Travels to Texas

While I'm stuck in Anchorage due to the explosion of Mt. Redoubt, Laura is on her way to Texas, right now!

We are going to spend a week in Texas, but she is beating me there, as I'm stuck here for a few more days. I was going to be on this flight with her, but the ash cloud from the volcanoe is keeping Cathay Cargo flights from coming into Anchorage, and are being rerouted through Vancouver instead. Bummer. I'll get to Texas, but not soon enough.

TobyLaura.com

Hudson Crash Animation

A friend of mine sent me this video over the weekend. It's a good two minute animation of the crash in the Hudson River; flight 1549. It's nice because it incorporates animation with the radio and air traffic control. You can hear the departure controller in LaGuardia frantically calling controllers at other airports and stations to try and clear a way for the powerless airplane to get a safe place to land.

TobyLaura.com

Founders wanted Presidents to fail

This post goes hand in hand with my last post about James Carville. Carville has proven to be political in his desire to see Bush fail. Rush, on the other hand, has proven to be historical in his desire to have B. Hussein Obama's policies fail. Here is the full transcript, but below is an excerpt of an excellent monologue as Rush explains why it is acceptable to desire socialist ideas to fail. Since no one wants to talk to Rush but simply take his comments out of context, here's Rush:

The Federalist Papers and the constitutional convention debates are rife with arguments about the separation of powers.  Now, stick with me on this, because this is a fundamental point to try to explain, especially to those of you who are new to the program, what it is that guides me.  The whole theory of the separation of powers, meaning legislative branch, judicial branch, executive branch, was ingeniously based on human nature.  Our Founding Fathers had studied history, and they knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely.  So we divide power.  We divide power between the states and the federal government.  We divide power within the federal government.  And we further divide power among three separate branches of government.  We give each branch a different set of powers and incentives to protect their own prerogatives so they can keep an eye on each other.  These are called checks and balances.  And the liberals love talking about checks and balances very much.

The underlying assumption of this whole system is that the country functions better if everyone is of a skeptical bent of mind.  That's what keeps the next guy honest.  The whole reason that we have divided government instead of a king is that the issue is not about one government official succeeding.  This country was not founded on the principle that the president is a king and above all the king must succeed.  In fact, the system is designed to ensure that the president fails when he is wrong.  That's the whole purpose of checks and balances.  The whole purpose of dividing power, is to ensure the president fails when he's wrong.  The Framers wanted the country to succeed, just as I do.  If they wanted the president to succeed, they would not have saddled him with Congress, they wouldn't have saddled him with the courts, they wouldn't have saddled him with the free press, and they wouldn't have made him face reelection every four years.  They would have made him a king who no one could oppose.  

If our nation was all about a single individual succeeding simply because that individual must succeed regardless, we wouldn't have the form of government that we do.  Now, conflating the president and the country -- and by that I mean, assuming that the president is always the country, assuming that the president always has the country's best interests at heart, such as the founders did, turns a functioning democracy into a robotic cult.  I fear that that's what we have right now.  We have a cult of fear and celebrity, robotic cult, that is epitomized in Warren Buffett, it's epitomized by Jack Welch, it's epitomized by Barton Biggs and Jim Cramer and anybody else who knows what they see is devastatingly wrong, is horribly wrong, but because there is a fear to oppose because the assumption is that Obama is the country, that Obama equals the best interests of the country simply because he's Obama, that's what gives you a cult.  The worst part of it is that many of these people who are making hay over this Limbaugh-wants-Obama-to-fail garbage know full well, ladies and gentlemen, that what I just told you is the case.  

This is not an honest debate going on here, as we have demonstrated in the first hour of the program with the Warren Buffett sound bites and the Barton Biggs sound bites and the Jim Cramer sound bites.  It's not an honest debate.  What's happening here is the most cynical kind of down and dirty politics by people who not only wanted George W. Bush to fail, but worked night and day to ensure that he failed.  I say to you again, if the Founders wanted a situation where the government was about one official succeeding, then George Washington would have accepted the role he was he offered as king.  But we have separation of powers.  We have division of powers.  All of this is designed to ensure that a president fails when he is wrong.  The Framers wanted the country to succeed.  Let me add to this, Byron York today writing at the DCExaminer.com: "'Why The Founding Fathers Would Want Obama's Plans to Fail' -- James Madison was not specifically contemplating Barack Obama, or Nancy Pelosi, when he wrote Federalist No. 63. But reading the document -- one of the seminal arguments in favor of adopting the US Constitution -- it’s clear Madison knew their type. And he knew they would come along again and again in American history, if Americans were lucky enough to have a long history.  Obama and Pelosi, along with their most ardent supporters, are the types to see a crisis, like our current economic mess, as a 'great opportunity,' as the president put it last Saturday. They are the types, after a long period out of power, to attempt to use that 'great opportunity' to push through far-reaching changes in national policy that had only a tangential connection, if at all, to the crisis at hand. And they are the types the Founding Fathers wanted to stop.

"In the Federalist Papers, written 221 years ago, Madison addressed the need for a Senate to accompany the more populist House of Representatives. An upper body, he wrote, 'may be sometimes necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.'  For the times when a political leader would attempt to capitalize on those errors and delusions, the Founders prescribed the Senate, with its members elected to terms three times the length of those in the House, originally chosen not by the people but by the state legislatures. From Federalist 63: 'There are particular moments in public affairs when the people, stimulated by some irregular passion, or some illicit advantage, or misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men, may call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn. In these critical moments, how salutary will be the interference of some temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career, and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves, until reason, justice, and truth can regain their authority over the public mind?'"

Let me translate this for you.  There are going to be times demagogues are going to come along, there are going to be times that people who are power hungry, who are going to take advantage of a crisis, to say they've got all the solutions, and they're going to ram all these things through.  The solutions have nothing to do with the crisis.  They're just selfish desires of the demagogue.  The people, because of the crisis, are going to go along with it, even though in rational moments they would reject it all.  We need an element to stop this.  We need an element to protect the people from the kind of leaders who would abuse them, mislead them, and, ergo, one of those devices was the United States Senate.  "Of course the economy is in crisis. But if Obama had his way, everything would be treated as if it were a crisis. Health care is a crisis. The environment is a crisis. Education is a crisis. In truth, those other areas are not crises, and the Senate’s job is to delay action on them until Obama’s power to stir popular passions fades."

So you see, ladies and gentlemen, all I want and all we want is success for every American. If there's any worship on this program, it is not of a single man, it is of our Constitution and our other founding documents, and the Founding Fathers who gave them to us. Certainly not of a mortal human being today. I just wanted to go through this to explain it because I know for a fact the tune-in factor -- our cume, which is the total audience (they actually showed it to me yesterday) -- is literally geometric in its increase. As such, the people listening here who haven't heard before who come to the program with all of these erroneous misconceptions that they've been filled with by the critics of this program for all these 20 years.

TobyLaura.com

The Mainstream media loves double standards

Carville Wanted Bush to Fail

The press never reported that Democratic strategist James Carville said he wanted President Bush to fail before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But a feeding frenzy ensued when radio host Rush Limbaugh recently said he wanted President Obama to fail.

By Bill Sammon

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, just minutes before learning of the terrorist attacks on America, Democratic strategist James Carville was hoping for President Bush to fail, telling a group of Washington reporters: "I certainly hope he doesn't succeed."

Carville was joined by Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg, who seemed encouraged by a survey he had just completed that revealed public misgivings about the newly minted president.

"We rush into these focus groups with these doubts that people have about him, and I'm wanting them to turn against him," Greenberg admitted.

The pollster added with a chuckle of disbelief: "They don't want him to fail. I mean, they think it matters if the president of the United States fails."

Minutes later, as news of the terrorist attacks reached the hotel conference room where the Democrats were having breakfast with the reporters, Carville announced: "Disregard everything we just said! This changes everything!"

The press followed Carville's orders, never reporting his or Greenberg's desire for Bush to fail. The omission was understandable at first, as reporters were consumed with chronicling the new war on terror. But months and even years later, the mainstream media chose to never resurrect those controversial sentiments, voiced by the Democratic Party's top strategists, that Bush should fail.

That omission stands in stark contrast to the feeding frenzy that ensued when radio host Rush Limbaugh recently said he wanted President Obama to fail. The press devoted wall-to-wall coverage to the remark, suggesting that Limbaugh and, by extension, conservative Republicans, were unpatriotic.

"The most influential Republican in the United States today, Mr. Rush Limbaugh, said he did not want President Obama to succeed," Carville railed on CNN recently. "He is the daddy of this Republican Congress."

Limbaugh, a staunch conservative, emphasized that he is rooting for the failure of Obama's liberal policies.

"The difference between Carville and his ilk and me is that I care about what happens to my country," Limbaugh told Fox on Wednesday. "I am not saying what I say for political advantage. I oppose actions, such as Obama's socialist agenda, that hurt my country.

"I deal in principles, not polls," Limbaugh added. "Carville and people like him live and breathe political exploitation. This is all a game to them. It's not a game to me. I am concerned about the well-being and survival of our nation. When has Carville ever advocated anything that would benefit the country at the expense of his party?"

Carville told Politico that focusing on Limbaugh is a deliberate strategy aimed at undermining Republicans.

"The television cameras just can't stay away from him," he said. "Our strategy depends on him keeping talking, and I think we're going to succeed."

Greenberg added: "He's driving the Republican reluctance to deal with Obama, which Americans want."

In 2006, 51 percent of Democrats wanted Bush to fail, according to a FOX News/Opinion Dynamics poll.

TobyLaura.com

Dispatch

This is a picture of Cathay Pacific's dispatch room in Hong Kong. This is where the pilots meet prior to a flight. This is a really nice setup, and most of Cathay's ports don't have this, but at headquarters, we get a nice facility.

At an hour and ten minutes prior to departure time, the pilots for the flight meet up at the table that has their flight number and flight paperwork. We shake hands and greet one another if we've never met in the past and get to know each other a little bit. There is a sign in sheet that we initial, and then we all have a look over the paperwork.

One thing that is a lot nicer than my last job, is all the prep work that the dispatchers do for us as far as paperwork. There is a sign with the flight number on it, so we know where our paperwork is. The dispatcher has laid out all the paperwork: the fuel slip, flight plan, dispatch message, notams, weather, and other various bits of information. All we have to do is show up and look at it all, and that makes it pretty nice. Also, all this information is posted on the internet a few hours prior to a flight, so we can save time in dispatch by making some decisions before we even show up at work.

After signing in, we each have a look at all the paperwork involved in flying from A to B. The dispatch message shows us our expected weight for takeoff and the maximum allowable weight for takeoff, tailored specifically for the aircraft we will be flying that day. A lot of the planes don't weigh the exact same amount, and it would be crazy to try and memorize the weights of each plane, so it is written down for us.

The Notams, or notices to airmen, are notes about defects at airports that are on our specific route of flight. For example, the approach guidance may be inoperative at the last airport we fly over prior to going oceanic. That would be nice to know, because if we need to turn back or have trouble, we will know that if the weather is bad, we won't be able to use that particular airport. The weather report shows us general weather and winds along the route, and then also at all the airports along the way. This is valuable information because if we have to divert with trouble, we need to know which airports we can expect to be able to use or overfly due to poor weather.

The flight plan is looked at, and it gives us tomes of information about what our flight will entail. How high will we be flying, where our step climbs will be, what the route is, and what our fuel load should be. Step climbs are important because on a long flight as we burn more fuel, the aircraft gets lighter. As it gets lighter, it can fly at a higher, more optimal altitude for fuel burn. A heavy plane can't climb all the way to it's top cruise altitude because it is too heavy. After five hours or so, it will have burned off tons of fuel, be lighter, and thus be able to climb to a higher altitude. Higher altitudes save fuel, so we want to climb when we can. On a 16 hour flight from JFK to Hong Kong, the Boeing 777-300ER might start at 29,000 feet, but 15 hours later, just prior to the descent into Hong Kong, it might be at 39,000 feet, climbing a few thousand feet, every few hours.

Finally, we all agree on a fuel load, based on things like weather, how heavy our cargo is, and so forth. Filling out the fuel slip is the last thing we do, and then we gather all that paperwork up and head out to the bus that takes us to the aircraft. At other ports, we just look at the paperwork online and then again in the cockpit, but in Hong Kong, the setup is really nice. Also nice in Hong Kong is that Cathay's crew hotel is connected to dispatch, so we just walk out of the lobby, and we're at work!

TobyLaura.com

Checkride time

I'm headed back Eastbound toward North America after a stressful but necessary few days in Hong Kong. This past week was my biannual checkride, two simulator sessions to keep my flying licenses current and my emergency procedures up to standard. After a while, these six month checks become a little more routine, but as a fairly new hire, they are still very stressful and honestly, a little nerve-racking and scary.

Each six months, a pilot's license currency expires and thus has to be renewed. Also, it is a chance to practice emergency procedures, like engine failures on takeoff, fires, electrical problems, technical problems like the landing gear not coming down, and so forth. These are drills that a pilot will almost never experience in a career, so they need to be practiced in a simulator so that if bad luck strikes, we will be ready to act.

People who say that planes basically fly themselves (who are usually not pilots or even frequent fliers) are wrong, as of 2009. There is so much that goes on in the planning stages, takeoff and landing phases, and during an emergency, that I don't see pilotless planes in the near future. I guarantee that a computer could not have landed safely in the Hudson river! A pilot really earns his money when there is a problem. Some like to say that pilots are over-paid – until that pilot saves that person's life when an engine quits over the North Pacific!

I spent the last few days in two simulator sessions, an RT (recurrent training) and a PC (proficiency check). The RT is graded, but it is more of a chance to warm up for the PC, that is graded on a lot more strict level. The RT is also a good chance to practice more non-standard problems, that the PC just wouldn't have time for.

Every pilot learns to hate checkrides. They are stressful because if a pilot doesn't perform well on the day (as he is just having a bad or off day) then there is chance he could lose his job. Real world emergencies are often non-events or at least only happen as a singular event. In the simulator, the checker running the profile is throwing problem after problem at us. Once we solve one problem, we have another one, and once that is solved, another problem pops up. Four hours later, you hope to still have your sanity.

The simulator is quite a cool machine in and of itself. It is a huge box up on hydraulic stilts that moves all around in space. It has a wrap around visual system on the front of it so that as we look out the front windshield, we see the “real world.” The large boxes on the top of the sim are the visual projectors. A ramp moves down into position so that we can walk into the sim and then it pulls away to allow the sim to move all around. For example, on takeoff, the sim tilts back, and gives us a sense of acceleration. The sims are real enough that pilots can be certified to fly the real airplane without having flown the real airplane, just the simulator. -- and this is old technology. These 747-400 sims are 20 years old and don't always cooperate. During our RT, the sim we were in quit working on us twice, and just like a poor windows user, the sim tech had to reset the computer. Luckily for the more stressful PC, nothing like that happened to us.

Needless to say, checkrides are not fun, but they are a necessary part of being a pilot. I will certainly take the stress of having a check every six months, over not remembering what to do when an engine quits for real. And as for the burning question, yes, I passed! I had a great captain to fly with and he was good and making sure I was doing everything correctly. The examiners were also very nice and laid back, which helps to set a good tone. So, I'm safe for another six months, until I get to do it all over again.

TobyLaura.com

Glenn Beck

Speaking of Glenn Beck, here is a funny YouTube video of his. (By the way, he had to search far and wide to find a singer willing to sing his version of the new National Anthem. They were unwilling to poke fun at "The One, the messiah, B. Hussein Obama. No one thought twice about making fun of G.W. but . . . ) Catch the Russian subtitles?

TobyLaura.com

Is this where we are headed?

I wonder if any of your kids are being taught this at school? I wonder how many Americans think we are a democracy? I wonder if you know that democracies fail and have in the past? Brush up on your history with this short video and then ask yourself where we are headed under the new big spender: B. Hussein Obama.


(Just remember: this is an internet video and is not gospel. Like Glenn Beck says, to stay informed, you must do your own research and take things, especially from the internet, with a grain of salt.)

TobyLaura.com