When in doubt, blame the pitot tube

They still don't know what caused the loss of an Air France jetliner over the south Atlantic this summer. The plane simply failed to arrive in Paris. The crew did not send out distress calls although the aircraft's computers did. The crash recorder sank to the bottom of the Atlantic and was not found. Intensive sea searches turned up some debris, but offered no clues.
A review of the aircraft's maintainance records revealed the aircraft was equipped with an older style of pitot tube. Lacking anything thing else to blame, the pitot tube became the culprit. Last week the European Aviation Safety Agency issued an emergency air worthiness directive to check the torque on the pneumatic disconnect union going to the pitot tube.
Trouble is, all the pitot tube does is make the airspeed indicator work. The plane will fly just fine without an airspeed indicator at all. The pitot tube is just a micely made bit of pipe facing forward into the airstream. Air is rammed into the opening of the pitot tube by the plane's motion thru the air and this pressure is measured by a sensitive gauge calibrated to read in knots instead of pounds per square inch. Since the tube is merely a piece of pipe, under very low pressure, it's failure modes are limited. About all it can do is ice up which makes the airspeed indicator stop working. To prevent icing, pitot tubes have electric heaters built into them. The one on the old F106 would heat the tube hot enough to burn your hand.
But the real issue is this, loss of airspeed indication is not going to crash a plane. It might possibly confuse an autopilot, but that's why the airplane carries a pilot and a co pilot.

Business Jets improve bottom line

Companies that use business jets have earnings growth 434% higher than non users. This from Aviation Week. You can believe as much of this as you like.

Universal Service bites the dust

The old Bell Telephone system had a corporate policy of universal service. Which meant running wires all over helangon to service remote farms and cabins. Bell figured universal service enhanced the worth of a telephone. Even if the remote farms never made enough calls to pay off the cost of running the wire, it was worth it in the long run. The ability to telephone anyone, no matter how far out of town they were, made possession of a telephone more valuable to everyone. Plus it is fair to offer phone service to those of us who live out of town.
Nothing last forever. The Bell system, after massive breakups, last-for-ever court cases, and a blizzard of name changes to confuse the customer, gave up on universal service. They found a bigger sucker.
Enter Fairpoint. The Bell guys (now calling themselves Verizon) figured out that providing phone service to the boonies of NH, ME, and VT was an overall loser. They offered to sell the losing phone systems to Fairpoint for an stiff sum of money. Fairpoint fell for it hook line and sinker. They borrowed a huge stack of money, at 11% if memory serves, and bought the farm.
Chickens come home to roost. Fairpoint is loosing money. Their stock has dropped from $9 to $0.90. They probably will declare bankruptcy. The Public Utility Commissions of all three states went along with this disaster.
Let's hope my phone continues to give dial tone. If it quits, I buy a cell phone.

Words of the Weasel Part 11

"Exit strategy" as in a way out of a war. There are only two ways out of a war. Victory or defeat. If it isn't victory. it is a defeat. Like Viet Nam, where the US executed an exit strategy, (helicopters lifting off from the Saigon embassy) the enemy won the war. Today's Sunday pundits are talking about exit strategies as I type this. Exit strategy is a weasel phrase for pulling out US troops and handing victory to the enemy.

President Pantywaist?

British newspaper calls Obama "President Pantywaist" over dropping the Polish and Czech missile defense system. Ouch.

Words for Wood Working

Names change. Used to be, a scroll saw was a hand tool, a bowsaw with a very deep bow to allow cuts far in from the edge of the wood. Now a days on the web, scroll saw seems to mean a stationary power tool, the one we used to call a jigsaw. As in the tool that made jigsaw puzzles. The jigsaw name has largely migrated over to the handheld power tool that has a short stiff reciprocating blade. Back then the portable tool was called a saber saw. And the big brother of the saber saw doesn't really have a universally agreed on name. Most folk still call that tool a Tigersaw or a Sawzall, which are the brand names of two of the leading makers of the tool. Some call them reciprocating saws but that name is just too cumbersome for everyday use.
Then consider the poor circular saw name. Again, way back, a circular saw was a stationary tool with a flat iron table up thru which a circular blade protruded. Now a days the stationary saw is called a table saw, and the circular saw name has moved over to the portable tool that I still call a skilsaw, the brand name of the first such tool. It's the portable tool that house carpenters use to quickly cut 2*4's to length on the job site.
Actually it would make more sense to use the circular saw name as a class name covering all saws with a rotating blade (table saws, radial arm saws, chop saws, sliding compound miter saws, and skilsaws), and find another name for the skilsaw. Or do the scotch tape thing and just keep calling them skilsaws.
While we are at it, changing names all around, find a new name for the radial arm saw. That name is so cumbersome that most folk use the acronym (RAS) when writing or speaking about the tool. Us woodworkers understand, but non wood workers find the acronym obscure.

The dog ate my homework

According to this, a laborious gathered archive of global temperature has been lost. Apparently some Brits, with US government funding gathered up temperature readings from all over the world going back to the invention of the thermometer. The project has refused to show their raw data to other scientists for years. Now as Freedom of Information Act queries have demanded to see their data, they claim to have lost it.
The matter is more than academic. The IPCC used this data to claim the world was getting hotter. Despite a good deal of correction of the data to account for the rise of well heated cities around the older weather stations, the IPCC was only able to claim a warming of a fraction of a degree. Thermometers are only accurate to two degrees, so the amount of warming is so small that thermometers can't really see it. The IPCC warming was detected only after a lot of statistical averaging on corrected data. There are lies, damn lies, and statistics Mark Twain once said. A fraction of a degree of warming might come from the statistics or the corrections, or both.
Naturally other scientists want to check the numbers. And the global warmers don't want to let them see the data that was used sell the Cap and Tax bill to the US Congress.