Early in the day I wondered why French President François Hollande was so quick to say that he expected no survivors in the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 … after seeing the debris field photos in the afternoon, I understand why (below). Sure seems like a suspicious crash considering the reliability of this Airbus A320 commercial airline workhorse – 6000 built, 3000 fly everyday.
An Airbus A320 flying from Barcelona to Düsseldorf with 150 passengers and crew on board crashed in a remote, hard-to-reach region of the French Alps on Tuesday, in the worst air disaster in France in more than three decades.
The flight operated by Germanwings, a budget airline whose parent company is Deutsche Lufthansa AG, went down near Méolans-Revel, a small village of 300 surrounded by steep mountains.
“The conditions of the accident suggest there are no survivors,” French President François Hollande said in a brief televised address.
Flight 9525 reached an altitude of 38,000 feet at 10:45 a.m., or 44 minutes after takeoff, and a minute later began an eight-minute descent before crashing, Germanwings Chief Executive Thomas Winkelmann said.
While doing a little garage work this past weekend (removed snowblower from the John Deere) I crawled under Brenda’s dented and bruised 270,000 mile 1998 Toyota Rav 4(Links 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6). Besides repairing an exhaust hanger and heat shield, I spotted a leak in the power steering and inspected a couple rusting structural parts. Although I’ve driving cars with far worse cancer, it has been a long time. Nowadays the rust treatment and steel seems to be so much better than anything built in the 60s, 70s and 80s. We are at a point with this little bugger that I really don’t want to put to much work or money back into it. Hmm?
I spent a few minutes updating and cleaning up some of the tags on MyDesultoryBlog this past weekend … more of a maintenance thing than anything essential. Part of the reason was that I am still learning about Blogsy as a blog writing and editing tool, but also just to clean things up.
I realized that the amateur radio propagation daily graphic wasn't something I or any readers really needed in a sidebar and that a tag cloud might be more useful. When adding it, I was also surprised to see a few of the “larger” words highlighted and was also disappointed when I realized how many early posts had missing “categories” and “tags” as they were lost during an update and server move years ago.
🙁
Last year about this time I had mentally decided that Brenda and I would be cruising the Bahamas aboard our sailboaat Encore in March 2015, but as “life happens” those dreams were not meant to be. As the year progressed, both of our surviving parents had health concerns requiring more of our attention, Encore started to show her age and had a few mechanical issues needing my attention and those pesky bills continued to keep us in need of a job. Our (my) plans were modified and instead of a month cruising the Bahamas we rerouted to the Florida Keys, then again to Miami and Biscayne Bay for a couple weeks and eventually nothing. Probably the most disappointed was my son Taylor who was looking forward to spending some time someplace other than frozen North Dakota in late winter (we’ll still do something this spring, just not as exciting).
Disappointed but glad not to be cruising with known mechanical problems, I made the most of a couple stretched out boat “work” weekends in Florida and “should” just about have the diesel back in running order. The last fix will be to add a thin copper washer to the number 3 injector on the high hour Volvo (unknown hours). Unfortunately an epoxy fix was attempted prior to our owning the boat and went unnoticed until it failed and began leaking … causing low compression, a loss of power and a little puff of smoke to enter the engine compartment. While it still ran, it wasn’t smooth or with the power needed in some situations and eventually coked up the injector making it’s removal from the head difficult. Thankful a diesel mechanic, Tim LaValley, winters in Florida and travels to the area in his RV each year with some of his tools. With Tim’s knowledge and penance for saving a buck, he suggested instead of removing the headand having a machine shop bore and press out the existing copper sleeve and install a new one (major engine work), that we try cleaning and placing a thin copper washer to see if it seals the leak (yet to be known). I’m crossing my fingers and hoping this fix will complete the diesel updates for 2015.
For now, I’ll follow my cruising friends the Judy and Mark Handley aboard Windbird (emails in above photo) who are in the Bahamas in between Mark’s chemotherapy treatments. They are an amazing couple making the absolute best of their challenging situation. So onto my 2016 dreaming and planning.
If you do plan a trip on the Amazon River, you’ve probably though about the wildlife … especially the ferocious insects, dangerous reptiles and famous fish … like the Piranha. They inhabit the neotropical freshwater rivers of northern South America, including the countries of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. According to the article posted in Wikipedia, there are over 20 species. Some larger, like the solitary Black or Redeye Piranha, others a bit smaller who feed in schools like the better known Red Bellied Piranha. Hmm … feeding in schools? Yikes!
One of our resident and noisy Mallard ducks woke me up early this morning. He thinks it is time for us to uncover the pool so he can take his partner for a swim as in years past (Link one and two). It’s still early since snow is still being seen across our latitude.
Although cloud based apps aren’t for everyone, they have made inroads over the past few years. Googles’ online Docs, Sheets and Slides have been slowly improving and many other players have entered the foray including Microsoft with their Office Online.
It has been 6 years and 200,000+ miles (time has zipped by) since I made an emergency battery replacement in my 2006 Honda Pilot while driving to Cleveland … and it happened again. I pulled off the highway and when I tried to start the car all that I heard was a “click, click, click.” I had thought the compressor/jump starter battery pack in the back of my car was fully charged, but it looks as if that battery is dead too. Thankfully a good Samaritan gave me a jump start which was good enough to get me to a Wallmartonce again. Thankfully they weren't busy and even gave me a few dollars credit from the pro-rated life for my 6 year old battery. All in all the detour only cost me about an hours and $73.00 … and I'm not even a fan of Walmart (may have to change that).
I received a few long overdue updates items from our EAA chapter’s president for the interior pages of the EAA284 chapter website on Wednesday and so before forgetting I jumped right on it. We are continuing to keep the EAA284.org domain, but opt to use WordPress.com to host because it is free. Still there are limitations to the “free” version and those quirks had me updating a old theme which in turn created way more work than expected. Thankfully it is a relatively simple site … besides the protected pages and forms for email, it is straight forward.
We’ve also talked about switching webmasters, seen too many ambitious, good intentioned members start strong and leave a “static” mess. I’d prefer keeping it simple as an archive style bulletin board rather than too many hour of work each month. In our case we’ll links to each builder, pilot or personal Facebook site and let them manage their own pages. THe new theme looks “ok” for now, but on an old PC looks a little washed out??? I’m sure the links will go stale again anyway and since we really don’t generate heavy traffic, it will serve its purpose.
If you are an EAA member and would like access to the builders section, send me an email and I’ll get you a passcode for members section which has contact information and links.
The future of transportation will likely include electric power even if automotive purist cringe at the thought of their beloved internal combustion engines losing ground. I’m as old school as the next car-lover, but can’t deny hybrid vehicles and EVs have come a long way in the past decade; the future will no doubt see more. Still, we are a long way from self-charging, be it solar power, fuel cells or induction strips built in to our highways.
Goodyear engineers have been doing their part to innovate too. Low rolling resistant tires squeeze a few more miles out of a gallon or a “charge” and have even created a way for tires to charge a battery.
The new concept tire, the BHO3, uses piezoelectricity. This is the charge that builds up in certain materials when they are squeezed … think about a tire being deformed as it rolls down the road. At this point it is a very small amount of electricity, but together with thermoelectricity from temperature differentials, advanced tires can add to the the power being produced by regenerative brakes and vehicle solar paint or panels can return to a vehicles power pack. Goodyear researchers are focused on what materials do the best job of producing power and how to incorporate something like quartz, ceramics and salts into the tire as well as thermoelectric materials such as bismuth telluride and tin selenide. According to the comments I’ve read, these high tech tires are probably 10 to 15 years away.
