Land and Hold Short

See comments: Hamish made me strike one.

Via Aviatrix, the challenge is to list three things I’ve done that I don’t think any of my readers have done. If anyone has done one (let me know in the comments), then I have to strike it and add something else. I’m starting with non-aviation stuff:

1. Found myself at the centre of a (minor) cold war intrigue involving both CSIS and KGB agents.

2. Been interviewed by the Washington Post.

3. Spent a week in downtown Amsterdam without taking a curiosity tour of the red light district.

3. Given guided tours in four different languages (English, French, Spanish, and German) on the same day.

Do I have to strike any of these?

Toronto City Centre Airport (commonly called “Toronto Island”) is a great airport for baseball fans, since it’s only about a 15-minute walk from the Roger’s Centre/Skydome, where you can drop by to see the Jays play the Bosox, Yankees, etc.

It turns out that the airport has an even closer connection to baseball. The Boston Red Sox signed Babe Ruth in 1914, but sent him down to their triple-A Providence Grays farm team for the 1914 season. Late that season, on September 5, when the Grays were playing the Toronto Maple Leafs baseball team at Island Stadium in Toronto, Ruth hit his first professional home run, pounding the ball right out into the waters of Toronto Harbour. The next year, the Bosox called Ruth up to the majors, and he famously hit his first major league home run — but not his first professional home run — against the Yankees on May 6, 1915.

Meanwhile, the [baseball] Leafs decided to move their stadium north to a mainland location, and in the 1930s, Toronto built its main airport on that empty land. After World War II, when longer runways and less fog became desirable, most airline operations into Toronto shifted northwest to the distant Malton airport (now Toronto Pearson International Airport), but the little airport built over the stadium where Babe Ruth started his professional home run hitting career is still in operation, still has airline traffic, and still sees lots of baseball fans passing through.

(Image via Wikipedia)

While I was in Pasadena on business this week, I rented a Piper Archer at El Monte Airport along with a glider-pilot friend (who sat in the back seat), and went up for 1.4 hours dual with an instructor late Wednesday afternoon.

It was easier getting around L.A. than other big cities because LAX’s control zone is small, and the surrounding class B has generously high floors. We had no trouble getting VFR flight following for a local sightseeing flight during LAX’s dinnertime rush hour, though SoCal approach didn’t bother calling out most of the traffic we saw.

Smog

On the other hand, there was the smog. I’ve experienced the haze around big cities like Toronto or New York, but that did not prepare me for flying in L.A. and Orange counties late in the afternoon.

It was a good VFR day (CAVU for our intents) and from the ground, the sky looked, if not the brightest blue, blue all the same. At 3,500 feet, however, it was a different story — to the west, where the sun reflected off the smog, there was nothing but a wall of white, and I actually had to use the gyros from time to time (depending on our heading). When the smog was a little lower, it looked like a solid cloud layer, even though it was transparent looking up from the ground. I think it topped out around 4,000 feet.

Again

It was a great experience seeing L.A. from the air after spending so much time there on the ground in the late 1990s, consulting for McDonnell-Douglas/Boeing, and I plan to go up again the next time I’m in town. If I had a U.S. license, the FBO would let me rent the Archer without a checkout, based only on 90 days currency on my Warrior — an excellent deal. I don’t know if I have time to get a U.S. courtesy license, but it would be fun to fly up the coast to a different airport.

This BBC story describes a study about how the human brain navigates.

On the street

They hooked up London cabbies to an fMRI machine, and observed which parts of their brain were active during different tasks while driving around London in a simulator. Here’s what they found:

Hippocamus

Initial route planning

Retroslenial cortex

Tracking the route in progress (waypoints, etc.)

Anterior prefrontal cortex

Planning diversions during the trip

Right lateral prefrontal cortex

Hazard detection (closed streets, etc.)

Medial prefrontal cortex

Tracking distance to destination

For example, as the cabbies got closer to their (virtual) destinations, the medial prefrontal cortex lit up more and more, like a DME counting down the distance to a VOR. Different parts of their brains performed social tasks like worrying about passengers.

In the air

These map very closely to the tasks a pilot performs, so it’s possible we’d see the same thing if a pilot in a simulator were hooked up to an fMRI: the right lateral prefrontal cortex would light up when watching for traffic or looking at bad weather ahead, the medial prefrontal cortex would show more and more activity as the pilot approached destination, etc.

It makes sense, then, that different people would show different relative strengths based on brain development — some might be very good at planning a route, but lousy at diversions; other people might hate planning, but be great at responding to unexpected problems en route. It’s a good argument against one size fits all for flight instruction.

Or then again, maybe flying is different. If anyone is looking for a great excuse to fit aviation into a grad school research project, here’s your chance …

Talking to ATC makes some pilots nervous — especially if they trained at an uncontrolled airport — but it’s actually pretty simple as long as you take a second to think before you push the PTT button, and compose your message in advance using the simple, Tarzan-like pattern “you, me, where, what”:

• who you (ATC) are
• who I am
• where I am
• what I want

Just repeat to yourself “you, me, where, what”; “you, me, where, what”; “you, me, where, what”.