before J. K. Rowling began writing the wildly popular Harry Potter series of books on children and magic, Edward Eager wrote a similar themed book in the 1950s. In my child’s mind at that time, Eager’s book, Half Magic, was one of the most remarkable and memorable books I’d ever read. In fact, it is currently rated by some as #54 among the top 100 children’s books.
