Hangar Chat

This starts from my basic understanding that time slows down as gravity increases. Gravity is "caused by?" mass. This must mean that time is faster where there is less gravity which leads me to think that somewhere way out there in deep space there is a point at which all gravitational forces are equal and it makes me wonder what happens to time in the absence of gravity? Does time exist in the absence of gravity? and my second question relates to statements like "the universe is 13 billion years old". But a year is a quantity of time and if time is much faster in one place and much slower in another and possibly non existent in yet another, how can we sa…

Oh dear. Nakuka lab module went a bit bonkers after docking and started firing its thrusters, sending the ISS out of its proper orientation by 45 degrees. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/30/russia-rocket-mishap-briefly-nudges-international-space-station-out-of-position

The Fort Point Vandal In 1853, three years after Californian attained statehood, the United States Army began the construction of Fort Point, a large three story red brick fort that today sits directly under and blends in well with the Golden Gate Bridge. Lee and I passed by it many times in our forays around the Presidio. One of our favorite places were the huge concrete coastal gun emplacements that faced the Pacific Ocean and at one time were the bases for huge guns that would have fired against enemy ships had they tried to approach the Golden Gate. Today they were empty, but the tiered platforms were fun to play around and spurred our imaginations of what…

Given that sea level rise is going to be a huge issue, with the US alone having to spend $400 billion on defences by 2040, the notion of cities on the ocean seems a great idea. I love this seament, stick a metal bar in the ocean and the minerals form around it. OTEC power generation sounds great too.

The 152, 172 etc. have mixture levers. Isn't this necessary at high altitudes? How does the Savage Cub get around it?

I am posting two stories this weekend. I had to post this one before I forgot. Last evening we went to a friends house after dinner. They had invited us for desert. After we ate the desert we sat around in the living room just talking. After desert their two sons disappeared. I asked where they were and their Mom said they were upstairs in their rooms playing video games. Some day your graandids or great grandkids are going to ask you, "What video games did you play when you were a kid grampa?" "We didn't have video games when I was your age Jimmy." "Really? What did you do?" Our Toys Lee and I always had plenty of toys. We started…

A few years back my wife and I celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary in Hawaii. We spent two weeks at the Mauna Kea resort on the big island and enjoyed every minute of it. When I mentioned to our neighbor where we were going he strongly encouraged us to drive up to the top of the mountain where the views of the sky are spectacular - maybe even the best on earth. And we did as he suggested. When we returned from our trip the neighbor asked me if we'd made it to the top of the mountain to see the stars. I replied that, yes, we had but, unfortunately, only a single star was visible. He immediately launched into a graduate-level explanation (he has a degree in astroph…

This one is rather short. The names are real because it is an historic event that you may have heard about. I've seen it depicted in documentaries and movies like The Birdman of Alcatraz. Tragedy Peter Miller's father was a guard at Alcatraz. Peter lived on that little island in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Each morning he would board the launch that would bring him to the pier at the foot of Van Ness Avenue. He would ride the bus up Van Ness to Broadway, get off, cross the street, and walk the half block to Saint Brigid's. Peter was the only one in our class who lived on Alcatraz. Peter was not in our 'gang', but he was one of my friends. …

Cross-Community Panel Discussion: The Future of At-Home Flight Simulation - YouTube Interesting!

My mom just turned 80. She's had congestive heart failure for a while now. (she's had a great many health problems along the way). She randomly gets extremely tired and, if she's out in public(mostly), an ambulance is called. The heart doctor either replaced or repaired a valve a while back and not too long ago we thought they might need to do that again but the doctor has basically said that nothing can be done. The main muscle of her heart is working less and less over time. Her 'heart function' was at 35% in January and just the other day (sh'es in the hospital now), they said it was down to 20%. I'm finding it hard to digest. I just needed to w…

Hadn't seen this posted but two incredible vids of a 744 landing at NRT in some strong wind gusts. I've never seen the speed tape on a PFD move like that. Incredible stuff but just another day at the office for the crew.

Steven Weinberg has passed away. Time to read and meditate The Scientifc American 2015 article about him. Profile of Steven Weinberg: from The End of Science - Scientific American Blog Network

So, today I was doing the road marshalling for an A320 which was being pushed out for departure and something unusual occurred. The aeroplane in question required an air start unit to be attached to crank its number 2 engine on stand. Because of this, as is normal in such circumstances, I went out onto the roadway behind and to the side of it with marshalling wands to ensure no traffic passed behind it. So, the anti-collision beacons go on, the air start unit cranks up to high power and the right engine begins cranking. At this time, fuel began pouring from the left wing, so I signalled the headset guy to alert him to this, by giving an emergency stop signal, but he did n…

I don't know if movie trailers are considered advertising, in that case, please mods feels free to delete this post. There must be some geeks fans of Frank Herbert's Dune around here. I have been waiting for a good adaptation half of my life. Apparently, here it is. Cheers! Pascal

Nor do I think many others do...not even here. https://www.livescience.com/universe-three-dimensional-donut.html Noel

I will be interviewing Evan Reiter from FSExpo at 6PM EDT 2200z on the Eric Flight Twitch Channel (http://twitch.tv/ericflight) FSExpo is in-person and online, we’re excited to connect simmers, developers, exhibitors, and real-world aviators from across the globe this September! Attendees, companies, speakers, and media partners will all have options for participating in-person or joining the event online. FSExpo is happening on September 24-26th at the Town and Country Resort in San Diego, CA. Eric Flight will be attending virtually and would love for you to find out more about FSExpo and what will be happening by tuning in to the FSExpo interview on the Eric F…

It's claimed this game is bricking high end cards. I posted about it in the graphics card forum.

So here’s an idea that arrived in my in-box this morning: Billionauts must pre-pay a modest (for them) fee to come back down to Earth. We can call it the Billionaire Astronaut Reentry Fee — BARF, for short. How much is the BARF? 10% of the billionaut’s net worth as estimated by Forbes’ “Real-Time Billionaire List” at the time of their launch. For Bezos, the BARF would be $20.2 billion. He can afford it. His net worth went up more than that in just the past three months. Note: the BARF would apply only to billionauts themselves, not to sub-billionaire passengers or crew. As it happens, Public Citizen has calculated that it would take $25 billion …

Good grief. The Met Office has issued its first extreme heat warning. Take care in the Sun people. Heat stroke is no joke. https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/uk-heatwave-searing-33c-weather-24580806 "The scorching heatwave is so hot that England's roads are melting under the sun as councils scramble to fix the damage." 170 dead in Europe too due to flash floods and hundreds missing.

Amazing videos of the flooding happening in China due to massive rain: https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2021/7/21/2041049/-Zhengzhou-floods-as-China-experiences-the-most-intense-rainfall-in-a-millennium

I'm getting so tired with endless threads getting derailed with pointless debates and arguments about MSFS and why it's so much better than sliced bread, to the point of feeling as if, if someone thrust religion the same way down my throat I'd want to cause then some serious discomfort. (Edit- informed technical discussions are interesting, it's just endless monologue about relative merits consisting of opinion only which is frankly boring now.) Now, threads for which that is on topic, fine, I'll stay away from them, no harm done. I'd very much encourage mods to more actively moderate inappropriate off topic trolling and opinion forcing, particularly in the P3D …

I'm in the process of reading through the Garmin NXi manual for the G36 in preparation for the eventual NXi release (boy, those Working Title guys have their hands full with this one!). I'm reading about setting minimum alerts and apparently I can set it to either barometric or temperature and I'm wondering how do I make that determination? What factors come into play in choosing which setting to use for minimums? Does it matter?

No nasty comments about Jeff please people. 😄