I haven’t been flying as much as I’d like to and decided the best way to get back into the air was to give myself a new goal and most of all, a new challenge. So now here I am fresh from completing my fourth lesson in pursuit of an instrument rating. I’m only four lessons in and I can see this is going to be much more challenging than my initial private pilot license. I am enjoying it immensely though, and welcome the chance to learn anything new in a plane. These first lessons have been basic but I can tell they have helped the precision of my flying tremendously. No more lazy altitude holds for me! Gone are the days where I would “choose” an altitude only to continue choosing new ones as I drifted about vertically throughout my flight. There is a price to pay for this newfound precision though, and that is… ATTENTION. My attention is fully devoted to the instrument panel. My entire lesson can be described as a frantic and sometimes ordered march through the nest of dials and gauges. In order to maintain altitudes, headings, and airspeeds to any certain value I have to monitor half a dozen dials, continuously. I focus primarily on the core instrument, the mother dial… the attitude indicator. Everything else is a short “hop” from that dial and back to the main dial. So this is the dance I do, for about an hour every lesson, heaving the airplane here and there according to those dials. It is very tedious and I am obviously still learning but it is enjoyable. I have to admit though, 90% of the fun of flying an aircraft is looking out the window.
This lesson was the most challenging yet. I flew different “courses” in the sky with reference to the instruments alone. This involved making something called “procedure turns” and tear drop turns all while flying certain VOR radials in the sky. Once I did a complete circuit while in a set cruise configuration I repeated it but slowed the plane down and sped it up through certain legs. This was the first time I changed configuration like this while only looking at instruments and it was a little tricky because in plane speed and height are linked. In order to slow down you reduce throttle and let some of the speed die off but this also kills some of the lift created by the wings. In order to create the same lift at lower speeds you therefore have to pitch the plane up. This gives the aircraft a higher angle of attack and generates more lift. Ok, solved. But no, this new lift isn’t free and the high angle of attack creates more drag since the plane is now cutting through the air with a bigger profile. This means you have to add power back in to get the speed stable. I did this awkwardly throughout the lesson but was getting better toward the end. I essentially reduced power, pitched up, then brought some power back in and iterated with both pitch and power for another few more minutes until both speed and altitude were just right. After the circuit training we flew a VOR approach into our home airport and then came another first for me, circling to land. Before I knew I had my foggles off and was approaching my airport at a perpendicular angle from 600 feet. 600 feet! I did a right turn and started doing my procedure for landing before realizing it would not be that easy. I could not reduce power because I was too low to start descending, but I did want to get my flaps out so I put out 10 degrees and ADDED power in order to stay level. I did my base turn and added another 20 degrees of flaps but now I wanted to slow down, but stay level at 600 feet…. So I just pitched up a bit. Then I turned to final and guess what, I was too high and fast. Ok just go idle on the power and pitch up to 60 knots and let her come down, steady as she goes. That kind of worked out but it was essentially a total flail. I wasn’t ready for the differences in the approach and I was making it up on the fly. I will make sure to be prepared next time!
So to recap, things I need to get better at:
I need to get a little more comfortable reducing speed at constant altitude. There was a lot of fumbling on my end. I definitely need to work on circling to land from 500 feet. My excuse to flail once has been used up. A few times early on I also busted by altitude holds by about 200 feet. Embarrassing.
Things I was pretty good at.
I had my VOR math down this time. I was able to anticipate the turns and even knew when to switch the heading bug by 180 degrees to get the “sense” right. This is much better than last lesson where I basically just switched it to whatever my instructor said. I also did well during my turns and even during my descending and climbing turns.
I just finished up a Genetics class at the local university and it was fascinating! The fields of genetics, molecular biology and bioengineering are just exploding right now. It’s cool to go to a class where some of the material is updated in real time, as research papers are released and published. It is very different from engineering courses I’ve taken where the content has been static for decades, allowing even for the use of decades old books and problem sets.
So it was fun to be in a class that was not like that. The biotech field has been around for a few decades but has been growing consistently ever since. It grew right under my nose. I was already in graduate school when MIT announced it was creating a new major, Bioengineering in 2003. It was also in 2003 when it was announced that the human genome was sequenced.
If anyone is interested here is a good lightning fast summary of genetics.
One cool thing is that our DNA is 99.9% identical to eachother! That means we are all practically clones of eachother. I wonder what kind of world this would be if people actually understood that and believed it… that we are all equal. Science says our difference are due to circumstance and the imagination.
There are no shortcuts in building aircraft and spacecraft. These products are not like computers, bridges, or automobiles. They are unique in that they cannot be “over designed” like a bridge because the cost is too high and the performance envelope too slim. Then again they are not made in the numbers that electronics components are and thus the industry cannot rely on statistics to say their design works. (Who cares if your particular satellite doesn’t work right, right?) Consequently any space manufacturer that says they will simply “take the next one off the line” in the event a satellite or vehicle is faulty is declining to tell you it would also nearly bankrupt them. In fact many aerospace companies have gone bankrupt before creating their final products. Aerospace companies famously run on razor thin margins.
Aerospace vehicles in effect have the worst qualities of every engineering industry. They demand an absurdly high level of precision, massive integration and money. The challenges are not only in engineering, that would be easy, but also in management and integration as well. There is simply no way around it, aerospace vehicles are expensive and will be so for the foreseeable future. For some reason people and policy makers have been talking like these costs will come down drastically due to this or that new company or vision. There is a reason nobody takes a company seriously that says they can make nuclear power plants or submarines at a drastically lower cost and faster than any company ever has.
There are no sectors of aerospace that are immune to these laws. Even the lowly general aviation aircraft the putt along at 130 mph are not simple. They require extensive analysis and complex flight-testing. For instance, in the past 5 years the Zodiac 601/650 aircraft has been sold as a very low cost two seat aircraft. It is advertised at 16 thousand dollars for the complete airframe in kit form. Well, most of these aircraft are pretty good but it turns out that sometimes the wings fall off during flight. In the past 5 years there have been 5 in flight break ups of the aircraft. This prompted the FAA to launch its own investigation into the actual design and testing of the aircraft. The report can be found at the following link.
What they found was really disturbing. The FAA did not find a single instance of faulty design or error. Instead they found multiple areas where the design and testing were insufficient. There were things like assuming the wing lift was elliptical, something more appropriate for undergraduate aero courses. It was all over the map with improper airspeed calibration, incomplete flutter analysis and tests and more. The cumulative effect of all the errors in design and testing caused the wing to be designed for loads that were 25% too low.
Spacecraft are enormously more complex than this general aviation plane. There are no shortcuts in their design, manufacture and operation. Nonetheless, they can be built, just don’t be surprised when you see the price tag, schedule and who ultimately paid for it.
Well the first genetically modified animal for human consumption is set to be approved by the FDA soon. A company named AquaBounty took 15 years to develop a new genetically engineered salmon that can grow as big as a normal mature salmon in about half the time. They did this by adding another gene to its DNA that codes for salmon growth hormone. They also had to add another chunk of DNA from an ocean pout (which is kind of like an eel) to regulate the hormone. To do this they took the pout’s anti-freeze protein promotor sequence and put it in “front” of the salmon growth hormone sequence to activate it. This particular promotor sequence is used like a switch used to “turn on” the growth hormone gene in the winter. So there you have it, year round growth in salmon. It’s interesting to note that this was all done in the early 90′s and all this time they have been “testing” the fish. This is because once you put the sequence in the fish, you are never really sure how it is going to act in the giant nest that is its genome. The new gene didn’t have the luxury of growing up in the fish’s natural gene ecosystem so interactions are a little unpredictable. The new sequence could effect other genes in all kinds of ways… so they just followed 7 generations and saw that everything looked fine. Good to go.
Interestingly, in order to control them they made them all female.. (sound familiar?). They also made them all sterile. It is interesting to note that they are identical to normal salmon and the only way to tell them apart would be some very sophisticated DNA sequencing. Would you eat them?
I’m taking a Genetics class this Fall and it is fascinating. One thing I found particularly interesting is that our DNA is only 3.2 billion base pairs long. Ok, that’s it. The equivalent digital information is about 800 MB, enough to fit on a CD. The information held on that CD is enough not only to build every one of the trillions of cells in your body, but put it all together and have it all function to make you. Oh and the complete CD is in every one of your cells. I don’t know but as an engineer that is just incredible to me. We (humans) just don’t build systems like that, we are not smart enough to. We have a hard enough time designing each little part beforehand and slapping it all together. (Anyone remember how the 787 fuselage didn’t line up right?) Can you imagine designing something that picks itself up and puts itself together?
I think that some day we will be able to, maybe in a few hundred years. How amazing would it be to have a device that “self assembled”? What if something as complex as an aircraft could be grown? (Maybe this way we could FINALLY pull manufacturing back into the US). Instead a device could be built and “grown” on a computer and then “programmed” using DNA in an artificial cell. After that just supply it with raw material or “nutrients” and it would assemble itself into… well anything. If nature can make redwoods, butterflies and people, what could WE make?
Crazy? It will never happen?
The company LS9, Inc. has designed a microbe that can eat woodchips and agricultural waste to produce gasoline. Yup, GASOLINE… and it’s basically pump ready. It’s a brave new world.
One of my favorite biologists, John Maynard Smith, was once an engineer like myself. He designed planes in WWII and then decided biology was more interesting. He made a complete and total career change, citing that airplanes were “noisy and old fashioned”. Anyway he still loved flying things, and wrote a really neat essay about the evolution of powered flight. He describes how birds evolved tails first for stable gliding but later began to evolve toward instability as they developed powered flight. It’s really neat.
Birds aren’t the only animals that fly though. I found this awesome video of a fish flying for 45 seconds! It even uses it’s tail to swat the water and develop thrust. It is amazing. I salute that crazy flying fish.
Speaking of flying animals and biologists, the earliest bird fossil is now on exihibt at the Houston Museum of Natural Science. It is called an Archaeopteryx it is about 150 million years old. I HAVE to go see this one.
I have a special bond with some of the things I learn. Just think of how many things you learn throughout a normal day, it’s staggering… but most of it is trivial and dull. In fact, most of the things I learn at work or just going about my day pass right through me, like the plot of a bad paperback novel. There are a few things that have poetry to them, or at least to me.
For instance, I’m taking a human physiology class and we are studying the nervous system. The nervous system is incredibly complex, and filled with all kinds of beautiful nuances. Anyway, at it’s core are little electrical currents that are created and propagated out through the body. These are very small currents, very faint… on the order of millivolts.
That is interesting enough but on my drive home I was treated to a wonderful lightning storm off in the big Texas sky. I could see the blue flashes of light speckle the bellies of the clouds all the way home. It was beautiful but the flashes were all pointless and random right? It’s amazing to think that that is what I AM. My thoughts, my personality, and my memories are all tied up in these little flashes of lightning in my head that might seem equally as pointless to say a frog or a rock. So I drove on with that happy realization and figured maybe that lightning wasn’t so random…. and for a moment I think the lights in the sky and I understood each other.
I went to Fry’s this weekend and walked out with a telescope. Yes, I bought a telescope on impulse but I simply couldn’t resist. This isn’t just any telescope though; this is a truly “Desktop” telescope! Seriously, the tube isn’t much bigger than a liter bottle and I can pick the whole thing up with one arm easily.
I love it.
It’s made by Celestron and is marketed as a “first scope” and at 50 bucks it’s a steal. First off I think it’s really cool they covered the tube with the names of old astronomers. I remember at MIT that Killian court (the main courtyard with “the dome”) had the names of scientists lining the upper trim of the stone walls. As corny as this sounds, it was inspiring. It was inspiring to finish a test or finish learning some new concept and walk out through that court and see those names… Archimides, Darwin, Newton, and Copernicus. There were literally a hundred of them lining the entire courtyard, I felt like I was a part of something bigger, something important. In a smaller way, that is what this telescope does. This telescope isn’t much stronger than what Galileo used, isn’t it just as amazing?
Ok, I got side tracked, I often do. Now for the specs of the scope, it has a 3 inch mirror as its base and comes with 20mm and 4 mm eyepieces. These equate to roughly x15 and x75 power eyepieces. The optical quality of the scope is sound but the 75 power eyepiece is really too much for this caliber of scope. That being said, it’s still awesome! Remember, it’s NOT the Hubble. It’s not the Hubble and I don’t live in the desert of New Mexico. Nevertheless, Sarah and I took it out and immediately saw the rings of Saturn! Saturn’s rings are very thin right now and the image still has significant aberration but we could definitely see the rings. When Jupiter comes back out it will also be able to image the 4 Galilean moons and the planet’s disc. This scope is really mostly for viewing faint star clusters, bright nebula and globular clusters. I can’t wait to spend more time with it.
So this telescope is a reflector type telescope. The image comes from a mirror on one end that focuses lots of light right onto the eyepiece. The size of the mirror doesn’t do any magnification; it just increases the amount of light the telescope can gather. It’s effectively like stretching out your pupil to the size of the mirror, or 3 inches The actual magnification of the image is done by the eyepieces. So what’s the reason you can’t just keep magnifying up (past 75 power for instance)?
Well there are two reasons. The first is because the mirror isn’t perfect. The mirror is effectively warped in some areas and that translates to an imperfect image at the eyepiece entrance. Also, there is only so much “light” in an image. If you magnify it, it gets duller and at some point the whole thing will get washed out.
Here is the kicker though, most faint things like nebula in the sky are actually quite big “angularly”. This means you don’t really need to magnify them all that much. What is really needed is a biggish mirror because nebula are very, very faint. This telescope is a great compromise between mirror size, mirror quality, magnification and price! What a great way to celebrate 401 years with the astronomical telescope.
What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any experience can bring to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where non other have walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea – to discover a great thought – an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of a field that many a brain-plow had gone over before… To be the first – that is the idea. To do something, say something, see something before anybody else – these are the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasure are tame and commonplace… These are the men who have really lived – who have actually comprehended what pleasure is – who have crowded lifetimes of ecstasy into a single moment.
