I have written about this before, but not in two years, and with lots of new clients and a couple of new Savvy services in that time, it seemed like a good time for a biennial review. The comedians are fond of saying, “Timing is everything.” I think the quality of the material is pretty…
The US stock market volatility index is sometimes called the fear index. Usually when the VIX is spiking to new highs, investors are bailing out and other indexes are tumbling. We had one of these events last last year – after a jittery October and November, December saw a “blow-off” top, and when the last…
I grew up in a river town – Cincinnati – then moved to a lake town – Chicago – and then to an ocean town – Encinitas, CA just north of San Diego. I just started listening to David McCullough’s new book The Pioneers and was happy to hear it begin on the banks of…
These days it’s call throwing shade. When I came up, good jazz musicians had a nice-but-direct way of telling wanna be jazz musicians that they weren’t up to the task – “don’t give up your day gig.” Dr. Graeme Smart has a day gig – he’s the Principal Scientist for New Zealand’s National Institute of…
I have been flying my Bellanca Viking for 29 years now. I have had two unexplained events – one electrical and one combustion – both in day VMC. I was alone for both. The electrical event was on approach to a central California airport with a tower. I had deployed the first notch of flaps…
Phoebe Snow’s recording of “No Regrets” is on one of my playlists, and I can’t hear the song without thinking of the Milky Way ad where the distracted tattoo artist gives her customer something to – uh, regert. Sometimes engine data will give us something that obvious, but more often we have to dig a…
They say what goes around comes around. As the new year arrived and I began my 5th year of writing these Puzzlers, I wondered what I could do to keep things interesting and informative. You the reader and I, acting as your agent scrubbing the uploaded data for good candidates, are at the mercy of…
If zero tolerance means we won’t tolerate anything but a zero, then I guess zero zero tolerance means we won’t tolerate any zeros. Usually a zero on an engine data monitor isn’t a good thing unless it has an integer or a decimal point in front of it. 40, 300, 2700, 14.0 – all ok.…
In most of the Northern Hemisphere it’s the time of year to think about icing. If your airplane is certified and equipped for FIKI – flight into known icing – an encounter with ice isn’t the emergency that it is for the rest of us. When an engine data probe fails in flight, most of…
I never had the guts to do it, but I sure thought about it more than once. Maybe you’ve done it or thought about it. You know – you’re in a mandatory meeting about some new company policy or initiative and the presenter is droning on from a pamphlet – or worse, a PowerPoint that…