Monday, November 26, 2007

Gone Wrong

Wright nine-cylinder Cyclone engine, as installed in a North American T-28 Trojan. Photograph taken at AirVenture 2007, the Warbird Flight Line, Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

England and America are two countries separated by a common language.” George Bernard Shaw.

“Have you ever had an engine gone wrong?”

The question was asked me by a young boy, 10 years old or so, in the cockpit of an L-1011 while on the ground in Manchester, England. We had just completed a night time crossing from Orlando, Florida, a regular charter run for ATA at the time, ferrying Brits back and forth “on holiday” to the sunny South. We still had one more leg to go, Manchester to London Gatwick, and as was common, had invited the kids going on to Gatwick to visit the cockpit while we were on the ground.

The kids were excited, of course, because they were going back home after a fun vacation. The questions came thick and fast. “What does that do?” “How do you know what all these things do?” “Is it hard to fly an airplane?” But, “Have you ever had an engine gone wrong?” was a new one.

“Gone wrong,” I thought. You mean, like get into drugs? I didn’t say that, of course, but that’s what I was thinking. “That was a good engine until it started hanging around with a bunch of recips.” How could an engine go wrong?

So I did the only sensible thing and said, “Could you ask that question again?” And he said, “Have you ever had an engine gone wrong?”

Right. Probably shouldn’t ask again. So I said, “Do you mean fail? Have I ever had an engine failure?”

“Yes,” he said.

“No.” And at that point I hadn’t. I probably had 7000 or 8000 hours of flying at that point, most of it in multiengine jets, and had never had an engine failure. In fact, I’ve only had one in my entire career, and except for the fact that it occurred on Christmas Eve, ironically departing Orlando (but for Boston, not Manchester), that failure was a simple affair, losing the center engine on a very lightly loaded airplane in good weather at 1000 feet. We shut it down (it was vibrating severely and probably was about to come apart), told the tower we had an engine shut down and needed to come back, circled around and landed. Spoiled Christmas for a very disappointed crew of 12, but it was a big non-event otherwise. Modern turbine engines, unlike their reciprocating ancestors, seldom fail, and when they do it usually is without too much drama.

He said, “Thank you,” and that was that. Then another kid said, “I miss my cat.” With kids, it’s not always about airplanes.

Saturday, November 17, 2007

Bardufoss

As the days get shorter, I’m always reminded of a trip I made to Bardufoss, Norway. The trip itself was an interesting one. We picked up a company of army reservists from Augusta, Georgia (the closest I’ve ever gotten to The Masters) who were deploying for several weeks of winter warfare training in northern Norway, above the Artic Circle. It was March, which doesn’t sound like winter, but Bardufoss is surrounded by mountains, it sits at the end of a fjord, actually, way up in the very northern part of Scandinavia where Norway, Sweden, and Finland all come together. It may have been March, but it definitely was still winter.

Since it was March, the days were fairly long, close to the 12 hours a day of daylight that the entire world experiences at the spring equinox. But I was curious what it was like to live in Bardufoss in the winter and summer since I knew it had to have several days of total darkness each winter and an equal number of midnight sun days in the summer: The Artic Circle is the line of latitude, North 66 degrees, 33 minutes and 39 seconds, that experiences one day of total darkness and total daylight per year. Bardufoss was above that at North 69 degrees 3 minutes and 21 seconds, so it had to have at least one full day of light and darkness each year; I didn’t know exactly how many such days they would have two and half degrees or so above the Artic Circle, but guessed three or four.

What really made it interesting to me was that Bardufoss otherwise seemed like a perfectly ordinary Norwegian village. I don’t know what I was expecting exactly, not igloos for sure, but maybe something more like Greenland or Labrador—something very basic and utilitarian. But it wasn’t. There was a pizza shop and a video store and a nice hotel, the one we stayed in, and the houses were very attractive, modern Scandinavian homes. The kids ran around outside after school dressed in standard European/American outdoor gear with colorful Norwegian touches. We could have been in Minnesota. All very prosperous, clean and healthy. Yet these people lived for a long time with very short days, including several non days each year, and also for a long time with almost no nights, including several when the sun never fully set.

So I cornered the handler—the local agent assigned to handle our flight the next day, I think we went on to Ramstein Air Base in Germany—and asked him how many days a year they had of total darkness in Bardufoss.

“Days?” he said.

“Yah, how many days of total darkness do you have here each year?”

“It’s more like months,” he said.

“Months?” I said. But you’re only a few degrees above the Arctic Circle.”

“That may be, he said, “but the mountains block out the light for several hours after sunrise and before sunset, and even with the sun not completely setting we don’t see it here. It’s dark for months here in the winter.”

“But,” I said, “here we are in March with 12 hours of daylight and just a short while ago it was completely dark. That’s a lot of change.”

“Yes,” he said, “the length of the day changes by about 10 minutes every day, longer or shorter. You notice a difference from one day to another.”

“So what’s it like to live like that?” I asked.

“It’s just the way it is,” he said.

We didn’t get into Daylight Saving Time. It didn’t seem appropriate.