Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Drinking and flying
My dad bought Jake Microsquash’s Flight Simulator X for Hanukkah. I suspect Jake wanted a flight simulator because of a recent episode of Mythbusters in which Jamie and Adam tested out the myth that an untrained airplane passenger could land a 747 by being “talked down” by an air traffic controller. (Answer: kind of, sort of.) Jake has no intention of taking the tutorials. He’s going to dive right into it and see whether he, too, can land a jumbo jet with no prior flight experience.
Jake’s father, on the other hand, believes you should take advantage of the tutorials. But why can’t I manage to solve the first tutorial?
I discovered this new beer I like: Pyramid Apricot Weizen. It really does taste like apricots. And so I’m sipping my beer, wondering if a joystick would make this process easier. Use the arrow keys, the tutorial says. But all I can do is climb or descend — how do I level out? And where’s my altimeter, where’s my speedometer? Is it even called a speedometer? And why do I keep crashing?
I need more beer. Clearly.
Now, I’m climbing, leveling out. This is good. I shot past all the hoops the tutorial wanted me to fly through (fuck it — if they’re not flaming, I ain’t bothering), banked to the left, executed a well controlled 180, and took her in for a landing. The voice-over said, “It looks like you’re taking a tour! Land anywhere to complete the tutorial.”
It’s high desert, Edwards Air Force Base, not a rock, cactus, or California desert tortoise in sight. It’s true, I really ought to be able to land it anywhere. (Take another drink, Doug, to work up the courage.) And as I’m coasting in for my landing, I get the blue screen of death. WTF?
This computer must like the blue screen of death. It shares it with us so frequently.
Well, we’re home, really and truly home, and this is a good thing, even if I can’t manage to get past the first tutorial. Tomorrow, I’ll be operating. It’s a tonsil day. And don’t worry — I’ll be stopping at one beer tonight.
D.
Is it even called a speedometer?
“Airspeed indicator”, IIRC. And then you take your airspeed, current weather conditions like windspeed, and you use a flight
confusercomputer to get your ground speed.Of course I took Air Studies when I was, what, fifteen years old, so my memory might be a little rusty…
I have successfully completed the first tutorial. In the second tutorial, however, they’ve thrown in a crosswind which makes it impossible to stay on course. The bastards! And now I’m going to be crashing planes in my head all night long . . .
Yes, airspeed indicator. Indicated airspeed is a tricky number. Close to the ground, it will be close to the actual relative velocity of the air molecules hurtling past your aircraft, but as you go higher it departs, and TAS is more than IAS by a greater and greater margin.
The difference between TAS and IAS is also affected by current pressure and temperature.
You’ll find controlling the aircraft much easier with a joystick.
Oh, and I should point out that the aircraft in the picture is a B-25 Mitchell, the type on which my father was a navigator/bomb-aimer in WWII.
Joystick. Check. And since Jake seems to like the program too, I should get it sooner rather than later.
Odd that I would just happen to choose that photo, eh?
Many moons ago, I had a flight simulator program. Maybe it was one of the originals. That was back in the days when computer monitors were green screens. Sky, water, ground, yeah, they all pretty much look alike on a green screen…
Back in grad school, we had a Macintosh program — Apache? Something like that. It was a helicopter sim, and you flew it past buildings which were line drawings, pretty much. It was still a blast.
Of course, flying the Cessna is so much easier! I’ve been flying MS for years but landing the big jets is still pretty tough. And the helicopters – what strange creatures they are…
I must amend my initial assertion. That’s a B-24 Liberator, not a B-25. It has 4 engines.
That’s an interesting photograph. I initially thought that the white streak on the belly of the aircraft was crash damage, but on closer inspection it looks like censorship: somebody has applied a streak of black on the negative, blacking (or whiting) out details aft of the bomb bay. The ball turret appears to be missing, although it might simply be retracted and not visible.
The B-24 was a tricycle, not a tail-dragger, so clearly what happened was that they set down in a field and made a successful landing, everything going smoothly until they reached the edge of the field, a ditch or something, where the front wheel caught and collapsed. Everyone probably walked away from the crash.
The bomb bay doors are open, so either the aircraft came down during a bombing run, or more likely, they jettisoned the bombload just before the off-field landing, a wise precaution. Or it could be possible that the bomb bay doors stuck open after the bombing run, and the increased drag caused the aircraft to run out of fuel over France, say. The aircraft appears to have come in on a controlled off-field landing, and a good one, so that makes some sense.
Over to the right, there is a man in what appears to be a German staff officer’s uniform. So the aircraft is almost certainly not near any front lines, but is in territory controlled by the German army.
I don’t recall there being any structure on a standard B-24 aft of the ball turret, so I believe that whatever is there and is blacked out was some sort of special mechanism.
Conclusion: this is a German army photograph, taken of an American bomber that force landed due to either a mechanical problem or running out of fuel, probably in France in ’43 or ’44. It was on some sort of special mission.
Where did you find the photo? I’m curious now.
Here you go. Scroll down a ways to find the story. My day is about to start, so I don’t have time right now to check whether you’ve nailed the interpretation or not.
Well, I was fairly close. The white is actually a parachute, not a censor’s pen, and the damage to the aircraft that forced it down is on the port wingtip, so you can’t see it. I was right about the other stuff.