Classism in the USA

 Classism in the USA

I have been thinking about classism for many years. I have lived on the border between the two classes all my life. I went to college to become a Mechanical Engineer, ran out of money, went into debt, and fell back to Mechanic. Through seventy years of fixing things, making things, and designing things, I have skills, but I’ll never be able to join the elite class.

I didn’t get that all important degree. But I could write a book about it!

When I went to college, I didn’t own a car. I rode a bicycle. I had bought it when I had a paper route in Merced, California. It came new with a Sturmey-Archer three speed hub, but I needed more gear ratios, so I added four more sprockets back on the wheel, and two more on the crank up front, with derailleurs to change the chain from one to the other. I’m sure it was the only one like it in town in 1961 - a 24 speed Schwinn!

When I dropped out of college after my freshman year, I found work in a carburetor rebuilding company near San Jose, California. In about a year, I worked myself up to dyno testing carburetors. I could identify and adjust any carburetor from Ford Model T’s to Carter AFB’s. While I worked there I bought a Chevrolet Corvair from a coworker and, of course, learned all about its idiosyncrasies and how to fix them.

Years later I got a call from my cousin Jim, who was broke down beside the road in Fresno, California, in his Corvair. He said it just went bang and stopped. I tossed my toolbox in the back of my Corvair and drove fifty miles south to see what went wrong. When I lifted the motor cover (hood in the back) I saw a twisted tangle of spark plug wires. The distributor had seized and rotated. 

It was at night, and no parts stores were open, and it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. We were both broke, with just enough money for gas money, maybe.

I removed the whole distributor from his engine, drove out the pin and removed the drive gear, then tapped the stuck shaft out with a hammer. There was melted and rewelded aluminum on the shaft, which I filed off with a smooth file, and polished the shaft with some fine grit sandpaper. I wiped it clean and got it spinning freely again. 

The distributor had a small tube on the side where oil needed to be squirted on every oil change to lubricate the distributor, but if you weren’t familiar with Corvairs, that was easy to miss.

I reassembled the distributor, made sure the points were correctly set, turned the crankshaft to the timing marks, put the distributor back into the motor, with the rotor aimed at the number one spark plug direction, then had Jim just turn on the ignition without bumping the starter. I slowly rotated the distributor until the points sparked and then locked the distributor down. I put on the cap and had him start the engine. It started instantly, and after it warmed up and came off the choke, I blipped the throttle a couple of times to make sure the vacuum retard and centrifugal advance mechanisms were working right. 

Cousin Jim was amazed that I could fix his engine without needing even a penny worth of parts. He went on his way, just a few hours later than planned. 

I became well known in Merced as a good Corvair mechanic, and sometimes the Chevrolet garage would send me a Corvair for fixing, because the local Chevy mechanics hated the things. They even gave me a 40% discount on parts.

I had a girlfriend at that time who was going to college to get her degree. She had an aunt with money, I think. She eventually got her degree and found a good office job at the courthouse processing traffic fines. But when her little Chevy needed work, she brought it to me.

When she insisted that she wouldn’t marry me until I got a degree, I found another girlfriend, who loved me the way I was, and stayed with me for fifty years until her death.

That’s when I began to understand the class divide in America. 

There are those who know things, and have the proof, on parchment. And then there are those who do things, and get their hands dirty at times. 

The divide has only increased during my lifetime, and is now a huge gulf. I feel stretched between the two classes. Mechanical Engineering is the college course that spans the gap, in my opinion. 

I didn’t get my degree, so I am stuck in the underclass. But I learned enough in school and life experience that I can understand the upper class. I’ll never be a professional, or managerial type, or an educator, but I can write and spell, most of the time. 

On the radio, Ed Schultz, the Rush Limbaugh of the Left, used to define the classes as those who shower before they go to work, and those who shower up after work. 

About sums it up, I think.

 

Abortion:

 

Abortion:

For many years some people have been making the case for “life begins at conception.” Is there a united opposition to that view? Where is the pushback? 

In my opinion, the lack of a consistent and direct counter position is why Roe v. Wade got overturned, and why the Alabama State Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos in an IVF clinic are “extrauterine children.” And why using an IUD is equated now with abortion, along with the “morning after” pill.

The counter narrative to “life begins at conception” has to be more than “No, it doesn’t.”

Pointing out that rigidly enforcing “life begins at conception” will cause many deaths from pregnancy complications, even though true, is dodging the issue. Legalism is a cold, unfeeling position in opposition to love and compassion. No sane, rational person can feel more compassion for a microscopic speck of an ovum than for a living, breathing, suffering woman in pain. 

To allow a woman to die an excruciating death due to an ectopic pregnancy rather than removing the source of her suffering is as evil and immoral as anything I can think of. A God who would command such a thing is no God I would waste my time worshipping.

Historically, there was no such thing as conception until less than 200 years ago, when the ovum was first found. For thousands of years, the belief was that the woman was a garden where the man planted the seed. If the garden was fertile, the seed grew and was harvested at the birth of the. child. If she was not fertile, or barren, it was her fault, and she could be replaced with a more fertile woman. Seems to be what worked for King Henry VIII.

Biblically, the texts are plain. In those days the soul and the breath were equated. Genesis 2:7 says.”And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.”

The same equation is evident in Job 27:3, “All the while my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils.”

Conversely, when the breath is gone, that is the end of life. Psalms 146:4 “His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in that very day his thoughts perish.” Not that long ago, that black bag that doctors carried everywhere contained a small mirror. If the doctor held the mirror up to your nose, and the breath wen’t visible on it, he declared you dead.

For those of us who believe that there is no better person to make a decision on whether to stay pregnant or not than the woman involved, there needs to be a forceful campaign to publicize the disastrous harm that the banning of abortion is doing to our freedoms and our privacy.

With women being thrown in jail after a miscarriage, the right to travel across state lines for better health care being threatened, and data of clinic visits, GPS locations and license plate photo captures being accessed by police for anti-abortion enforcement, the New Inquisition is here. 

The cruelty to women is the point. 

It is way past time for freedom minded people to fight back.

Don Rogers

2/28/24

Almost to Arkansas

 Almost to Arkansas 

The sun was shining brightly, there was no wind to speak of, and my wife Carolyn and I decided to fly to Mena, AR, to look for information on her ancestors. I had been exploring cemeteries, visiting courthouses, and compiling her family tree for several years. 

This was our third trip to Durant, OK, since I had gotten my pilot’s license, and I was enjoying the easy flying out here where there were no tall mountains in the way. The date was August 1, 1990.

 The two old boys in the airport at Eaker Field wondered why I came out to the field so early in the morning to fly. I told them I liked the smooth air then, and they laughed. “You must be from out west in the mountains!” they said. “The air is smooth all day long in Oklahoma, unless it spins up like a funnel.”

I explained I was from Winnemucca, Nevada, and if you didn’t fly in the morning, the air got turbulent and made it hard to practice precision flying. This day I told them I was flying to Mena, AR, and back, and they told me to be sure and check the weather, as there are some mountains over there in Arkansas, and the fog in the valleys sometimes made flying difficult.

I thanked them and made a quick call to a weather station. I have forgotten which one. It was before the internet, GPS, and radar coverage on a pocket sized phone. No frontal systems were in the area, and ceilings were above 2000 ft.

Carolyn and I loaded our two small bags into the back seat of the Cessna 172, and taxied out to the south end of the runway. I stopped at the end of the taxiway and did a full runup on the engine. The engine was fairly high time, and it barely passed the compression check at the last annual, but it still climbed out at 400 or 500 ft per minute down here in southern Oklahoma. The old Continental six needed a quart of oil now and then, but it was still reliable and sounded good.

As we headed northeast away from Durant we tracked out from the VOR beacon there. Somewhere about halfway to Arkansas I planned on switching to the Rich Mountain VOR, which was just north of Mena.

As we passed over the farms and towns below, I focussed on the gyrocompass, following the heading given by the VOR. It was dead reckoning at its best, and with the plane trimmed out, it was easy to lose track of exactly where we were. We were beginning to get a thin overcast above us, but it was well above me and I wasn’t worried about it.

As we approached the state line the VOR from Durant was getting weaker, and I switched to the Rich Mountain VOR in Arkansas. As I was tuning and adjusting the navigation equipment, my wife said, “I can’t see anything.”

Whoa! It looked like some Twilight Zone out there. Fog had rolled in under us, totally obscuring the ground, and the thin overcast had become thicker. We were sandwiched between the layers, which merged somewhere in front of us. The horizon had completely disappeared.

Suddenly the plains out here weren’t so easy anymore. I immediately went to my training on instruments and started scanning my panel. The artificial horizon was showing us level and the altimeter showed us right on 7500 ft.

My sights moved to the turn and bank indicator, and I carefully banked the plane to the left, lined up the little wing tips to the marks on the gauge, and added a little rudder to keep it coordinated. I started counting chimpanzees. That’s how I learned to count seconds when I was a young kid. Most people I know count by thousands, but it all works the same. After holding the turn for one half minute, I rolled out level and straight and followed the Rich Mountain course heading outbound.

Once I was fixed on the track outbound, I took my hands off the yoke and just used small rudder inputs to keep the plane on course. The smooth air made it simple to trim and hold the altitude. Most airplanes fly straighter and smoother if the pilot lets the plane fly itself. 

One of the first things I had to unlearn during my training was what is called PIT. That’s Pilot Induced Turbulence. Don’t do it! Stay steady on the controls.

In a few minutes the ground appeared beneath us, and the overcast layer burned off as well. I decided that was enough excitement for one day, and I told Carolyn we would fly back to Durant. I couldn’t get a good signal on the Durant VOR yet, so I tried to locate us by the towns beneath us.

On of the bad things about all the little towns in Oklahoma, is they all look alike from the air. Luckily, many years ago, during the early days of aviation, people painted barns and water towers with the town name. I saw a water tower ahead of us, so I descended and circled it, and found myself over Kenefic, OK. That put us due north of Durant, and all I had to do was follow the highway south.

We found the airport and landed with out any further trouble. I filled the tanks and rolled the Cessna into the old WWII hanger just north of the terminal. 

It was a good day, and educational as well. Down here in the South, the humidity can get so thick you can’t see through it. It was never like that in Nevada!

 

Boeing Corporate Culture

 Boeing Culture

I have been watching the Youtube coverage of the Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-9 Max carefully to see if anyone caught the problem that has been obvious since the MCAS debacle. So far everyone is focussed on the door plug hinges, the roller tracks at the top of the door, and the conditions of the bolts that hold it all together. 

So far, the reports are all on the details of the mechanical defects. The real problem is the company culture. Sure, blame the workers who didn’t put it together correctly. Blame the lack of QC inspectors who failed to catch the error. They are looking in the wrong place. Raise your sights!

People were trying to tell management about the quality problems on the floor. They were ignored, or in the worst case, fired. That culture is not just at Boeing. From the frozen O-rings on the solid rocket boosters to the heat shields on the shuttle wings, people who knew the problems were ignored until disaster happened.

The cultural problems have to do with the way the company is structured, with people who know the problems at the bottom, and people who have the power to do something about the problems at the top, and then the several layers of middle managers in between who add almost nothing to the process. In my experience, they function as a wall to prevent information from getting to the top. They really don’t like Quality Control Inspectors because they know it will reflect badly on their fiefdom.

From my forty years of working for large electric generation companies, I have enough stories for several hours of ranting. I will spare you all!

I will have hope that the operational culture problems are being addressed when the whistleblowers who were fired are hired back with bonuses and backpay and promoted to jobs in the QC department, and the managers who fired them are sent down the road kicking a can.

Japan Air A-350 crash

 Japan Airlines A-350 Crash at Haneda, Tokyo

For the last couple of days I have been watching coverage of the collision of an Airbus A-350 and much smaller Dash-8 on the runway at night in Tokyo, Japan. There is so much to learn from the results of this accident.

The fact that almost 400 passengers and crew safely evacuated the Airbus A-350 before the plane was consumed by flames is a miracle. To be certified as a commercial passenger carrier, the plane must demonstrate the ability to evacuate all the passengers out half of the exits in less than 90 seconds. This plane had only three of the eight exits available, due to fire outside. And yet, everybody was evacuated alive.

Several other things made the successful evacuation possible. The passengers listened and followed the orders from the cabin crew. Nobody stopped to grab luggage - they got their bodies off the plane as fast as possible. The mantra is, “Save your life - leave your luggage!”

Another factor was the composite construction of the airplane itself. This is the first accident of this scope involving a plane mostly made of carbon fiber, rather than aluminum. It passed with flying colors, in my opinion. The carbon fiber insulated the interior better than aluminum would’ve, giving more survivable time to get out of the airplane. I understand that they actually used more than the required 90 seconds to get everyone off the plane. I heard one report that said the last person left the plane 18 minutes after the collision. That’s really remarkable. I’m assuming that was the captain. All the while the plane was being evacuated, a raging fuel fire was visible under the belly of the plane, held back from the interior by the carbon fiber material.

The damage on the A-350 demonstrates that the Dash-8 was holding on the centerline of the runway, waiting for takeoff clearance. One report said he waited for 45 seconds before the collision. It was at night, and neither airplane saw the other. The tail of the Dash-8 center punched the nose of the A-350 and broke off the front gear, which dropped the nose of the big plane down on the runway. The fuselage of the big plane straddled the smaller plane and essentially crushed it, starting the fire. The wings of the smaller plane smashed cuts and dents in the inlets of both engine nacelles on the A-350. Five were killed immediately on the small plane, with only the pilot surviving with major injuries.

Several things pop into my mind when I ponder how these two planes met on runway 34R. The tower transcripts show that the Dash-8 was cleared to taxi to 5-C intersection and hold there. To me, as a pilot, that was an incomplete command. I would have been listening intently for one of two words - “hold SHORT of runway 34R” or “hold CLEAR of runway 34-R.” The pilot knew he didn’t have a takeoff clearance. He was waiting for one. He was following the clearance for “Taxi into POSITION and Hold” which was NOT the clearance given to him. Unfortunately, he was waiting in the middle of the runway, where a huge Airbus A-350 had just been cleared to land.

I like to believe that I would have declined the clearance without clarification on the hold position. Since he should have been able look to the right and see the approaching plane, he should have rejected the taxi and hold clearance. Once he entered the runway and turned away, the approaching airplane was invisible, and the crash was inevitable.

If instead, the Dash-8 had been given a “takeoff without delay” clearance, he could have been in the air past the end of that runway and out of the picture in 45 seconds.

Dangerous runway incursions have been far too numerous this past year, for some unknown reason. Is it too many new air traffic controllers? Is it controllers being overworked with long shifts and not enough time to rest? We pilots are living in fear that there is an awful catastrophe in the future if a handle isn’t found to straighten out this problem.

I lived in Japan for a year and a half when I was in the US Army. I had to laugh as I listened to a video on Youtube by a group of guys called Flight Safety Detectives. They described the orderly evacuation of the passengers by the rescue crews after they had exited the plane. They were organized into groups of ten persons and sent marching down the runway away from the burning plane. I had to laugh! Only in Japan would this happen. I had wondered how they knew everyone got off the plane. If they are marching to the building in groups of ten, it’s no problem to get an accurate head count. 

I’m afraid if that happened in the US, they’d still be chasing down passengers wandering around the airport!