Flying with Finesse

One of my students suggested a book I'd never read, Henk Tennekes The Simple Science of Flight (MIT Press, 1996). My heart sank a little when he lent me his copy. "This is a book I'd like to write," I sighed.

Tennekes has the audacity to apply the basics of Aeronautical Engineering to all flying creatures, "from insects to jumbo jets." The discussion is clear and gentle. He puts all of the material together -- and I mean all of the material. For example, study The Great Gliding Diagram, which shows the polar curves for 10 flying objects: the cabbage white, the Gossamer Albatross, a typical sailplane, a swift (the bird, not the Globe-Temco beauty), a real albatross, a budgerigar, an ultralight, the Fokker Friendship, a pheasant, and the Boeing 747. You can compare the performance requirements directly, and there are many interesting consequences about wing loading, wing shape, power requirements, and the like.

Apparently the French call "L/D," the ratio of lift to drag, the finesse. I will now use this term forever. By the way, we owe the concept of the polar graph that shows vertical speed versus horizontal speed to another French engineer, Gustave Eiffel, of "Tour d'Eiffel" fame.

My current aeronautical thinking is that everything depends on two parameters: energy, which I wrote about in this post, and L/D, which I wrote about here. Those posts are just the beginning, of course, hence my idea to write a book explaining every maneuver and performance calculation in terms of these two.

But it would be a nerdy book, full of equations and tables. Tennekes does not shy away from equations (Stephen Hawking claims that every equation reduces the sales of a book by a factor of two), but his gentle prose and simple ink drawings really evoke the beauty of these simple ideas. Perhaps with Tennekes's inspiration I can write something with a little more finesse, too.

Boy - Rock - Water

It was payday at the airport and another typical day
at the university. Which one of those sounds more attractive? So after finishing my class prep I headed out to the airport.

The combination "boy - rock -water" has an inevitable outcome, as does the combination "boy - money - airplane". What better use for my Flight Instructor pay than to spend a few minutes off the planet? What reasonable mission might I accomplish?

Ah! Here's an engineering question: how far above the house does our wireless router's signal travel? (Our home network is JETNet: my family members' initials are J, E, T, and N.) Would I see "JETNet" on my network list as I flew over?

That sounds like a reasonable question; so reasonable that, as an Affiliate Professor in Computer Science, it should be a tax-deductible flight.

I couldn't find the network, but I don't think I'll write a paper for Nature about it, either.

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For many of us, flying "after work" means flying during the freight rush. There were 6 IFR departures and 3 IFR arrivals during my 30 minute flight, not including me, and Rob was busy in the tower. I monitored the tower during my experiment, mostly for amusement. Headed back, I could see the lights of a Gulfstream 200 outbound on the ILS and put my nose on them, which amounted to lag pursuit given the speed difference. Spacing was good, but the tower asked me to do a 360 on 4-mile final to let a SkyWest Brasilia depart. I complied, but was disappointed that they did not say "Thank You."

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Even though it was quite dark, it was within an hour of sunset, so I got no night landings. This is a little ironic since it was much darker than the other night when I flew the Cherokee Six for night currency.

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This sounds selfish, but I am disappointed to see my piloting skills continue to deteriorate. Not to the dangerous level, but I do find myself forgetting little things that used to happen automatically, the same things I observe in pilots who fly about as much as I do these days. Some things continue to be easy, so I think I have other people fooled, but in my heart I know that there is room for improvement.

Which means I better fly more!