Flying story, user notes on Retrograde and the Big Vitamin Battle on the grill this morning…we’ll start with the fun stuff.
See that funny looking instrument off to the right, there?
That’s called an artificial horizon, attitude indicator, and a bunch of other things in aviation.
The idea is simple enough: If you are flying an airplane, and the clouds come along with enough density to block out a view of the ground, you need to know where “Up” is.
Your eyes become useless, the inner ear begins lying to you, and what you think is your “sense of balance” turns out to genuinely suck.
Any second, vertigo will ensue if you don’t have one of these…and that will be that. You’ll either pitch up the nose of the airplane, too far, stall, and come crashing down to the earth.
The artificial horizon gyro platform (vacuum or electric-powered) keeps that from happening if you can read it and “keep coordinated” under instrument conditions.
Or, you’ll drop the nose down and think that you’re flying straight and level when, if you’d look at any number of instruments, you would be able to see instantly that your nose is down, you are increasing airspeed (the air speed indicator is rising), the altimeter is showing you beginning to burn off altitude, and your vertical speed indicator might be suggesting a speed of something line –1,500 feet per minute.
That’s why pilots (at least good ones), are always aware of their instruments.
“How does this relate to Retrograde?” you’re wondering.
When you fly an airplane there’s a checklist you go through, so that when you (not IF) you ever goof up and go inadvertently into instrument conditions, you’ll be able to fly the airplane safely using the “instrument scan” technique.
On serious airplanes, the instruments are arrange in a standard T configuration with this goody top and center of the T. Below is a directional gyro (a gyroscopic compass) and to the left is the air speed while to the right is the altimeter.
So there I was, picking up the old Beechcrate from the Doctor’s office and we were socked in, Instrument Flight Rules (IFR) and not legal to fly instruments, I did a “high speed taxi” down the runway, “accidentally” lifted off to about 10-feet of altitude, and then dropped back down into ground effect, floated along a few feet over the runway with 15-degrees of flaps in, until, almost a mile later, I was coming up on the north end of the runway, so I settled back down onto the main gear, dropped the nose, raised the flaps and was slowed to way under flying speed before the desired turn-off.
I did the “high speed taxi” and “float in ground effect” because of something I figured out: When an airplane comes out of maintenance is one of the highest likelihood of failures you’ll find.
By keeping the first post-maintenance flight as a “high speed taxi” (where, OK, you might lift off into ground-effect, slow flight) you can check everything and be safely within a few feet of ground which seems to me like a good thing. When possible, I do two of these, before going really flying after maintenance, since I’m a natural-born coward.
Back to the Retrograde part. I noticed in the preflight that my main gyro (attitude indicator) was not erecting properly. It was slightly wonky in the preflight.
Since I was going on a “high speed taxi” it was no issue. I know the airplane like a “second skin” and practicing aborted take-offs is a very good exercise.
By the time I was down at the far end of the field, the attitude gyro was (finally) erected, but on taxi (regular low speed type) back to our hangar, Jeremy the Mechanic looked into the vacuum pump and announced it healthy.
“Most likely, it’s because it’s so bloody cold out…but this is how gyros give notice that they are planning to go out. They take too long to spin up in cold weather.”
Conditions were 33-degrees and the airplane was dead cold when this happened, but I concurred with his assessment: Not normal so it’s another squawk that will be addressed.
The mechanic was also impressed with how slow our VG equipped airplane will almost hover in ground effect. He couldn’t believe how slow it was flying with the nose-high configuration.
Since we were talking about Retrograde the other day, I’m not sure how I’d score this one.
Was this the “going away present” for Mercury going out of Retrograde on the 11th?
I haven’t figured out how to score this one: One side of me figures that Mercury just screwed me out of $600-bucks because it will cost around $500 to rebuild the gyro platform and another $100, or so, for the in and out of the airplane…so that was bad in terms of the checkbook.
But, it might actually be “good” in the sense that whenever possible, I like to “trap errors” in tightly controlled conditions, when flying in ground-effect is: Hitting the ground from 3-feet is a lot different than hitting from 3-thousand, and from ground effect, I can have the aircraft stopped and be out of it in 15-seconds, or so.
So the bottom line to this was to wonder if Retrograde is really all that dangerous. After all, if we have great safety habits, maybe Retrograde is just Nature’s way of telling us what we need to be saving money for, next.
More Adventures in Retrograde…
All this Retrograde talk got reader Kate to wondering about how all this ties in with my recent comments on the “workings of time.,…”
“… the fact of quantum physics that all time exists”
Is this by the same physicists who found the Higgs Bosom and then….. didn’t? I have a hard time believing that we know much of anything (hard facts) about the universe. But we must keep looking…. I suppose. Also, why would Mercury retrograde affect you if all time exists?”
You know, this may see absolutely nuts, but let me roll one out here:
We all know that time-space is deformed by the mass of a planet or other large object, right? And, since other planets go around influencing the subtle nature of our depression in time-space, is it possible that at a deep-down psychological level, we have time expectations than can be tricked, just like the inner ear can be tricked into losing track of where up is, that we were talking about in gyros?
And, if this is the case, could that really be what the “retrograde effect” is all about – a minute variation in space-time which is so small that we don’t notice it because it impacts the whole planet?
Isn’t it possible that we all have forward-directed expectations which could increase the number of people making missteps right when Mercury runs the wrong way?
Long-time Peoplenomics subscriber Kerry sure noticed the effect:
Mercury in retrograde huh ? I must be right in the window. Just got my water bill last Friday.
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