Ones and Zeros

I headed north-northeast from the Ocala FL VOR, intercepted the ILS to Gainesville (sharper than 90 degree left turn), and tracked it inbound. The glideslope came alive and I reduced power and started my descent over Newnan’s Lake (where I taught myself to sail).

Unfortunately I wasn’t back there where I could pick up a lunch at Burrito Brother’s. I was on my home simulator based on X-plane. (see x-plane.org also). Just another video game? Not quite as I have higher goals that game scores. I’m banking on the idea that practice with x-plane and the controls I have attached to my computer will make me more accurate on the controls in the real plane and improve my scan. So while I can’t log this home simulator time, as far as the real goal of flying better it seems to be working.

Flying IFR in the plane is something like a video game anyhow - I don’t get to actually see outside that much after all. The difference is in the billing for my gas and instructor, and that little detail of no pause or restart button. That makes it real.

Simulators are legal in training, but I don’t have access to a full motion simulator. At the flight school we use a FTD or flight training device. Basically a glorified PC with external controls. This is legal for training for a limited number of hours only. I have a more or less similar setup at home without the radio stack and panel; I have a yoke and pedals only.

Both the airplane model I’m using in x-plane and the FTD at the school are more sensitive than the actual plane, especially in pitch. Perhaps that’s partly the lack of feel and force-feedback of the real aircraft. Or it may be some shortcuts in the airplane model in the simulator. After all it’s all ones and zeros in there. One day I might try my hand at making a model in X-plane.

But for now, I’ll just go practice my approaches safely and cheaply. I figure if I can get perfect on the more sensitive simulator, the real thing ought to be easy!

Yes, I have an airplane.  Immediately your mind might fill in an image: it is probably one of those million dollar new fiberglass jets with leather seats, a full glass panel, and a stocked bar in the passenger area.  And I must be rich, that just goes without saying!  But of course this isn’t true at all.

My wife and I have 1/5 share of a Cessna 172M airplane built in 1973.  We bought into a club that owns this plane.  Actually, it’s not a club, it is a corporation that owns the plane and we all are the people who own the corporation.  This is a one common approach to group ownership.  Our group has, with varying members, been going on for many years now and has owned this plane since the plane was a year old. This is the group’s second plane.  Owners come and go and the group persists.

We’ve maintained the plane through a series of local maintenance centers at our home airport or nearby airports.  I’ve taken an interest in maintenance and have worked with mechanics a fair amount.  Others in the group handle finances or other tasks like updating the GPS database, etc.  We have an online schedule, the rule is first come first serve basically.  There’s some rules we have about longer flights as well.

I bought into this club for less that many people spend on cars, boats, or RVs.  It is a hobby, certainly not the cheapest one, but not the most expensive either.  You can spend more money on SCUBA, fishing, and many other things.  Our plane goes slower and lower than the jets, but it can get to the same airports that a newer faster plane can, albeit more cheaply.  But slow is relative.  A 5-8 hour drive to visit friends or family might be 2 hours in the plane.

And, anywhere I can fly to in three hours or under (about 380 miles) is faster in my plane than in buying a ticket on the commercial airlines.  This is due to the overhead of time for parking, ticketing, security, etc at a commercial airport.  At my airport, I plan my flight before I go to the airport, at the airport I preflight the aircraft and put our stuff on board, then we takeoff. There are over 15,000 airports in the US that I can go to.  Only a few hundred have scheduled airline service.  Most commercial flights go to fewer than 30 major airports.

My equipment is a mix of old and newer avionics.  We have an older Narco Nav/Com radio, a somewhat newer Garmin 300XL GPS/Com, and a much older ADF.  (There are still airliners that don’t have GPS.) Since we fly near the Washington DC class Bravo and also sometimes fly IFR, we have a transponder too.

The cost of running an airplane is a factor.  Gas costs around $4/gallon at my airport.  We charge ourselves per hour to pay for the overhead of the plane: maintenance, insurance, and the airport tiedown fee.  There are two assessments each year to cover any additional costs (unforseen maintenance perhaps).  Since our original loan for the plane is paid off we don’t have the loan costs anymore.  Even with all that there are many people who spend more on their hobbies that we do.

Flying exsists in a legal structure of the FAR (Federal Aviation Regulations) and requires a pilot’s certificate, periodic currency training, and higher level certificates for things like flying on instruments.  I’m pursuing that instrument training now.  Training and recurrency has its cost as well.  All this is manageable and controllable and can be budgeted.

In the end it is worth it.  After all how else are you going to see a sunset over the multiple ridges of West Virginia, or on a clear day see all the way to Ohio, or see the Mississippi River from the air on your way to Texas?  And it sure beats the driving or the security lines in the airport.  I can even carry a bottle of water and a pocket knife with me in my plane.

In Gov. Jindal’s response to President Obama’s State of the Union address a while back, Jindal belittled the volcano monitoring program saying, “Instead of monitoring volcanoes, what Congress should be monitoring is the eruption of spending in Washington, D.C.” Now that Mount Redoubt in Alaska has erupted many people are pointing out the importance of volcano monitoring. Coming from Lousianna, Gov. Jindal should know better about the value of government services.

To make it clear, scientists had suspected conditions for an eruption based on that volcano monitoring program. And they were able to detect the eruption when it happened at night when it could not be seen. This is important since the smoke and ash from volcanos is very abrasive pulverized pumice. This has destroyed jet engines before and reduced large aircraft to gliders. The FAA’s air traffic controllers and the National Weather Service (NWS) were able to isolate that airspace and protect flights both to Alaskan airports and transit flights to Asia.

But the interesting point that’s not yet being made is this volcano monitoring is a prime example of an non-market value. No private company sees a profit motive in doing monitoring. This is an example of something useful and valuable - it probably saved several flights and their passengers earlier this week - but is not provided by the free market.  Market-based economics is valuable.  But it is one tool, and not the only tool, in providing useful and necessary goods and services.

One part of the role of government is as a provider of extra-market goods and services (primarily services). Providing the military for defense, Coast Guard for recovery of people and vessels, volcano monitoring, air quality monitoring, and many other services. The one I use daily and rely on when flying is weather services. Even the commercial weather services rely on the weather data collection, observations and predictions that the NWS provides. For example hurricane forecasts have made storm avoidance possible. Fifty years ago this was not true.

Reagan famously said, “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem”. But government is only the problem when it is preventing us from doing something we want to do. When government provides us with necessary services we can’t get elsewhere, we tend to consider it our right. Reagan’s quote is catchy and any institution run by people can have problems. But both the GOP and Gov. Jindal ignore the valuable and necessary services that the government provides that protect our life, our well-being, and our economy.

The stock market responded with almost 500 points of enthusiasm to the Obama/Geithner bank plan today. Somehow, given the last year of history in financial services, a plan that garners this much enthusiasm on Wall Street doesn’t inspire my confidence. After all if your friend bet big and lost, then assures you he know what he’s doing would you trust him?

In his NYT article Paul Krugman says:

“And now Mr. Obama has apparently settled on a financial plan that, in essence, assumes that banks are fundamentally sound and that bankers know what they’re doing.”

We have demonstrably proved that the bankers don’t know what they’re doing in our current situation. This plan is because they have no way to figure out the value of many of their assets. Valuing assets is a fundamental banking task after all.

I’m not taking a position on if Geithner should keep his job, that’s a separate question. And I’m not expecting that the Obama team will solve this in three-four months either. It took us a while to into this mess, unfortunately it’ll take a while to get out of it.  I want this plan to work, but I lack confidence.