Ones and Zeros

At work I’m tasked with creating what is basically an “introduction to aviation” for people who are not pilots, don’t necessarily want to be pilots, but work in an aviation-related consulting business with the FAA and other aviation entities internationally.  Thus, they need to know something about aviation.

What would you want to put in such an introduction?  What would you want to see in such an introduction?  (Comments and emails much appreciated!)

The kinds of things I have so far include:

• types of flying: VFR vs IFR
• commercial vs private aviation
• pilot ratings and capabilities
• types of airports (controlled, pilot-controlled, private, etc)
• airspace
• safety processes (airplane certification, pilot/controller certification, preflight, etc)
• stages of a flight: departure, enroute, approach, landing
• IFR approach types

I’m in the early stages of pulling this together so would appreciate any suggestions you might have.

It’s been a pretty good while now, and my posting was getting sparse before that.  Despite the news with health care, various items of note in economics, and more recently a guy with a bomb in his pants I’ve not been around.

My day job has been occupying a very large portion of my time for the last three or four months.  In engineering project work it’s not uncommon to have a “push” where long hours are required.  This is usually a week or two, occasionally as much as a month.  Three months is not common and was due to budget shrinkage with no work shrinkage, I’m supremely glad that’s over.

There are plenty of other people doing year-end retrospectives; let’s look forward here in a few areas.

Economy:  It won’t be getting better for many of us.  If your idea of economy = Wall Street, you’ll probably be ok for a while at least.  But Wall Street can’t be isolated from the real world forever.  The hangover in the lack of jobs and the consequent poor consumer spending will affect us for some years yet.  The stimulus helped, but it was too small.  It will also be years before the housing bubble is resolved as housing is comparatively illiquid.  In short 2010 will be a lot like 2009 without some of the higher drama perhaps.

Politics: What can I say here?  The GOP is against everything and for nothing.  The Dems are trying to keep everyone happy - a losing game - and ended up with a weak and watered down health care bill.  The next year looks like the same: the GOP will continue to be the party of the irrational tantrum and the Dems will continue to ignore the progressives that got them elected.  Lawrence Lessig is right.  Without reforming the election process, there is no progress.

Aviation: For me 2010 won’t bring a new rating as it did last year.  (Unless my company funds it, which is very unlikely.) In a less self-centered view, I’m told that all the GA aviation companies are focusing on glass panel instruments now.  The AOPA show in Tampa had very few people that were pushing round dials.  So expect the technology revolution in aviation to continue and to probably accelerate into new areas. The FAA is continuing to move toward a GPS-based nav system.  The little problem of single points of failure is dictating some sort of backup.  But GPS and WAAS is the way they’re going.

Technology: It seems like Apple may kick off their tablet computer early in 2010.  Google will follow with theirs of course. They’re both planning to remake computing as  we know it again.  They’ll probably both succeed in some way too.  It’ll be a big year.  The “maker” movement will continue to pick up steam and is an outgrowth of open source tech.  This is a good thing and offers hope for future technical growth.  The risks in tech are the ongoing dilution of privacy and security for our information.  I’m more concerned about out government and our companies misusing information about me that I am with terrorism.  The former is infinitely more common.

If we can survive the economy and the political battles of officials who’ve forgotten how they were elected, we’ll be ok.  I do believe things are getting better over the long run.  It is hard to see that long run on a day-to-day basis sometimes.  Keep the faith, and may your new year be a good year for you.

Risk concerns the expected value of one or more results of one or more future events. Technically, the value of those results may be positive or negative. However, general usage tends focus only on potential harm that may arise from a future event, which may accrue either from incurring a cost (”downside risk”) or by failing to attain some benefit (”upside risk”) - Wikipedia

Flying small airplanes and driving a Citroen 2cv are considered risky by some people.   So sometimes people think my wife and I are risk-seekers.  In the past I’ve been an entrepreneur and my wife has her own business now too.  These too are sometimes considered risky endeavors.

But there’s actual risk: (probability of an accident) X  (the loss per accident).  Then there’s perceived risk, “those little airplanes are always crashing”, “small old cars will kill you in an accident”, and “large companies are always more secure”.

There are some risks that are larger in flying than driving: altitude for example.  Then some things more risky in driving too.  In flying I don’t have some yahoo on his or her cell phone at 70 mph just 6 feet away from me and drifting into my lane for example.  In the plane,  I’m much more in control of my own situation. If I avoid zooming too close to the ground and flying too slow, don’t fly in weather I’m not trained or equipped for, and make sure I have enough gas, then I’ve just avoided most of the accident causes!

Small cars are not always more dangerous: they can move out of the way more easily.  And recent economic news makes it clear that large companies aren’t secure.  Perceived risk is not real risk, it’s just not accurate.

Bruce Schneier has a great article pointing out that we systematically perceive risk incorrectly saying, “People have trouble estimating risks for anything not exactly like their normal situation.”  This psychology has also been studied (see “Stumbling on Happiness“).

There’s a lot written about mitigating risk.  This just how to avoid risky situations.  There are various ways to do that: sit at home and don’t do anything is one extreme.  But my wife and I handle risk in several ways: using training, and maintenance to prevent some of the types of risks. And where those won’t work, simply avoiding putting ourselves into that situation.  I.e drive the backroad instead of the highway in the 2cv.   Life is more than simply avoiding risk. We have decided it’s more risky to get to the end of our lives not having enjoyed them.  Or as my wife puts it very simply, “Life is for the living”.

But I’m still not keen on bungy jumping.

The Hill reports that  Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) will introduce a bill to ban pilots from using laptops during flight.  The Hill isn’t aviation press of course, and the bill is probably too early in its drafting for any detail.  But not all pilots are airline pilots.  And not all laptops are what  you might think of as laptops either.

Pilots can be private pilots, commercial pilots, and air transport pilots.  The latter two categories can be paid for their piloting services - most airline pilots are the latter category.  The majority of all flights are not airline flights either only about 10% are airlines.  The others are “general aviation”.  I hope the eventual bill takes into account the widely varied types of both pilots and flying that happens in the use.

Some laptops and some ebook readers like Kindles are starting to be used for electronic map displays, storing and displaying approach plates for instrument approaches, and for storing and displaying airport and facility directory information.  There are specialized devices for this, but more and more are off-the-shelf commercial laptops.

I hope the bill takes into account this use of laptops and computing devices as well as the different types of pilots and of all the non-airline kinds of flying that take place.

Note also that the NWA Minneapolis incident was not an emergency, nor was an accident either.  It was an incident; something that might have been a more serious matter but ended with no harm to anyone and no damage to any aircraft.  The only damage is to the pilot’s careers.  The key here is to learn from this incident and future avoid situations that might become emergencies instead of contributing to panic.  We can be bad at estimating risk.