I’m in the middle of Walter Isaacson’s new book on Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna. She co-founded CRISPR which is an acronym for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. Imagine having the tools to make humans immune to viruses or other diseases. We could eliminate baldness. And glasses. And hearing aids. And maybe cancer. All sorts…
I heard a weathercaster dig up the old “In like a lion, out like a lamb” line recently in reference to the weather in March. As I write this we don’t know if this year’s “out” will be a lamb or something more fierce. But it got me thinking about airplanes named for animals. We’ve…
This is part two of an article about sticky valves. Part one is here. The cliffhanger was a Cessna 182 with a wobbly trace in EGT 4 for the first 14 mins of ground ops. Your homework was to decide if it was a sticky valve or something else. Here’s the whole flight. One of…
It has been a while since we took a look at sticky valves. I’m not going to write about why valves stick and how to keep it from happening, although I have a great resource for that. Earlier this year Mike Busch wrote an article for AOPA Pilot called Why Valves Stick. And here’s a…
Recently a client submitted engine data with an erratic EGT trace. It always makes sense to check the connection first, but in this case it looked like a failing probe. When we reported this, he said that he suspected it failed because he hadn’t been flying much lately because of the virus. Then he asked…
I live in California. I moved here from Chicago in 1983. It’s probably safe to say that Californians think about earthquakes every day. Most days it’s a fleeting thought then you go about your life. But when you feel a rumble it becomes top of mind again. I’ve been part of conversations that began in…
I’ll go out on a limb and say that priming the engine is not a precise science. Every POH has instructions, but experience often suggests that some engines like a little more and some a little less. What happens to the excess fuel if the pilot over-primes? Cylinder manufacturers thought of that and included sniffle…
Thanks to the virus, I think we’re all logging more flight simulator time lately. I was talking with a game-designer friend about sims and haptics. To save some of you running to the dictionary, haptics are kinesthetic cues given by electronic devices. Like when your phone buzzes if the ringer is muted. Or when the…
Maybe it’s just a coincidence that we use the same word for a piece of silicone that directs cooling air over an aircraft engine – and a state of bewilderment. In the world of sound it’s also used to describe the box that contains a speaker. Maybe it’s just cruel irony at work. As the Danish…
I was talking with a friend recently and he said “I understand it intellectually, but I’m not sure I’ll ever grok it”. I haven’t heard that word in years, maybe as far back as reading Heinlein in high school. (I was more of an Asimov fan in those days.) But it got me thinking about…