Archives for April 2006
The Creme Egg Challenge
I know when I’m beat. After setting a record of eight Creme Eggs in eight minutes back in 1993, nobody has risen to my challenge of ten eggs in ten minutes.
Until now.
Step forward Mr Pantson*, glutton extraordinaire, who’s set new standards in competitive chocolate eating. I think it was harder than he expected, as these pictures prove, but he should stand proud. Key plays in the game highlighted below.
“It’s only ten eggs”: cocky
I get very excited whilst Mrs Pantson taunts with Granola bar
The challenge is underway, at astonishing speed
Onto the fifth egg in three and a half minutes
But with the sixth egg, the sweats begin
And the pace has slowed considerably
Two eggs to finish in two-and-a-half minutes. Can it be done?
Half a minute left. Looking sickly
Seconds after the final gulp: finished with five seconds to spare
Mrs Pantson offers a celebratory chocolate
Seriously, a significant, 1740 calorie, 62g of fat achievement.
*Name changed for internet anonymity
Toilet Humour
Sorting through hundreds of books in preparation for a return to Tooting, I came across my collection of toilet reading – small, flickable items suitable for rapid scanning. Which reminded me how valuable are many of the tips in Esquire’s Things a Man Should Know About Style. For example:
Wearing a suit does not make you a “suit”.
Wearing a bad suit or an incorrectly tailored suit or the same damned striped navy suit every day does.There is no footpain so severe, no dress show so fragile, no commute so arduous as to justfy the sartorial holocause that is wearing sneakers with a suit.
Hats will make a comeback someday.
It is not that day.Women notice shoes.
They also notice nosehair.Never try on shoes in the morning
Far from attesting to vast wealth, a bulging wallet attests to slovenliness.
After all, a really wealthy man lets his accountant settle his bills.Slim fitting clothes are for slim men.
Which means if you’re a thirty-six, you won’t look skinnier shoehorning yourself into a thirty-four. You’ll look skinnier wearing a thirty-six.You are in a car for an hour a day; you are in your clothes from morning to night.
Spend accordingly.“Easy care” is for those who don’t.
When in doubt, ask a woman.
But
To have absolute style is to break absolute rules – sometimes even these.
Quite.
I imagine there’s also a rule that a man should never leave books in his bathroom.
Another Flight Test
(Caution: long post.)
I’ve not been posting much on here recently, partly as I’ve been working and partly as I’ve been preparing for another flight test. Skip to the end: I’ve passed and am a pilot in both hemispheres! For the more aviationally minded, here’s a summary of how the UK skills test went.
I learnt to fly in the mountains of New Zealand, and having returned home I was keen to exercise my newly acquired skills in the skies of South East England. But I realised that things are rather different here – airspace, navigation, traffic and electronic aids – and I didn’t want to ponce around without knowing what I was doing. Plus I’d like to fly to Europe at some stage, which is (probably) not possible in a British aircraft on an NZ licence. So I signed up with the local flying club and had a few lessons with a very helpful instrucutor. Things in the UK PPL syllabus are rather different in parts, but I’ll explain that another day; for now, let me report how the test went. (I have always found reading others’ accounts of their skills tests helpful, so I hope this repays that debt.)
Since I already had 100 hours on a New Zealand licence, I was converting to a JAR licence rather than starting from scratch. This gave the examiner some leeway in how the test was structured, although it still covered all of the basic skills. For example, rather than two long navigation legs, I was asked to plan a flight of about twenty miles to a small grass strip near the south coast. As it turned out, I wouldn’t even get that far…
Waking early on Friday morning, I pulled up the weather, TAFs and METARs, NOTAMs, called up the Royal Flight line, even checked about Danger Areas with Lydd Tower. At this stage there was a beautiful golden sunrise with a layer of stratus moving overhead; a front was forecast to move over Kent that morning, and this was the start of it.
By the time I got to the airfield the sky was claggy, cloud quite low and a spot of drizzle was in the air. Not ideal. Nonetheless I pre-flighted the aircraft and prepared for departure. Once the examiner arrived we talked about the test, who would be in command etc., but didn’t spend too long (well, actually any time) talking about the weather, weight and balance etc. It was straight into the air.
Weather and circumstance meant I hadn’t flown for three and a half weeks, but I was reasonably happy that I could still control the aircraft. A quick discussion of the weather and a theatrical passenger briefing during the walk to the plane, and we were belted in and ready to go, before I realised I’d left the key in the office! At least I got a little exercise jogging around the airfield. Then through the checks, startup, taxi across the muddy field and we were off.
In my opinion I made two massive boobs in the flight test, alongside other smaller errors. The first was in the climb out. Lookout is key in flying – keep the head moving outside, rather than focusing on what’s inside. But after my takeoff the examiner spotted two aircraft ahead of us before I did. I verbally chastised myself and set heading for the coast.
Ideally when navigating I’d like to be able to fly at 2,000′ or more to get a good view of the land around and make sure I’m heading in the right direction – the ‘bigger picture’. Today, however, the cloud was around 1,200′ – 1,400′ which meant I was flying around 1,100′. Dropping the first stage of flap and keeping to 80kts I was glad of a recent lesson when we’d focused on low level navigation in similar conditions; without that, I’d have been much less confident today.
Even in this configuration, I could see the cloud was closing in on the ridge ahead of us. Deciding when to turn back on a skills test is difficult, since although the examiner is theoretically a passenger, he still has the final say. “If this was a normal flight”, I said, “I’d turn back to the airfield. I could fly down that valley but I’d rather not push it”.
“Okay, then divert me to Lydd”. A diversion after 10 miles! Fine by me. I returned to my first waypoint and set a broad heading towards the diversion airfield, meanwhile noting the time and drawing appropriate lines on the map. I gave an ETA (the helpfulness of drawing a wind rose cannot be overstated) and started following the track.
At this stage I’d like to have started using the VOR to help identify position, but to my shame I couldn’t work out how to turn it on in this aircraft! Plus the DME wasn’t working so that made it harder to pick up my position. With a subtle hint I was able to tune in the correct VOR and identify the radial on which I was travelling, if not the distance. My VOR tracking was weak, partly since in the 6,000′ mountains of New Zealand there are no radio aids, so that’s something to work on. Nonetheless we got there in the end and the navigation section of the skills test was over.
The next stage of the flight was the upper air work – turns, stalls etc. With a cloud base of less than 1,500′ this would be difficult, so the examiner elected to climb through the cloud. Whilst I’d done instrument flying ‘under the hood‘, I’d never flown through cloud before, which made this all an unexpected novelty. And a challenge. Onto the instruments, and a gentle climb was underway, occasionally peeking through layers of cloud but mainly staying in the white stuff.
Up we went – 3,000′, 4,000′, 5,000′ – keeping clear of controlled airspace (I assume, the examiner was busy using the only functioning VOR to track our position). I was getting a bit confused by the way the instruments were shaking, something I hadn’t encountered before. We were at full power in the climb – surely carb icing couldn’t explain this? That’s something that only happens at low power settings… but when I mentioned this to the examiner, he set the carb heat to hot and everything cleared up. I had severe icing, but hadn’t cleared it. Oh dear.
Finally we poked free of the cloud at 6,300′ and climbed a little higher to get a decent height for the exercises. I hadn’t flown above the cloud before which made this a stunning sight. Beautiful. But no time to take pictures or admire the view: straight onto advanced turns and stalling. These went okay, as did the slow flight, although recovering from some of the stalls was a little confusing with cloud rather than land below. We were apparantly over the middle of the Channel at this point. I’d end up with a French licence!
Time for my biggest boob, or the ‘only black mark’ as the examiner described it. Spiral dive recoveries are new to me and we’d only done them a couple of times. As the aircraft drops out of a steep turn and starts to dive, one is meant to pull back on the power, gently roll wings level, pull the nose back to the horizon, wait for airspeed to drop back to the normal operating range and then apply power. However, I applied power at the bottom of the dive which meant I briefly overrevved the engine before the examiner pulled back the throttle. Very poor – I got that wrong.
Putting that behind me, we began a descent through cloud again before we had the coast in sight. The examiner asked me to pull back on the power to get us to the coastline. “Is this an engine failure?” I asked. “No, but if you want to make it one – okay, engine failure!”. Shot myself in the foot there… I chose a field right on the nose and the descent was fine, although he made a fair criticism that I should have spent a couple of moments choosing a better field before starting my plan. I missed a huge green one to my left, but the once I chose was fine. At least it was long – I felt spoilt for choice compared with the strips in New Zealand, where there was often only one field available, rather than the acres of cropped land around here.
Another engine failure on the climb out and then back under the grey skies to return to the Headcorn. The examiner oriented me, which was very helpful, and we tracked the railway line to the airfield. Radio calls went fine and I made a straight in approach to Runway 29.
I haven’t done many circuits at Headcorn, nor at any uncontrolled airfield, and this showed. My first landing was poor – too slow – and my circuits were rather misshapen. On the glide approach, he asked, “are you this close in because of the glide?”. “No”, I replied, “I just got it wrong.” Honesty is the best approach, I reckon. The other landings – flapless, glide, normal etc. – were okay although far from my best, with errors ranging from flaring too high to coming in too low. But we made it round. I did feel lucky that there was no crosswind, and that the poor weather had kept the circuit quiet on what might normally have been a very busy day.
Runway vacated, shutdown checks complete, and we were done. “I’m pleased to say that, from what I’ve seen of your flying, I’m going to pass you.” Yes! A relief, nowhere near as exciting as getting my first PPL but still a source of pride (although really, after 110 hours, I should be able to pass). A debrief on the weak points and back to complete the extensive paperwork.
And then an afternoon nap. I have never had such an intense two hours of flying. For those with IMC or IR qualifications – you have my respect. My thanks to those who have trained me recently, who shall remain nameless.
So it was a good Good Friday. So far as I can tell, the pleasure of flying comes in two forms – taking up friends for some fun in the air, and continuing to improve one’s flying skills. I have a short queue of people waiting for a flight, which I shall be happy to provide very soon. After that, well, the challenge will be to continue improving – making sure I fly with both hands on the wheel, so to speak, rather than one arm out the window and the other holding a mobile phone.
Any suggestions on what I should do next, or requests for a flight 
?
Self-censorship
I’ve been looking at how people find my site, and noticed that in the past couple of weeks there’s been a new top search phrase, which might tie in with my recent rise up the Google rankings. You can see it below: I don’t want to use the words again. These are just from the past few days.
They all lead back to the bottom of this post that I made from Nepal. It included a photo of a group of children that we found by the river. Their poverty so close to Kathmandu was a big surprise to me, as was the pleasure they had in seeing their photos on the back of the digital camera, so I thought it was right to put the picture up.
Once I realised there were potentially kiddy-fiddling searches reaching my site (of course I have no way of knowing, but it could be happening) I recropped the image to remove anything below the belt. The original picture remains here where the title will make it harder for deviant searchers to find. I like the picture because of the looks on their faces, staring straight into the camera, and don’t want to have to hide it.
Yet still the searchers reach my site, and Google will keep bringing it up as long as I use those particular words. I don’t care if ugly old men do searches for Thai Girls in Lamai, which was my previous top source of visitors – there are no pictures there and plenty of discussion about prostitution on Samui. But if it’s people looking for young children, well, I’m not happy about that.
Which leads to my dilemma. I don’t want to change what I write or hide what I saw, but also object to my words attracting and pictures pleasing some who might be what we consider unacceptably deviant.
Was I right to trim the original picture? And should I drop the current one?
