Moving Beyond the pilot's Operating Manual

[2ndsegment]

So much for having the AI whipped into shape. I spent yesterday trying to fly from KLAX to KLAS in the A320. But enough about me. The AI with the default departure for LAX took me out into the Pacific and kept going. Hey! Las Vegas is to the Northeast! Roughly, let's see RWY 6, Let's try rwy 6. Yeah! It is going almost along the red course! (I am cheating a bit and using IFR-Low to avoid the mountains I know ring the LA basin (Valley of Smokes). Soon I am out and into the high desert (about 3000 feet ground level). Joshua Approach? Is that what the ATC just said? Joshua Tree is a bit toward Oceanside and San Diego to the South but the Course seems to be heading Northeast.

Now, just to get over those mountains that ring Las Vegas. Because I have about 500 hours of flight time in the MS-FS now it is telling me each time my transponder is out and I need to squawk a code and it will track me on radar. I can find the XPDR on the panel with my mouse and have the command in the list I made of the Settings but guess what? Yeah, it is out. That just means my handicap now is ATC wants to drop me for VFR landing in scattered clouds below from about half the standard 18000 feet meteorological altimeter setting for 29.92 in Hg. So I am here at 9050 feet.

What if I just let it go? Seven hours later as fuel exhaustion approaches and I have gone past Salt Lake City Center having the hope of Nellis Center past long ago and yes, Minneapolis Center and a whole lot of water before a bit of land and now looking forward a lot more water, the ATC call "Airbus ... contact Winnipeg Center ... on ...." Is that what the stepped on "Wi2osdn ndkj," was, and now I hit escape and save the .flt file to be able to see the LAT LONG. Sure I need to practice takeoffs and landing with my joystick which is somewhat like the one that replaced the B-58 yoke in the aircraft CCTS syllabus at Castle AFB in 1968 and needed to be somehow adapted into a new one for the FB-111.

But after the meeting at Nellis in 1966 my next trip was to Wright-Patterson where the gate gave me a card with all of my appointments and times and blanks for the contact to sign me in and out before giving me a pass for my portfolio. I had 15 minutes between each appointment to get to the next before someone would come looking for me. The first meeting was in a dugout. On the surface I saw a dump truck with three rear axles, a tandem and a single lift axle as well as the normal front axle. Then into the lobby and meet the contact and down an elevator to another lobby which looked out of the side of the hill through large picture windows. The contact handed us off , for I was with the Douglas Dayton rep, to a civilian older man. He was very pleased to see me. He led me down a corridor and we turned into a room with -- I don't remember-- and later at Shaw AFB, I really don't remember any of the officers I met or anything I said or heard.

No real problem as the civilian had a book. He offered to let me peruse it and to make any notes I wished which he would mail to me afterwards. The book was about Soviet PVO-Strany. Chapters described various GCI and EW radars as well as acquisition radars for AAA and SAM sites. Each radar had a NATO nickname which was classified. I can rattle some of them off and you can look them up now in Google or buy kits to build mockups in scale. TOKEN, TALL KING, SPOON REST, KNIFE REST, FAN SONG, --- and some pictures of the pads in a pattern that were now appearing as pre-laid out locations in North Viet Nam for mobile SAM's like SA-2. Some of the pads would have occupants, some days and most would not. All of this I put into the notes and sure enough after I got back from my trip which included a second stop at Shaw, AFB in Sumpter, South Carolina, the document control station at Long Beach informed me, my package from Dayton had arrived.

The trip to Sumpter included the Dayton rep and Stanley Hubbard and two other guys so that our flights in short segments met fog as night fell and Stan and I were the low status individuals bumped as standbys. When we got to the next stop on a later flight the airfiled was closed and we rented a car for a wild ride through the mountains from Charlotte to Raleigh and on to Sumpter. I guess we flew to Raleigh from Charlotte as standby, but the route to Sumpter was all night with fog and near zero visibility with one Yank as copilot and one RAF Wing Commander as principal driver. Sumpter is where the Douglas B-66's modified for Reconnaisance and Electronic Countermeasures were. I could see the silhouettes of their tails and fuselages on the ramp as we drove in the gate on Stan's exchange officer ID. He had decided we would spend the minor fragment of the night left in the BOQ as no motel reservations were left.



Но после встречи в Неллис в 1966 году моя следующая поездка была Райт-Паттерсон, где ворота дали мне карту со всеми моими назначениями и раз и пробелы для контакта, чтобы войти и выйти, прежде чем дать мне пропуск для моего портфеля. У меня было 15 минут между каждой встречей, чтобы добраться до следующего, прежде чем кто-то придет искать меня. Первая встреча была в землянке. На первый взгляд я увидел самосвал с тремя задними осями, тандемом и одной подъемной осью, а также обычной передней осью. Затем в вестибюль и встретить контакт и вниз на лифте в другой вестибюль, который выглянул из стороны холма через большие окна изображения. Контакт передал нам, потому что я был с представителем Дуглас Дейтон, гражданский пожилой человек. Он был очень рад меня видеть. Он повел меня по коридору, и мы превратились в комнату с - я не помню - и позже в Шоу АФБ, я действительно не помню ни одного из офицеров, кого я встретил или что-нибудь я сказал или услышал.


Нет реальной проблемы, так как у гражданского была книга. Он предложил, чтобы я ознать его и сделать какие-либо заметки я хотел, который он будет по почте мне потом. Книга была о советском ПВО-Страни. В главах описаны различные РЛС GCI и EW, а также радары приобретения для сайтов AAA и SAM. Каждый радар имел прозвище НАТО, которое было засекречено. Я могу греметь некоторые из них, и вы можете посмотреть их сейчас в Google или купить комплекты для создания макетов в масштабе. TOKEN, TALL KING, SPOON REST, KNIFE REST, FAN SONG, --- и некоторые фотографии колодок в шаблоне, которые в настоящее время появляются в качестве предварительно изложенных местах в Северном Вьетнаме для мобильных SAM, как SA-2. Некоторые из прокладок будет иметь пассажиров, несколько дней, и большинство не будет. Все это я положил в примечаниях и конечно же после того как я вернулся из моей поездки, которая включала вторую остановку в Шоу, AFB в Самптер, штат Северная Каролина, станция контроля документов в Лонг-Бич сообщил мне, мой пакет из Дейтона прибыл.


Поездка в Самптер включены Дейтон респ и Стэнли Хаббард и два других парней, так что наши рейсы в коротких сегментах встретил туман, как ночь упала, и Стэн, и я был низким статусом лиц наткнулся в качестве резервов. Когда мы добрались до следующей остановки на более позднем рейсе airfiled был закрыт, и мы арендовали автомобиль для дикой езды через горы от Шарлотты до Роли и дальше в Самптер. Я думаю, мы летели в Роли из Шарлотта в режиме ожидания, но маршрут в Самптер был всю ночь с туманом и почти нулевой видимости с одним янки, как второй пилот и один RAF крыла командира в качестве основного водителя. Самптер, где Дуглас B-66 изменены для разведки и электронных контрмер были. Я видел силуэты их хвостов и фюзеляжей на рампе, когда мы ехали в ворота на обмен офицера Стэна ID. Он решил, что мы проведем небольшой фрагмент ночи, оставленной в БОЗ, так как никакие бронирования мотеля не были оставлены.

[2ndsegment]

My first flight on company money was actually to Saint Louis to meet the new St. Louis representative in Carrolton at the new Douglas Field Office. I was with my boss Robert E. Hull (as in hull insurance, a polite reference to what the services were calling Class A damage). The new rep was Norm Stevens, a retired USAF officer. I was also with John Correz from Douglas, Military Marketing, the specialist for DC-9 applications. This was the team of what would later be called "Road Warriors." Soon there would be just me as the others begged off to please their wives. In Long Beach, there was Ed Spraitz, a retired, C-124 Globemaster II pilot, who saw me as a nuisance. Fortunately, Donaldson, the VP of Engineering, liked me. (More on this later when we flew to St.Louis to decide the responsibilities on the Strike Fighter, and I won a bottle of wine on the flight back by predicting the mid-point of the flight) Donaldson was retiring and John Brizendine, the former DC-9 project manager, at the 1965 time of my first flight was moving up. But what kind of airplane was I on for that epic first contact with the 375th AMAW of MAC? (learned how to breakdown the acronyms, AMAW is AeroMedical Airlift Wing and MAC is Military Airlift Command both headquartered at Scott AFB in Illinois.)

The commercial DC-9 was just going into service as 1966 dawned with West Coast Airlines and Bonanza some of the very first. Trans World Airlines, which would have it's headquarters in St. Louis was a favored buyer and all my later flights did not have tickets bought, but rather were TWA ticket stock vouchered for flights as partial payments for DC-9s being built for them. For this first company paid trip I had a little notepad I bought especially and I dutifully noted cab fares and breakfast ---"Whoa!" Said my boss! "We put a standard per diem on our expense reports when we get back." If the hotel was beyond the discounted standard rate the secretary will get our management to authorize a "hotel hardship" rate as charged.

I had flown on a DC-6 and a Convair CV-340 in Texas and the military versions of those some Operation Deep Freeze Antarctic explorers C-118's and "Samaritan" special cargo hospital ship C-131's were what we had to beat on cost of ownership. I'm sure the LA to STL flight was not on a turboprop like the Western Airlines Lockheed L-188 "Electra's" I later flew to Sacramento with former Colonel Maury Rosner the B-45 navigator and Minuteman Wing commander from Minot North Dakota. But was it a DC-6 like the puddle jumper which was refueled overwing at each stop on the flights to Castle AFB? or later from Detroit to TriCity Bay City, Midland, Saginaw on a loop to Chicago for United airlines? It was definitely not a DC-7C or a L-1049G which I heard barking and banging as the loudest piston airliners on final flights to/from Washington National to Europe as the 1970's dawned.

If it had been a DC-8, I would definitely have noted a first flight in the premier company product of the era. My drop back that it was a TWA 720 cannot be verified on the Internet now. It wasn't yet time for the 727. I did fly on a hangar queen Convair 880 I saw the mechanics putting useable tires on and banging the nacelle doors closed on after what looked like a hailstorm victim was pulled out for maybe the last time. Landing in LA as the autopilot dropped out overwater and the "lateral JC with a whifferdill" signaled that stability was a bit of a step and it settled down to a typical bang as the landing gear dropped down and locked.

The mystery remains which I was happy to leave alone until I needed to specify if another type besides the DC-9 was my first jet flight, a DC-9-10 with derated Pratt & Whitney JT-8-D-5 engines of 12,000 lb. thrust each and a maximum gross weight of 90,000 lb. The ones I would be helping sell with analysis and proposal writing would be the stretched DC-9-30 that would be rolling off the production line for charters Overseas National Airways (ONA) or Trans International Airways (TIA) with gross weights of 108,000 lbs. and center line optional fuselage fuel tanks and cabin cargo doors after static testing had verified the soundness of the engineering in them. Even 98,000 lbs. of the early DC-9-30 was surpassed and leading edge slats and triple slotted flaps were insufficient for the C-9A offered for ATEWS. It might need inflight thrust reversers for survivability using it's buckets instead of louvers like the DC-8. These DC-9's like all unstretched DC-9-20's and stretched DC-9-30's had JT-8D-1's of 14,500 lb thrust like the Boeing 727 and the coming 737.

[2ndsegment]

John Correz is making fun of Norm Stevens saying in a TWX, "The Air Force does not know about the DC-9. Send models and pictures." I had never seen either of these and policy was not to give models to individuals but only to offices to be left when the man moved on or retired. I was given a tie tack with a little gold plated DC-9 and told to not show it or someone would ask for it. No replacements would be made.

So---marketing was about options to the coming CX-X RFP (Request For Proposals). To show capability in PACAF, Ed Spraitz had John Corezz a "drift down curve", one engine out from a point and how far it could fly before it was at sea level. PACAF was Pacific Air Force. USAFE was something that even Charles Lindbergh could deploy to. United States Air Force Europe would come first but 2000 nautical miles from Travis (SUU) to Hickam in Hawaii with reserves to C-5011 rules was the coming hard point for the C-X-X. MAC 55-1? nope, AFR 60-1? nope and those had 10% reserves 10 % fuel density variations and different winds. C-5011A was 5%.

So you see, only engineering graphs, no photographs or nice wooden models with correct 375th AMAW livery passed through my hands or even appeared on Spraitz or Correz desks when I met with them. My contacts were Dr. Dreyer and John Roper his assistant in MAC Analytical. They had a contract with the University of Iowa to solve the "Travelling Salesman Problem." Later, Ken Boutwell of DoD Systems Analysis became a regular phone call of R.E. Hull to chat about this or that philosophical theory of optimization.

My work was always low balled and depended on regular MAC Monthly Maintenance Summaries from Scott as well as CAB-41 news from the beginning DC-9 commercial operations available from the CAB office on Connectcutt Avenue in the District of Columbia.

I also was given maps of the 375th Trunk lines which connected Scott with Travis, Maxwell, Kelly, Lowry and McGuire on a daily basis where there were regional hospitals that then spawned feeder routes to up to 400 different small airfields each years of which maybe 200 were common between years in the Viet Nam War years when 50,000 casualties per year- I had a box of routing cards for one year after the competition was over to create a centralized routing for the domestic option of 8 aircraft out of 25. Maybe I don't need to get the Airbus A320neo to fly all the trunk lines with AI. I've tried some of them.

As the War went on the installation of Litton LTN-51 inertial navigators on the C-141 allowed "over-the-pole" flights from Yokohama to Elmendorf and then on to Kelly in San Antonio, Texas to reduce the concentration on Scott and flow more casualties in to the facilities there that had held T-39 jets on "burn urgent" mission. I had an LTN-51 operating hand book on my desk soon. It was joined later by symposia proceedings from Inertial Guidance Test Symposia at Holloman, AFB I attended that became out run by GPS as satellite navigation showed that autopilots and gyro horizons were reliable and useful in newer applications.

[2ndsegment]

I didn't want to distract from the other thread about real pilots but my recent experience of having a simulated aircraft struck by lightning in Central America has released something that fits the timeline of the first atomic bombs. A bright flash and a loud explosion in the neighborhood brought out all the local kids one day. Finding the center of the blast we kids found ourselves outside Albert Mayhew's house. He invited us in to view his chimney in his kitchen and his electric stove with the oven door blown off. It appears that something like St. Elmo's fire that mariners report at sea happened. The lightning came down the chimney surface and reappeared as ball lightning that rolled over the linoleum leaving a black track and hit the stove where it grounded out on the plug in the back blowing off the oven door. I saw another oven door blown off in a house my sister-in-law was gutting to renovate on Thanksgiving Day 1976. It was in the Idyllwild section of Lake Elsinore, California. Albert was the owner of the Bad Axe theater where we had seen the news reels of the Atomic explosions in the Pacific.

If you were a contemporary viewer of these blasts you probably don't know or remember SALT-I, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, alone before there was a second better known SALT-II in the days of Jerry Ford and drawn up in Vladivostok, USSR. A book I just purchased on "B-58 Hustler Units" has some pictures and text on how the B-58 was stripped of the ability to carry Strategic Cruise Missiles to remove it from the count that applied to the B-52. The open bomb bays had to be verified empty of contraband. What was the name of that Admiral who was put in charge of Nuclear non-proliferation that later caught China, Iran, Pakistan and North Korea, as well as India where the vented hole was judged to be not just nuclear but fusion? https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/publi...p/nuclear.html

[2ndsegment]

I am happy again with the AI. I have made flights to Kabul from Basra and Frankfurt am Main from Bagram. The mountains did not deter me. I could explore full payload and full fuel load although --- I then decided to challenge the Sierra Madre. First from a long flight over the jungle and then over the high plateau from SBGL, Rio Janeiro to Santiago as Arturo Merino Benitez International, SCEL. That done I did Estancia Nueva from Lubecka Airport, SAJO up the coast instead of down to SCEL. Just because you can jump to FINAL one day and not get a "You do not have enough fuel to jump to FINAL" does not mean you can always gross up to what can be flown off the departure runway and miss all the obstacles. It's a play of wind, mountain wave and ATC clearances with no XPDR operating for me.

[2ndsegment]

I was missing one tag, the natural law view which changed neural network into more than an associative memory. My uncle a life insurance salesman had a neighbor who claimed to have invented an associative memory. It formed the basis for neither deductive nor inductive logic. Instead it sort of just played forward from one association to the next. In that way it needed no sensor inputs nor did it make reports of any kind. In that way it presaged the first IBM PC which had no keyboard and no display. I looked at a Hewlett-Packard PC version like that in 1993 and that is how I came to receive a Christmas gift of the PC of my choice in 1994. My gift did not include a spread sheet or a copy of a word processor which to me was a big long tunnel hooked to a keyboard that produced completed documents in multiple copies stapled and -- you know, a Wang. The printer I was allowed to include did not have a printer driver. I had been avoiding computers and even calculators since 1981. Then when self driving cars began to be announced, I especially avoided them. I avoid at all costs contests between brute force and common sense and science or mathematics.

Gyros had found a competitor in accelerometers. Ring Laser gyros completely eclipsed the reliability and accuracy of constant temperature inertial navigators. Radio navigation using satellites was far beyond beacons, VOR/DME and LORAN eventually becoming near ubiquitous as GPS. I now even have a few year old GPS mechanization on my Garmin Forerunner. My grandchildren "learned to fly" on my FIRE tablet using the onboard MIMS accelerometers almost 10 years ago.

So what am I doing even considering the AI on the new Microsoft Simulator? Ummm! I didn't know it was there. Why not just trim and autopilot setup like I used on FS-X? Give a nod to EAA and learn to fly a GA aircraft not a War bird as in Combat Simulator 3 that I avoided in 1994 for my first PC any way just to what?

Stories about ghost multiples fooling the AI that had exotic sensors and also about owners sitting in the back seat and hitting a divider at a fork in the road sent me further away not nearer. Even the 737 MAX AI was not intriguing. Now gravitation, there was something intriguing with how it varied over the earth and how something stretched might actually be capable of sensing differences at the two ends. Instead, now I have found an Airbus A-340 that climbed a blast wall when the 4 engines were operated at maximum in contradiction of certification for only one engine at maximum at a time and the airplane was parked facing the wall and unchocked. I had seen news that A-340 pilots tended to takeoff very flat and found "ouch!!" that reefing the Boeing 747-8i off the runway led to a tail strike. I knew about tail strikes but mostly on landing and specifically with the DC-9-50 flight test. John Lane an ex-Marine service acceptance pilot on the Skyhawk had discovered that tendency.

John Lane and an El Toro Marines Major Ezell at "Top Gun" did not like me. It was an instinctive thing that first appeared when I chose the weapon delivery system on the A-4M to exclude the A-7E and it's ILAAS system as inferior in SATS takeoff payload and unable to demonstrate sufficient deadliness to give it the nod. I was cautioned that "if a bomb ever fell on one of their guys they were coming for me." My brother-in-law was also a U.S. Marine after I drove him in my truck to Marine Recruit Center, San Diego after he had enlisted. One day because I did not want to buy life insurance from him after he said, "You should be made to suffer ordeal!" Perhaps he was thinking of SEAL training, I did spend some time on Juno Beach, Florida and my son became a PADI certified diver.

[2ndsegment]

I like to see myself as real in terms of timing. What happened with my taxes in 1978 after I sold my only house I saw as an audit. I decided to fly close to home like the other EEA guys. I still faced my lack of flying hours in a small private aircraft. AI flights to San Marcos 25 miles down the road just did not pan out so--why not grab my untrusty Freedom 2.4 that MS-FS 2020 forced me to assign all the buttons and sliders on. Why not test the AI on the Japan flight with all the hoopla? All right--nothing to lose. The AI just flys straight off the runway and continues on ignoring the course as shown obviously on the 2D map.

The Freedom 2.4 with my new lessons from Arizona , on this sim, about choosing a fixed throttle and sighting a constant glare shield to horizon height held a lure I did not chase the airspeed. I learned that from the flying lesson as FS-X had faded for me. Really bumpy up there and the wind out of the gaps between islands was anything but divine. So I sometimes have to wake up the joystick as it seems to go asleep or is it the wireless dropping out? I got to see Mount Fuji on a cloudless day. Then as supper time came I had to (ESC) and let the sim pause to make salad and pour my drink of water mixed with about 1/3 fruit juice. It rejoined the flight just as I had left it after that and the time to the fish course being ready gave me a short passage over the spine going out to the sea on the shoulder of Fuji.

This morning I read about the passing of the chairman of Fanuc robotics who had pioneered some of the NC machines. He had placed his company on the shoulder of Fuji. No mention was made of GM-FANUC that had created a joint effort in a new building in Troy, Michigan. I once had walked over that way as part of my keeping it real. I got diverted by a new Lucas facility and turned in there to chat about some robots I had seen in a German VFW brochure. The receptionist suggested I talk to Kipp. He sent me to Tom Werner at Vickers and he after awhile sent me to Sperry where they had a very noisy printer.

After dinner I woke up the sim before first waking up my joystick and classically the failure mode of zero latency gave me a windscreen full of terrain and uncertain as to just which way was up. Now the latency as I watched the screen go to "you have damaged your landing gear." I did not realize that is what had happened until this morning as I was trying to establish a heart rate of 100, constant while jogging with variable strike for higher and more steps very short for lower. I had jumped first to the FINAL after a takeoff and on a second to APPROACH to get logged and watching it land in AI on the wrong runway off in the dirt to the left side. Next time I will wake up my joystick before pressing the screen button for FLY and restarting the sim from a pause. My keyboard pause button only switches from cockpit view to tail on outside view as if I used ALT on the main and END on the numeric pad.