Blizza Blizza

New Year’s resolution for the guy who modified his 20-year-old washing machine to Twitter him when the laundry is done: unplug the Intertubes and move out of the parents’ basement.

In three and a half hours, give or take a couple minutes, stores around the country will open their doors to people who have now been camping out in tents on the sidewalk for the night in the hopes that they’ll be one of the first 10 individuals to buy some loss-leader product at some ridiculous fire-sale price. Riddle me this:

It’s November. In Michigan. Which means it’s approximately 28 freaking degrees outside, and you’re going to spend the night on the sidewalk outside Best Buy in a tent so that you can be the fifth guy in line at 4 AM just so you can (you hope) save $250 on a Nintendo Wii.

If I offered you $250 to camp out at the mall for 18 hours overnight in the middle of winter, you’d look at me like I was crazy, but because you’re doing it for a Nintendo Wii, it’s OK?

People are nuts.

So said Morpheus to Neo when explaining what the remaining humans knew about the history of the war against the machines.

Four years ago, it was widely publicised — and largely ignored by people who mattered — that the CEO of Diebold, the company that produced millions of electronic voting machines, had said he and his company were “committed to delivering the state of Ohio to President Bush” (that’s a paraphrase, but the quote is generally accurate in both content and spirit) in the 2004 election.

How quickly and conveniently some forget.

The Ohio Republican Party is now extremely upset that their lawsuit to force disclosure of voter registration database mismatches has been thrown out. (On quite solid grounds, by the way, but we shouldn’t let sound legal reasoning by the Supreme Court of the United States get in the way of a little blatantly partisan bickering, should we?)

Pot, kettle, black.

Rumour has it there’s an election coming up.

I picked up my absentee ballot today and, as I was tossing it in the car, had a realisation: I have never voted at the polls in a presidential election. In 2000, I was living in Australia. In 2004, I was living in Jacksonville. In 2008, I will very likely be flying the entire day.

Let’s just hope the ballot gets counted.

In a few weeks, the good citizens of Evansville, Indiana will go to the polls and cast votes for President, Congresscritters, judges, and…coroner.

Will someone please explain to me why a job requiring a great deal of technical expertise and a medical degree is an elected office?

We don’t elect a Surgeon General and we don’t elect a Secretary of the Treasury, so why is the coroner of Evansville an elected office?

Some things are above politics. Performing autopsies and determining a cause of death is one of them.

This really sounds like it should be a headline about something that happened at a strip club, not in NASCAR qualifying:

Johnson on pole after Montoya’s lap disallowed

The Chicago Tribune is quickly becoming my least-favourite newspaper for its horribly biased reporting on all things aviation. It’s almost as though Mayor Daley himself is directing the editorial board to slant things as much as possible. The latest? The totally unnecessary paragraph at the end of today’s story about an American Airlines 757 departing runway 22R on landing Monday afternoon:

The emergency landing comes the same day that the National Transportation Safety Board said it’s investigating an incident last week in Allentown, Pa., involving a small private aircraft and a passenger jet bound for Chicago.

In that incident, a single-engine small private plane landing at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Allentown missed a runway exit and narrowly missed colliding with a Mesa Airlines commuter flight taking off on the same runway, according to an NTSB statement.

Yes, that would be the incident last Friday night at Allentown, PA (PDF Airport Diagram) in which a Mesa Airlines CRJ began its takeoff roll without ensuring the runway was clear, after a controller issued a takeoff clearance without himself ensuring the runway was clear (instead assuming the Cessna 172 Skyhawk would make the turnoff). The jet crew rejected the takeoff at approximately 120 knots, had to swerve around the Cessna, and estimated the closest distance between their aircraft at 10 feet.

A Skyhawk even at max gross weight can easily be stopped in under 2000 feet, but it requires good short-field landing technique and advance planning on the part of the pilot. Stopping a Skyhawk in under 1000 feet, the approximate distance between the runway threshold and taxiway A4, where he was instructed to exit, is damn near impossible if you’re not planning to do so ahead of time. It’s a virtual certainty that both jet pilots have enough time in single-engine airplanes (possibly even Skyhawks) to know this, and even if they hadn’t given it any thought, seeing an airplane less than 2000 feet away with navigation lights and a red beacon illuminated on a clear night is not at all difficult.

Despite the failure of the jet crew to clear the runway for takeoff, and despite the controller’s failure to ensure the Skyhawk was at least beginning his turnoff before issuing a takeoff clearance, the Tribune reporters manage to pin the blame on the Skyhawk’s pilot. He didn’t “narrowly miss” anything; he was “narrowly missed” by the Mesa jet.

This was in no way the fault of the Skyhawk pilot. The Mesa crew should be ashamed of themselves for putting the lives of their passengers in jeopardy due to their blind trust in the controller. That’s four eyes in the cockpit of the jet that all failed to adhere to one basic safety premise: clear the area where you’re going.

Every time a major hurricane — or even something so mundane as a severe thunderstorm — hits an area served by the major commercial airlines, folks at work start watching the Automated Surface Observation System (ASOS) reports from the airport. We do this partially because we get bored easily and partially because it’s interesting by itself to see extremes of weather reflected in the reports, which look something like this:

KMSY 010100Z 04005KT 9SM -RA FEW030 BKN055 OVC090 23/22 A2978 RMK AO2 TSE0058 OCNL LTGIC DSNT SW NW CB DSNT SW NW P0000

Translation: New Orleans International (KMSY) observation on 01 [September] at 0100 Zulu (GMT; New Orleans is five hours behind GMT, so this would have been 8 PM local time on 31 August). Winds from 040 degrees at 05 knots, visibility 9 statute miles, light rain (the - in front of RA indicates light, and RA indicates rain). Few clouds at 3000’ above the field, broken layer at 5500’ above the field, overcast layer at 9000’ above the field. Temperature of 23ºC, dewpoint of 22ºC, barometric pressure 29.78” Hg.

Remarks: AO2 indicates an automated observation station with a precipitation discriminator (it can tell the difference between, say, rain and snow, or snow and hail, etc.). TSE0058 indicates a thunderstorm ended at 0058Z, or two minutes prior to this report being generated. OCNL LTGIC DSNT SW NW means occasional lightning in clouds, distant to the southwest and northwest. CB DSNT SW NW indicates cumulonimbus clouds (i.e., thunderclouds) distant to the southwest and northwest.

It gets really easy to read these once you’ve read a couple thousand of them, trust me.

Anyway, now we get to the CSI part. Here are some of the ASOS reports from KMSY as Hurricane Gustav came ashore 70 miles to the southwest of New Orleans, presented in chronological order:

KMSY 010153Z AUTO 01010KT 10SM FEW060 25/23 A2978 RMK AO2 TSE0058RAE16B33E45 SLP086 LAST AUGMENTED OBSERVATION UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE P0000 T02500228 TSNO

The “TSNO” at the end means thunderstorm information not available. In other words, the sensor crapped out. This gets interesting later on…

KMSY 010853Z AUTO 04026G41KT 9SM FEW022 BKN029 OVC034 26/23 A2950 RMK AO2 PK WND 03041/0846 RAB09E18 SLP992 P0000 60000 T02610233 58058 TSNO
KMSY 010953Z AUTO 04025G39KT 3SM RA BR SCT017 BKN023 OVC029 26/24 A2947 RMK AO2 PK WND 04042/0919 RAB10 SLP981 P0006 T02560239 TSNO
KMSY 011053Z AUTO 04032G46KT 3SM RA BR BKN020 OVC027 26/24 A2940 RMK AO2 PK WND 04048/1042 SLP959 P0014 T02560239 TSNO
KMSY 011105Z AUTO 05036G49KT 2SM RA BR BKN020 OVC026 26/24 A2939 RMK AO2 PK WND 05049/1103 P0005 TSNO
KMSY 011114Z AUTO 04039G55KT 1 1/4SM +RA BR SCT018 OVC025 26/24 A2938 RMK AO2 PK WND 04055/1108 P0014 TSNO

Note the steadily increasing wind speed (especially the gusts) and steadily falling barometric pressure and visibility (due to increasingly heavy rain), which is to be expected as a hurricane approaches. The last three observations above were all taken within a 21-minute period, from 5:53 AM to 6:14 AM local time. Then, 16 minutes later, a new observation:

KMSY 011130Z AUTO 2 1/2SM -RA BR FEW015 BKN022 OVC027 26/24 A2936 RMK AO2 PRESFR P0026 TSNO $

Wait, where’d the wind information go? Ah, there’s a hint at the end. The “$” denotes “sensor requires maintenance”. It gets better:

KMSY 011139Z AUTO 1 1/4SM BR 26/24 A2936 RMK AO2 RAEMM P0026 PWINO TSNO $

Nine minutes after the first observation with missing wind data, we now have a “PWINO” remark and a “RAEMM” remark. PWINO means the peak-wind sensor has failed, and I think (although I’m not sure) RAEMM means that the time at which the rain ended (the “RAE” part) is also missing. Why? Because the precipitation discriminator — possibly the entire precipitation sensor — has also failed. And Gustav is just getting started:

KMSY 011205Z AUTO 1/2SM FG A2934 RMK AO2 PWINO FZRANO TSNO RVRNO PNO $

By 7:05 AM local time, the ASOS had lost its wind sensor, freezing rain (FZRA) sensor, thunderstorm sensor, runway visual range (RVR, a measure of visibility) sensor, and its precipitation sensor (“PNO” is precipitation information not available). It doesn’t show in the “NO” codes, but you’ll also note that the ASOS is no longer reporting cloud cover or temperature either. The only thing it’s reporting now is rough visibility (RVR equipment is far more sensitive than the sensor that determines “1/2-mile in fog” as seen above) and the barometric pressure (which, incidentally, got all the way down to 29.20” Hg before it started coming back up).

The definition of irony: drinking Fuller’s ESB (an English ale) out of a Harp (an Irish lager) pint glass made by Arcoroc (a French company, and made in France) in a hotel bar in Kentucky that doesn’t actually serve Harp.

Probably everyone who reads this blog regularly — all three of you — has done a fair bit of flying and has some idea of the shockingly different perspective a person can have on the world from 30-odd thousand feet above it. I’ve been a pilot since 2004, I’ve flown as a passenger literally around the globe, and I’ve spent something like 2500 hours of my life in airplanes so far.

It was a clear night tonight up at 37,000 feet in cruise from Dallas-Ft. Worth to Gulfport-Biloxi, Mississippi, and the Milky Way was very clear and bright. I love night flights over fairly dark terrain (open water is even better) because it almost feels like you could reach out and touch the stars.

As we began our initial descent into Biloxi, we crossed over I-55 at about 33,000 feet. At first, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking at, but then it dawned on me: as Hurricane Gustav bears down on Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, as mandatory evacuations have been ordered for all of New Orleans to avoid a repeat of Katrina, the entire interstate had become one solid bumper-to-bumper mass of headlights streaming north to safety.

I’m going to hop in the same airplane at 0700 tomorrow, fire up the engines, and blast off to Dallas, where I’ll have a two-hour break and eat some breakfast before going to Cincinnati. Monday morning, I’ll get up, fly back to Chicago, do an Albany (NY) turn, then fly home to Kalamazoo. Meanwhile, those thousands upon thousands of headlights will still be marching north, to wait for who knows how long. I hope when they turn around and head back home, they’ll have homes to head back to.