Category: Uncategorized

Cribbed from Ace of Spades (and no doubt cribbed from somewhere else):

An easily understood view of the Four Turnings hypothesis. A lot of historians turn up their noses at it but American history has, at least, clearly fit the pattern well. A useful perspective, if nothing else.

I’ll take “Days That End in Y” for 500, Alex…

This amusing little gem from the NY Post just popped up in my news feed:

Pilot freaks out passengers with ‘horrific’ tornado warning.

“He seemed angry,” said Pamela Kent, a Princeton resident who was traveling with her daughter Jessica. “He said, ‘We’re going to be flying through horrific storms, including tornadoes.’”

Another PR victory for United!

Any of my readers in the biz will recognize the rest of the story embedded here:

There were tornado warnings across Warren County in New Jersey and in parts of Pennsylvania late Tuesday as heavy rain pummeled the mid-Atlantic region. When the plane finally prepared to taxi, the pilot got back on the intercom to notify the passengers that the plane had to return to the gate because of a maintenance issue, Kent said.

Let me break this down, inside-baseball style (assuming the story isn’t #FakeNews):

The Captain is probably Chicago-based, running a couple of round trips a day to EWR. The crowded airspace and concentration of busy airports in the NY area makes it notoriously sensitive to weather delays. The slightest threat of thunderstorms in the morning will start ground delays to NY by lunchtime.

I’m sure the weather was dog crap. I’m equally sure his dispatcher planned his route, fuel, and alternate(s) accordingly. And I’m dead certain that if he had any disagreements with his release, he could either work out a better plan with his dispatcher or refuse to take the flight. Either one of them has the authority to do so.

In reality? Airlines can be stingy with contingency fuel, and nobody wants to be “that guy” who refuses a legal trip. So in classic passive-aggressive style, he decides to frighten the passengers so everyone can share in the misery.

Meanwhile, he’s looking at his watch and waiting for his duty clock to run out, thus forcing the company to take him off the schedule and send him home. So, push off blocks and boom (cue Chuck Yeager drawl): “Well folks, this here pesky indicator light that’s been a known nuisance for the past month just twinkled again. We’re gonna have to return to the gate for maintenance (and where I know scheduling can probably scare up a relief crew from the bullpen because – gee whiz – we just hit our 10-in-24 limit for today and the only thing I want to do less than spending a couple hours in the spin cycle over EWR is to actually spend the night in that hellhole). Sorry folks, and thanks for flying the friendly skies.”

Just my two cents. Could be wrong.

 

It’s that time of year for Big Airshows that result in Big News of Big Money being spent in Big Aerospace. This year’s Farnborough Air Show doesn’t disappoint, with some welcome news out of the still-intact-for-now United Kingdom. Via Parabolic Arc:

 

XCOR’s Lynx demonstrates that cats may indeed have nine lives:

US manned space launch vehicle designer XCOR Aerospace has signed a strategic Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with spaceplane design and operating company Orbital Access Limited and Glasgow Prestwick Spaceport. This partnership is supported by Scottish Enterprise, the Scottish Government’s economic development agency.

The MoU paves the way for the establishment of manned launch services at Prestwick using XCOR’s Lynx spacecraft with support from existing Scottish aerospace organisations.

This is very good news as the Lynx project ignominiously had the rug pulled out from under it just a few weeks ago. XCOR needed to shift focus to the new engines they’re building for ULA’s Vulcan rocket, but it was still disappointing. Lynx has a lot of potential for personal spaceflight, including something that hasn’t been discussed much in popular media: training new pilots. While it’s been touted as a suborbital tourism and research vehicle, I also see it as potentially being a Space Age Stearman.

In other news out of Farnborough, Reaction Engines UK has secured enough money to finally build a demonstrator SABRE rocket-based combined-cycle engine.

The agreements now in place between Reaction Engines, ESA and the UK Space Agency, together with the working partnership with BAE Systems, set the framework for Reaction Engines to deliver the world’s first SABRE ground demonstrator engine by the end of the decade.

 

SABRE is exactly the kind of revolutionary propulsion needed to enable the type of point-to-point space travel that I wrote about in Perigee. So yeah, I’d very much like to see this work. God save the Queen!

It’s taking a while for Farside to get some traction, but all the reviews so far have been quite positive. I especially liked this one from John Walker at Fourmilab, also cross-posted at Ricochet:

This novel is not going to be nominated for any awards by the social justice warriors who have infiltrated the science fiction writer and fan communities: the author understands precisely who the enemies of civilisation and human destiny are, forthrightly embodies them in his villains, and explains why seemingly incompatible ideologies make common cause against the values which have built the modern world. The story is one of problem solving, adventure, survival, improvisation, and includes one of the most unusual episodes of space combat in all of science fiction. It would make a terrific movie.

Dang skippy! Just waiting for that call from Hollywood…