Channeling Steve Fossett

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Because I’m a pilot, I often get asked to speculate on the causes of plane crashes where there’s not enough evidence to know for sure what really happened. Such is the case with Steve Fossett where I get periodic requests to give my opinion about what happened in his mysterious disappearance in a borrowed airplane. Just for those who haven’t been paying attention, Steve Fossett was a wealthy adventurer who set numerous aviation records including traveling around the world solo in a balloon as well as flying an airplane solo without refueling around the world. He took off on a sightseeing flight from Barron Hilton’s Ranch in Nevada last September and was never seen again. Just a few weeks ago, more than a year after he disappeared, some of his personal effects were found by a hiker about 80 miles from the ranch where he had departed. Shortly after that, the crash site was discovered in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

A recent Avweb newsletter linked a set of pictures on Flickr posted by one of the SAR team members who helped clean up Steve Fossett’s crash site. There are about 10 pictures in the middle that show parts of the plane that start right around the one with the newspaper clipping image.

What I found interesting was the caption on the photo 43 that mentioned that the plane impacted the ground climbing at about a 10 degree angle on a slope that was at a 20 degree angle leading me to think that Fossett may have had a problem with the airplane and so he tried to land by attempting to climb uphill and get the aircraft to stall right around the time it contacted the ground. A ‘roll out’, if you want to call it that, on a 20 degree slope uphill would be pretty short. However, there were a lot of rocks and trees and so it appears that the plane broke apart on landing and then was consumed by fire. To make that maneuver work, you would have to do it ‘just right’.

At an EAA chapter meeting last night, someone mentioned that Bob Hoover performed this maneuver where he knew he was going to crash and so he did it going up hill and he and his passengers walked away from it. Here’s that story, excerpted from my (autographed) copy of Bob Hoover’s autobiographical book “Forever Flying”.

One of the more frightening experiences I’ve had occurred after an air show in 1989 at San Diego. It was held at Brown Field, which is located just a few miles from the Mexican border.

I had completed my performances in the P-51 and the Shrike Commander. I told the line boy who drove the fuel truck to service the Shrike quickly so I could leave right after the show was completed.

The young man asked how much fuel I needed. I told him I wanted precisely sixty gallons. I added, “That’s hundred octane.”

After my performance, I went to the manager’s office, where he received a phone call from the same young man. The manager told me the boy wanted to know if 100 LL (low lead) was all right for my airplane. I told him it was. He relayed the message.

Normally I like to be present when the airplane is being serviced, but I was held up when I came out of the airport manager’s office. By the time I got to the airplane, the truck was pulling away. I said, “Fueling done?” The boy replied, “Yes, sir. It was sixty gallons precisely.”

When I taxied out, probably at least a hundred airplanes were waiting for takeoff. But as soon as I called in, the tower said, “Mr. Hoover, we want you to taxi to the head of the line.”

I did not like to leapfrog ahead of other pilots. However, since time was scarce that day for me and my two passengers, I accepted the tower’s kind offer.

The takeoff was smooth. Everything was normal and checked out perfectly. All of a sudden, at about three hundred feet, I realized I didn’t have any power in the Shrike. I started losing airspeed.

I dumped the nose, but I couldn’t understand what was happening. Everything checked out. The manifold pressure was right where it was supposed to be. The rpm were at the right setting. The fuel pressure and oil pressure were in good shape. Even though the gauges indicated that nothing was wrong, I knew something was. I started looking for a place to land. That would not be easy.

Brown Field is located on a plateau. To the north where I was headed, there were deep ravines. I could try to recover and head back to the airport, but I knew I wouldn’t make it.

My two passengers tried to remain calm, but they were obviously frightened. Both thought we were going to crash and die. “Mr. Hoover,” they asked more than once, “are we going to make it?” I assured them we would.

As I have mentioned before, each time potential disaster strikes, I rely on my experience of anticipating trouble to help me out. I had flown the P-51 cross-country for many years. I’d often considered what might happen if I had to put it down over the Rockies.

Recalling those thoughts, I dumped the nose of the Shrike. I kept my best glide speed until I reached the very end of the ravine. Landing in the bottom of the canyon meant no survival. Our only chance was to pull up and land on the side of the ravine.

As my airspeed bled off, I dropped the landing gear and flaps. I wanted to be at a minimum forward speed on impact. The landing gear would cushion the impact along with the tires and struts before the impact hit us square on.

I was down in a V-shaped ravine. A thousand feet wide at the top, it narrowed down to nothing at the bottom. I went right to the bottom to maintain the best glide speed. I then pulled the plane up and landed into the side of the ravine. I didn’t travel very far at all before I hit a rock pile that caved in the nose. The instrument panel was torn out of its mounts and dropped down on my shins.

Neither of my passengers was hurt, but there was one fatality. We ran over a rattlesnake with the belly of the airplane when the gear tore out from under it.

We sat there awaiting rescue. I considered what had caused the lack of power. Only one thing was possible: the plane had been serviced with jet fuel instead of gasoline.

To confirm my suspicions, I went around to the side of the airplane and opened the drain valve. I leaned down and took a whiff. Sure enough, it was jet fuel.
My mind flashed at once to the young man I had asked to service the airplane. He must have known by then what had happened as I had informed the tower of the emergency.

Within minutes, rescue helicopters were on the scene. My passengers and I climbed up the ravine and were transported back to Brown Field.

After making sure the Shrike would be protected from theft, I asked, “Where is the line boy who serviced the plane?”

Everyone seemed reluctant to tell me, apparently afraid that I wanted to chew him out or be unkind to him. Finally, someone said, “He’s outside.”

An article in the Fullerton (Calif.) News-Tribune the next day quoted me regarding what happened next:

When I got back to the field, I saw the boy standing by the fence with tears in his eyes.

I went over and put my arm around him and said, “There isn’t a man alive who hasn’t made a mistake. But I’m positive you’ll never make this mistake again. That’s why I want to make sure that you’re the only one to refuel my plane tomorrow. I won’t let anyone else on the field touch it.”

Just as I said, I had the boy refuel my P-51 for the final two days of the air show. Needless to say, there were no further incidents.
Shortly after that, I received a wonderful letter from a doctor in Palos Verdes named William Snow.

He wrote:
I wanted you to know that I was quite touched by the apparent casual way in which you trea
ted your unfortunate incident. Thank goodness it was just that and nothing more! However, what really impressed me was your genuine concern for the young man who had serviced your plane.

It is rare to find a person who has just experienced such a close brush with death and yet feels such compassion for his fellow man. God surely must be your copilot!

I could have just cut off that excerpt at the part where Hoover crashed, but I was so impressed by how he treated the line boy, that I’m sure you all wanted to hear how it ended.

Another interesting photo is of the Google Earth map below that shows where the shirt and ID were found. They appear to be about .7 miles from the wreckage. I can only assume that those items may have gotten carried away by animals.

The NTSB report has very few details so far, but I’m sure that it will accumulate more details about the crash as they start to examine the wreckage.

We may never know what happened, but it’s obvious a fire ensued after the crash. Had the fire started while he was flying? If so, was he attempting to get the airplane on the ground as quickly as possible using the famed Hoover maneuver? We may never know, but I am eager to see what the NTSB has to say about it after they spend some time examining the wreckage.

The Kindle

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My friend Peter cares deeply about climate change and so he includes a line at the bottom of all his emails that admonish the reader:

Please consider the environment before printing this document.

As a consultant to HP and prior to that, an HP employee for 24 years, I worry about the prospect of people no longer printing out documents on paper and depriving HP of the profits that come from selling ink cartridges. But I can certainly understand Peter’s sentiment since, with the exception of photos, much of what’s printed ends up as trash a short time later. The same happens with newspapers and magazines. For me, books create another problem. I tend to hang on to many of my books after I’ve read them just in case I want to re-read them or refer to them in the future and this requires finding space to store them all. And it doesn’t help that I read books on an intermittent basis, sometimes abandoning a book half way through only to pick it up a few months later to finish it and then give it its rightful place in my ever-growing number of bookshelves and boxes. It’s not unusual for me to read several books at the same time. This drives my wife crazy in her efforts to keep our house neat and orderly. So I’ve long hoped for the day when I could have books that take up no space and yet are instantly accessible whenever the mood struck to read one of them. In short, I needed a practical electronic book reader.

E-book readers are not a new idea, but like many nascent technologies, they appeared on the scene well in advance of cost effective technology or even a convenient way to purchase content that would have allowed them to compete favorably with traditional books. In the past year, Amazon.com launched what is arguably the first mass-marketed e-book reader called the Kindle. The Kindle appears to have achieved a level of success that had eluded previous e-book reader products, including several competent designs from well established companies like Sony.

A few essential features for an e-book reader are ease-of-use, portability, and long battery life. Thanks to the introduction of high resolution e-ink displays, which draw very little power, a new generation of e-book readers has emerged that has allowed the e-book a better chance to gain market acceptance.

Another important e-book feature that had been lacking previously was the ease of content acquisition. Amazon has done a great job in this area thanks to their significant offering of more than 140,000 e-book titles in addition to many popular magazines and newspaper subscriptions. But the biggest breakthrough for Kindle, in comparison to its competitors, has been the content acquisition and delivery method. Amazon decided to take on the considerable challenge of installing a cellular modem in each Kindle. The logistics of this undertaking are significant. By partnering with Sprint, Amazon can get wireless data coverage over most of the U.S. which alleviates the need for a customer to install any software on a PC or even physically connect the device to a PC to periodically load content on to the Kindle (although it is still an option). The books and magazines can be purchased directly from and delivered to the Kindle, lending considerable temptation for customers to buy books on impulse. Kindle owners are even able to download significant samples of books that include a ‘buy it now’ button at the end of the sample thus eliminating much of the friction of an e-book acquisition. After all, who wants to stop reading a book after you’ve already read the first 20 pages and can’t wait to see what happens next?

I’ve downloaded books previously and attempted to read them on my laptop or PC but I found it difficult. Part of the problem was that I wanted to take the book with me, from room to room, or with me when I traveled. That’s not easy to do with a laptop computer because it’s awkward and heavy to carry around a notebook computer for reading. It also takes a while to boot, and with each program I install on the laptop, the boot process slows down even more. Secondly, the battery life on my notebook is only 100 minutes, hardly enough time to make it a convenient reading device. All rechargable batteries lose capacity as they age. And it costs about $120 for a new battery pack. So, like many others, I tend to live with this continually decreasing battery life rather than replace the battery every year. But the biggest downside of reading something like a downloaded book on a laptop has been that there was no easy way to keep my place in the book. Each time I rebooted the computer, I needed to re-find my place in the book. That’s just not acceptable. Granted, things are getting better with software e-readers, but the other disadvantages of laptop computers as e-book readers are just too hard to overcome.

E-book readers have done a lot to get around these problems. The Kindle will last for several days of reading on a charged battery that is 1/10 the size of a typical laptop battery (6 Wh vs 60 Wh). And when the battery loses its capacity over its life, Amazon offers a replacement battery for $20. I can change the battery myself, something that I can’t do very easily with my iPod. Instead, Apple recommends I return their products to a service center at considerable inconvenience and significant expense to replace the battery. So I congratulate Amazon for making the Kindle battery easy to replace and offering it at a reasonable price.

After using the Kindle nearly every day for a few weeks, I like it more and more, particularly the ease of acquiring new books at a reduced cost over conventional books. Best of all, these e-books take up no space around the house. The only downside is that I can’t borrow or lend the Kindle books like I can with a physical book. And sharing the Kindle with Terri is not easy since only one person can use it at a time. Amazon allows up to 5 Kindles on a single account that would all have access to my growing e-book library, but that would be expensive. I guess that’s the downside of digital media, it’s so easy to copy that if they don’t protect it by locking it to each customer, then no one will pay for it. In some ways, that’s more fair to the author too, since a book that gets passed around means that there is less compensation for the author per book. But unlike physical books, you can get free books that are out of of copyright. There are about 20,000 books, including many classics, available for free on feedbooks.com in a ‘mobi’ format which is compatible with Kindle.

I couldn’t wait to tell Peter about my Kindle because I thought he’d be interested in a ‘green’ reading device which will save a few trees. Also, it consumes so little energy that I can recharge it with a small solar panel. But instead, he seemed somewhat suspicious of the newfangled gadget and asked me how it ‘felt’ and how it ‘smelled’ indicating that these are important sensory experiences when it comes to reading books. Terri is equally suspicious and cannot imagine replacing her paperbacks with this gadget. She’s agreed to run an experiment by reading a book of her choosing on it. However, her patience for new technology is limited and for her to be pleased with it, it would have to be superior in every way to a paper book, so I’m not holding out much hope that she’ll become an e-book convert.

I generally don’t buy the first generation of a new technology product. In fact, I had planned to wait for Amazon to offer a second generation Kindle prior to getting one, figuring that it would have many improvements over the first genera
tion. But after learning that the Kindle design would not be refreshed this year, I decided to get one. It also helped by getting an offer for a $100 discount through a credit card promotion Amazon offered, so I got one for $259. I see they are back up to $359. If I continue at the rate I’ve been buying books, Amazon should make a good profit from me. I’ve already read 6 books in 3 weeks, 2 free ones and 4 that I purchased from Amazon. I also converted several large 100+ page industry reports to a Kindle-compatible format and read them on a plane trip to California. So I’ve really been getting a lot of use out of it.

I think that the e-book reader market shows great potential and after a few false starts it just may be poised to catch on and allow people do their daily reading without killing as many trees in the process.

National Renewable Energy Lab visit

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A few weeks ago I visited the National Renewable Energy Lab open house in Golden, CO with a few other members of the Northern Colorado Clean Energy Network. I’d wanted to see this facility for some time, and figured that an open house on a Saturday would allow some of our members who normally are unable to attend our energy tours during the week to join us. As it turned out, we only had 4 members of our group show up. Despite the low turnout, we had a good time carpooling there and back because we got to chat for a few hours about renewable energy topics.

The NREL has a visitor’s center and there was a presentation in progress when we arrived about how to do an energy audit on one’s home. Several of us had just been to an NCRES presentation on this topic recently so we did not sit down to listen to the presentation. The presentation took up much of the visitor’s center display area, making it impossible to talk without disrupting the presentation so our ability to wander around inside was a bit limited.

The exhibits were very nicely constructed and a docent explained the various renewable energy programs underway and the purpose of the various buildings on the campus. There are numerous projects going on all over the facility, but unfortunately they are off-limits for visitors. Only the visitor’s center is accessible. I had expected this to be the case, and so I tried to gather some information about what would be necessary to get a tour of the actual laboratories in the hope that some future visit would allow us to get better access to what’s going on in the labs. I can see that it will be a challenge as they are not set up to handle tours of the actual labs.

The docent who was our guide had spent most of his career in the power field, and I had a long discussion with him about transmission of power over high voltage DC lines. Transmitting power over DC lines is counter-intuitive for most engineers who were taught that you can only transmit utility scale power on AC lines. But thanks to advances in high power semiconductor components to handle utility scale power, DC power transmission lines are becoming more common to deliver electrical power long distances and to help isolate grids through interties. This method of transmitting power will become more important in the future as some of the best potential sources of renewable power generation such as wind and solar tend to be far removed from population centers. HVDC power transmission has the advantage of being able to isolate the grids so that the need to control the phase of the AC power over long distances is not required. The largest DC line in the U.S. is the Pacific DC Intertie which takes hydroelectric power from the Columbia River in Washington State and delivers it to customers in the Los Angeles area.

My favorite Visitor’s Center exhibit was the section of the GE 37-meter wind turbine blade. I’ve seen these blades up close during our Ponnequin Wind Farm tour, but was curious about the materials of construction. With the section exposed, I saw that the materials looked identical to those used in my LongEZ and Cozy. They consisted of wood, foam, fiberglass, and epoxy albeit on a much larger scale that what is used in my planes.

Me and Ed Miccio standing next to the GE blade section

You can see that the spar and caps are very thick on these blades.


The Cozy uses the same materials and construction techniques as the wind turbine blades.

The NREL visitor’s center is open from 9-5 Monday through Friday and I’d highly recommend that if you ever find yourself in the vicinity of I-70 at exit 263, you should stop by for a short visit and self-guided tour.

Midnight Engineer’s Forum

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Each year I attend a conference in Denver that grew out of a magazine called ‘Midnight Engineering‘. The magazine was dedicated to engineers that loved the work so much they could be found doing it at all hours, even in their spare time, hence the magazine’s name. Many of the readers were entrepreneurial types engaged in moonlighting activities. A yearly conference called Entcon was started that became like a ‘real-time version of the magazine’. It was a great networking event with lots of interesting people that kicked off with skiing in the Rocky Mountains followed by a weekend of presentations and informal networking sessions.

The magazine is out of print, but a conference which is now called Entconnect is still going on each year in Denver around the last week of March.

We don’t get a chance to talk much with the other conference participants throughout the year, so I’ve put together a forum on Yahoo Groups. If discussions about entrepreneurship, tech startups, and free agent engineering appeal to you, perhaps you’d like to join the group.