Aizawl Again - April 16th

The silence is deafening! It is sometime in the early morning, and the power in out. No fan, no lights. Even the birds and bugs are unplugged. My internal clock is shot, and I never really had the chance to reset my mind after Haiti so here I lay with a thousand voices screaming in my head and no sound to drown them out. This is not the time or place to deal with Haiti, so I will occupy my mind with more immediate and familiar issues.

Getting to Aizawl, again, is never an easy task. The worst part is that you can only fly there from Kolkata, and that means spending a night in Kolkata. This time around, however, the experience was comparatively good! It was 43 degrees when we arrived, but there was a room at the airport and the air conditioner worked. I even got water to come from the shower head! We managed to board the aircraft to Aizawl with a set of badly distorted permit papers. Photocopiers these days!

Rama met us with a truck, and off we went to find all the hotels full. This sounds familiar, eh? The very helpful young lady at David’s Kitchen hotel took a while to recognize me without the beard, but, when she did, she gave me that familiar big smile and said I looked 10 years younger, very good. I figure any time you are told you look very good after 40 hours of flying, it is a banner day. We spent the night in a very nice, private residence. I look at Aizawl differently after having been to Haiti. I love Aizawl--one of the last places that really took my breath away--but in the light of my earthquake experience, I feel less comfortable here now.

The voices screaming in my head are not the voices of earthquake survivors but the voices of average people all over the world screaming at each other. I have had too many conversations lately about how this group of people are bad or how that group of people needs to go away. I am uncomfortable with prejudice, although we all possess it to some degree. People should be judged on their actions, not the color of their skin, the spelling of their last name, or the church they attend or don’t attend. We are all different, but we are all together on one very small rock that is getting much smaller! Within any group, there are people who want to make a positive difference. Those are the people I want to work with; those are the people I want to support.

Men and Machines

We had a 9 hour stop-over in London today--just long enough to take the tube into the city and have a great lunch with my sister. She took Ray and I to a very comfortable room, and we had very identifiable and delicious sandwiches for lunch. Identifiable is important, as this may be one of the last meals about which I can say that, at least for the next 5 weeks! After lunch, we walked through a bit of the city and then took the tube to the British war museum.


There were airplanes hanging from the ceiling as we walked through the door, so I was interested right away. The spitfire was front and center. If asked, I always say that this is my favorite WWII aircraft, but secrectly I like the Zero best. They only had a piece of the Zero at the museum.


The German Folkwolf was also hanging there as was a Mustang and many other weapons of human destruction. Ray knew very little about these aircraft, so I switched into teacher mode and was quite happy talking about these machines.


Near the end of the tour was a large exhibit about the holocaust. No machines in there; just row upon row of pictures of people, videos about the survivours, stories about those who did not servive (some six million in all), stats about who killed who and where, and maps...many maps that held no good memories for me. I could not make it through the exhibit. I had to leave. The story told there, unfortunatly, is not unique. Change the name and places, change the numbers and the maps, and that exhibit could be about too many other genocides of recent history. The thing that would not have to change would be the expressions on the faces of the men, women, and children in those pictures.
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Well, we are back at the airport and about to board. Keep us in your thoughts.

Email: It Is Good For Something--Finally!

It occured to me today that email has been relegated to the role of work tool. I check my Facebook with joyful anticipation, but I check my email with anxious trepidation. I don't mean to imply that I do not try very hard to remain connected or that I do not wish to use email better. I only mean to say that I tend not to expect anything truly enjoyable to be in my inbox.

I have a phone that is supposed to connect to my work email. It connects to my Gmail just fine, but I realized today that it had been some time since I had gotten that familiar buzzzzz--the one I normally get MANY times a day--notifying me that I had new work email. It took some time to relearn the menus on this new phone, but I finally managed to reconnect it with our email server and waited for the soothing buzzes to return.

The first buzzzz was a useless email (I need to get that filter set up to delete everything that does not contain the phrase "free food"), and I took a moment to think how nice it had been to be disconnected. The second buzzz was an email from "Luis Marcelo." Who?? Those who know me know that I am horrible with names, even in my native tongue; give me names in another language and I am hopeless. I am, however, very curious so I opened the email (there was no mention of Viagra, after all) and was very happy to find out that Luis Marcelo is the Luis from the Santa Cruz R/C flying club!

When I left the flying field that happy Bolivian day, I did attempt to get some contact information for the guys there, but when I got home, I discovered that I had no email addresses, just phone numbers. I was planning how I could get a translator to help me make contact with my new friends when this email came in. (I must admit that I shamelessly added my email address to the blog entry about the club in hopes that one of the guys would use it, but that would require one of them to find their way to my blog and actually read it. I didn't know if any of them would, but I really wanted to make contact with the flyers again, so I took a shot.)

Thanks to Luis, we are now connected! I can't stress enough how welcome they made me feel; it was like I had been at that field for years. I am planning to take a little electric pylon racer down with me next time I go to Bolivia. You know how I like to go fast and turn left! I am designing all my new plane projects to fit in a shipping box. My air fare down might be nothing compared to the cost of the toys I take. I don't think I have crashed in another country (if you exclude landing in a tree in Africa), but I bet I can fix that if I work really hard at it!

Thanks Luis for making contact. I hope we can stay in touch and do some flying in the Fall. Anyone want to do a humanitarian/R/C flying trip?

P.S. Take a look at this Video taken from Pablo's plane.

Back to the Basics of Lift

I have had more than a few interests in my life—often frivolous at first blush. There have been far too many different interests to actively be involved in all of them at once, so I tend to be engaged in something for a while, then box it up and shelve it. If you looked through my shop, you would find boxes containing Beta fish breeding equipment, pottery tools, squash equipment, sheep shearing tools and, of course, pretty much every type of model airplane you can think of.

I pulled one of those many boxes off the shelf this week, and I have been amazed at how it has come to consume my train of thought again. The box was labeled “PRS” for Portable Remote Sensing. To be honest, PRS has never been fully shelved; it has been lingering in my grey matter since Murray and I started the project. With the Bolivia group going to map CERENID next month and an old friend, Dawn, working to create an information database for project sites, the need for good remote sensing data increases. My mind has shifted back to airfoils, amps, thrust, and lift.

I feel like my mind is reloading memory slots at the front of my brain with information I had pushed to the back. I have started sketching and drawing, thinking and evaluating. I stare off into space and recall what I have done, then start inserting new information gathered since the last time I did this. New camera information, new GPS equipment, better servos, smaller gyros and so on. I revisit old locations for inspiration and new ideas. I spent time inside my plane room--standing, thinking, experiencing new thoughts and feelings. I tried, somewhat successfully, to penetrate to the heart of the issue, savor the moment and energize my mind. Time well spent!

That night, only a few hours after new possibilities opened to me there in my plane room, a new drawing file appeared on my computer. It will morph over the next few weeks, and then the dust will start to fly. Years of diverse experience and fresh new ideas will combine to produce one black box. The contents of this box will have roots in the basics of lift, the fundamentals of aerodynamics.
I love to look ahead, but I have learned that you must never forget to look back first. There are physical laws that govern our universe, and there are past experiences that govern our perspective. With the exception of the bumble bee, things don’t fly that don’t conform to applicable physical laws; our new experiences, too, are more likely to ‘fly’ if we reflect on what we, and others, have learned before us.

Go Fast and Turn Left

I have been flying model airplanes of some sort for 40 years (I started very young!) and radio controlled airplanes for 32 years. For 30 years, I have been trying to go fast and turn left—the motto of a pylon racer. I have raced just about anything that flies—from gas airplanes that go faster than 200 mph to the very slow, electric Vapor racing. What would make a man do such a thing? I had to have a serious talk with myself early this Monday morning. I drove two hours to fly in a gym and race Vapors. This is a plane whose claim to fame is that it flies at the speed of an out-of-shape geriatric with a bad hip! At full speed I can keep up to this plane without breaking a sweat. So what is the appeal in racing these aircraft?

I have identified three types of racers over the years. There is the Tinkerer who loves to try new equipment, new designs, new props or new motors. I started out as this guy - always designing a new plane, always stretching the rules. There was lots of room to improve back then: the rules were loose, designs were evolving, and materials for construction were pretty standard. I had some successes as a Tinkerer. Paul, an engine wizard, and I teamed up to build the Ultrax. This plane was hands down the fastest thing in the sky, albeit a bit hard to control.

The Spender has made a bold appearance in the sport in recent years. This is the guy who simply buys the best of everything currently produced in the world. With the internet and international competition, anyone with enough money can fill these shoes. This approach does not guarantee success. I have seen many a Spender re-kit (crash) their high priced stuff due to a lack of skill. A significant number of these competitors seem to be divorced. Go figure!

It is the presence of the third group of racers (my current home) that makes Vapor racing possible. The Flyer wants to race evenly matched equipment. Ideally, all planes are exactly the same—that way, when I beat you, it is because I am a better pilot. This group would race dust bunnies if we could figure out how to put a radio into them. It does not matter how fast the planes go, as long as everyone is going about the same speed, and it is best if the race is very close. I would far rather place second in a very close race than win a race by three laps. It is the heat of battle that is the thrill, even more so than the victory. Don’t get me wrong; this is a very competitive group of people, but the pleasure comes from the race, not the win. There is more honour in a victory based on skill than a victory based on weaponry.

I have wondered if this attitude has permeated past my flying and into my life. Those who know me will say, “YES!” I find that often my goal is to do more with what I have instead of having more: My car was the cheapest new car on the market when I bought it 18 years ago, and it currently has 510,000 km; I love to find free software to do the job of expensive, flashy software; I take great pleasure in getting water out of the ground cheaper and more reliably than the big NGOs. I don’t need to lead the race. I just want to win it in the last lap.