As soon as I heard about it on the radio yesterday, after the words "was flying through heavy rain", I just knew that it would turn out to be icing related. My first thought was Roselawn.

Rain in NY this time of year, at altitude, probably will only have one state: freezing rain. This is where the water droplets are supercooled - liquid water below freezing point. As soon as they hit something, they freeze into solid clear ice. You may have seen it - what we call an ice storm at ground level is caused by freezing rain.

Now imagine that two inch thick shell of clear ice on a flying aircraft.

It's heavy. But it's worse than that, it can build up into formations that change the aerodynamics of the aircraft. In the Roselawn case in the 1990s, the aircraft was on autopilot in a holding pattern. Large droplet icing at the time was poorly understood - the crew didn't realise the danger. They had the anti-icing systems on, and after all the ATR that they were flying was certified for flight into known icing conditions. However, the ice was building up in places where their de-icing systems didn't reach - behind the de-icing boots on the leading edges of the wings. Most ice builds up on the leading edges, and de-icing boots can be inflated to break the ice off. The ice was forming a ridge behind the de-icing boots, and it was causing changes to the aircraft's aerodynamics. Since the aircraft was on autopilot, the crew didn't feel the changes in the flight controls - that is, until the autopilot disengaged itself and the plane rolled inverted. They ended up performing a "Split-S" - a high-G aerobatic manoevre, in the clouds, covered in ice. The plane broke up in flight from the aerodynamic loads.

From what I have heard since the initial report of the NY crash, icing again once was the final link in the chain. However, this time, from the information I've seen, they lost control when they extended the flaps for landing. The problem is with an iced up aircraft it can change the aerodynamics such that the tail can stall - and once this happens you lose control of pitch, and the aircraft nosedives towards the ground. I read a few years ago that if you suspect icing on the tail surfaces, you should not extend the flaps. Unfortunately, this seems to be just what happened. The news report I read suggested that the crew tried to retract the flaps but sadly it was too late.

Ice and airplanes don't mix. Ice and helicopters is worse.

We live in interesting times.

Considering the latest interest rate cut now means my mortgage repayments on my 4 bedroom house are now lower than what I was paying for rent in Houston 6 years ago for a 1 bedroom apartment... I've decided to have a little bit of a splurge, and now the iPhone has arrived here, I've gone and got one.

I had tried other people's iPhones, and to be honest, it's the only 3G phone that I really like the user interface on. I had my previous Nokia 6820 (the one with the qwerty keyboard) for 5 years, and although I liked its feature set, the user interface was appallingly bad, especially for text messaging which I use quite a lot. Unfortunately, the 6820's contacts list is some sort of proprietary format so I couldn't copy it with bluetooth - so I had to enter my contacts again - but this time I did it on my PowerBook and synced it with the phone. (The iPhone, not surprisingly, goes perfectly with a Mac).

On my way back to Birmingham Airport, I was very surprised when leaving Yatton station that my train was a rake of 5 blue/grey BR InterCity liveried Mk.2 coaches (a livery that disappeared in the early 1980s), pulled by a class 67 locomotive. At the rear of this, was another class 67 locomotive just being towed with its engine shut down.

It's quite rare to see any passenger trains loco hauled in the UK these days, especially blue grey Mk.2. stuff. I suspect First Great Western had just made a "spot hire" with EWS (to whom the locos belonged) and that possibly that the mark 2's are from a heritage railway :-)

I'm travelling to the US soon, so I completed the new ESTA online form to authorize travel to the US with the DHS. There was an awful lot of indignant hot air about ESTA on Slashdot (how terrible the US was being etc. in making travellers who are visiting the US without a visa fill this thing in). But all ESTA is, is the green form you fill in on the plane. It has the same questions. But unlike the green form on the plane, you get to know BEFORE you travel if the DHS thinks you are inelegible to enter the country without a visa, instead of flying 10 hours on a plane to get deported and fly back, so I don't know what the fuss is about - IMHO, ESTA has to be better than doing that. It's not as if they weren't already recording and retaining the information that was on the green forms forever and a day.

But there seems to be an awful lot of not-joined-up thinking within the DHS. You fill in everything for ESTA, but you STILL have to fill in an advance travel information form for them (via your airline) with *exactly* the same information. It's only a mild aggravation (it takes only 5 minues) -- but so much for the paperwork reduction act!

I had to do a double take as Aretha Franklin started singing a song to the tune of the *British National Anthem* during Obama's inauguration!

I was half expecting Obama to announce in his speech that he was handing the country over to Her Royal Britannic Majesty.

Compare and contrast:
Aretha: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/spanish/multimedia/video/newsid_7840000/7840814.stm

Her Royal Britannic Majesty's coronation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAc0Vcv5Gs4

OK, so the words are different, but it's the same damned tune!

I almost died of laughter watching this clip from the BBC's QI:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejoC7-GfBh8

Enjoy! The sound track is probably NSFW in places speaking British English.

In an attempt to find out how well my language learning thing is going, I looked for a DVD on my shelf that may have a Spanish translation. The only one I found was Fargo (some of my DVDs are English only, some have a seemingly random collection of languages, but only Fargo had Spanish).

First, I expected it to be translated Latin American Spanish, but it was quite obviously castellano. Secondly, because I still don't listen too fast, I turned on Spanish subtitles to try and help me - but the subtitles were totally different to what was being spoken. Not in the sense of what was being said, the meaning was the same, but it was using different words. For instance, the police woman may have said "Hola qué tal?" but the subtitles said "Hola cómo estas?" [note there should be an upside down question mark in that too but Slashdot seems not to have had the UTF-8 cluestick). It was pretty rare that the subtitles matched what was being said. However, I see it as progress that I could tell them apart and actually understand some of the movie! I ended up turning the subtitles off since they weren't really helping. I think in the end I probably understood about 50% of it.

It looks to me like the subtitles and the voice were translated by totally different people who had never met. I'll have to see how closely the English subtitles follow the English version. I'd be curious to know whether the US release of this movie has a different Spanish translation compared to the European release.

On a different learning-Spanish note, I also found a Spanish geek comic strip courtesy of foro.speccy.org, which I find *incredibly* difficult to understand due to all the colloquial phrases, in fact my head starts to hurt if I attempt to read too many in one sitting. Anyway, it's TiraEcol, http://www.tiraecol.net/

In my best Victor Meldrew voice, "I don't believe it!!!"

I've binned the T-Rex 500 heli on its 4th flight, and not due to executing some amazing 3D manuever and getting it wrong, or anything else spectacular and exciting, I did it on a boring "Let's tweak the gyro settings" flight.

For reasons I can't adequately explain (well, other than my own stupidity), I turned the gyro gain far too low (I was trying to get it just right, not put in big changes) in rate mode. I didn't touch heading hold mode (this is an important bit in the story).

I lifted the heli off into ground effect and it seemed happy, so I gave it a fistful of collective to climb out. Immediately, it started pirouetting wildly out of control. When I say wild, I mean it, probably about 600 degrees a second. However, it remained upright.

The correct move at this stage would have been to raise my right index finger, and toggle the gyro switch on the transmitter, to put the gyro in the unchanged heading hold mode. I could have then landed the heli, and let my hands shake for a while, then put a more tenable setting for the rate mode gain and tried again.

But instead I fought with it for about 30 seconds. Trying to put in opposite stick to stop it spinning just made it spin at about 600 degrees per second in the other direction. I did briefly get it hovering (for about 2 seconds) nose in, but then lost it again, and the heli started going straight for the only wall within half a mile. At this stage it was still saveable, I could have given it a bunch of power - it wasn't going to try and flip - it remained upright - which may have given me time enough to remember to hit the heading hold switch. But no, instead I chose autorotation. Autorotation is where you cut the power to the main rotors (or the power is cut, if the motor fails), and you descend unpowered, with the air moving through the rotors keeping them spinning. Unfortunately, the heli landed on uneven ground and the main rotor blades hit ground. Just to make matters worse, the tail rotor landed on a rock. But the main rotor blades were split at the ends, the tail rotors were chipped, two of the cyclic servos got stripped gears, the shock loading of the tail rotor hitting the rock stripped teeth off the tail driveshaft bevel gears.

Aaargh. For an encore, when I got home, I nearly short circuited a LiPoly battery, and then I dropped my toolbox sending tools flying all over the kitchen. But I did strip the heli down to get the broken bits out. The good news is the main gears are fine, the motor's fine, frame is undamaged, tailboom and tail drive shaft (torque tube) is undamaged, and the rotor head is undamaged.

I haven't yet decided whether to get metal gear servos, or just get new gear sets for the existing ones. But I'll have the embarrassing task of relating my stupidity to Sean, the owner of the model shop, as I order the spare parts...

At least the new tail case for my HDX-300 micro heli arrived today, and since I was now in the mood for heli maintenance, I also overhauled its rotor head (it had got sloppy, and I wanted to get rid of the supplied feathering shaft because it sucks - too long, and doesn't hold the blade grips snugly against their washers - the cheap and nasty Compy feathering shafts are much better than this supposedly better hardened steel one) and ordered some CF rotor blades (the woodies aren't all that well balanced and tend to cone a bit when you give it a handful of collective).

Bah. It seems like British Airways has cut its service to Houston, and changed the airport from which it operates - it used to run two daily services from Gatwick, now it only runs one daily service from Heathrow and this means I can no longer get a through ticket from the Isle of Man. With the unreliability of early morning flights from the Isle of Man (they chose the worst place to put the airport - the most fogbound place in the island, with only a category 1 ILS, that means even low cloud can close the airport to inbound traffic, let alone fog), it means I'm going to have to leave the night before to be sure of not missing the onward flight. (In the last 5 trips to Houston, I've missed the outbound twice due to weather. But in those days, BA operated two direct flights a day, so I could just get the next. But with no through ticket, missing the onward flight means a day's delay plus a hefty charge to change the ticket).

Someone at a Christmas party said, "Oh, I won't go in cattle-truck class on a flight that long, you should look at club class, it's so much better and not that much more expensive." So I checked the prices. Economy (coach) is £300 or so for a round trip London to Houston, which is staggeringly good value - that's Ryanairishly cheap but with a traditional full service. For club class? Well, I selected it and nearly choked on my tea. £4600 for a round trip! Slightly more expensive my arse! Try FIFTEEN TIMES more expensive! For a laugh I selected first class to see what price it gave me - almost £9000.

Now I know who really pays for my flights to Houston, it's those rich people in first and business class...no wonder BA have cut the service back in these credit-crunched times.

I got my new T-Rex 500 in the air for the first time on Christmas Eve, and again on Boxing Day. It has three flights on it now, and no, I didn't crash it :-)

I didn't do anything particularly exciting on these first flights, because I'm still tweaking the setup. On Boxing Day, I didn't even do any tweaking, there was an icy 15 mph easterly wind that made me give up before I even finished the battery packs - I could no longer feel the transmitter sticks my fingers had got so cold. (However, it flew really well in the wind, it would have been like trying to fly in a washing machine with my HDX-300 heli).

It's absolutely fantastic. And it was worth all the time spent on getting the rotor head setup just right - the first liftoff, it lifted off into a perfect hover with absolutely no surprises. It's just the tail I need to tweak (and that really must be done by flying and tweaking, rather than on the bench). My local RC shop lent me a very good pitch gauge, so I could set up the blade pitches and this meant the tracking was perfect on the first liftoff.

Here's a pic of it sitting on the table. I will take some in-flight photos tomorrow if the weather allows.

http://www.alioth.net/tmp/trex1.jpg The whole heli
http://www.alioth.net/tmp/trex2.jpg Tail detail, also showing the bevel gears from the driveshaft (or torque tube, as Align calls it)
http://www.alioth.net/tmp/trex3.jpg Rotor head detail

There's not a lot of it about here, so...for an early Christmas dinner...

Last night, I made tacos (actually started the night before, the filling is best, I find, made the night before and allowed to marinade in its own juices for a night). I used Alton Brown's "Good Eats" recipe for the guacamole, it's a good recipe. Also made salsa too. I found some "Quark" brand cream cheese so I had to use that, too!

And margaritas. It's not a proper Mexican dinner without a certain tequila element. It went down very well, between 4 of us we finished off all the margarita mix in less than an hour...and there was half a bottle of tequila in it. Not to mention the triple sec. I think all the food must have ballasted the booze a bit because I didn't feel at all wasted.

I still have some taco meat left, so guess what I had for tonight's dinner :-)

Sod the credit crunch. I just got myself a new RC helicopter, a T-Rex 500 ESP. It comes as a kit, and I got it on Saturday and had it almost complete by Sunday evening. However, I needn't have rushed, because the weather looks terrible for the next few days.

Compared to my current HDX-300 heli, it looks huge. The rotor disc is just under 1 metre, and it's powered by a big chunky brushless motor and vast Li-Poly battery (actually, two of them in series). It's no wonder Align (the maker of the T-Rex series) has such a good reputation - the engineering is beautiful, everything fits together perfectly, with no slop in the rotor head whatsoever. This kit has a shaft driven tail (most helis use a belt) which hopefully will be more efficient, I think the belt tends to rob quite a bit of power. My only grumble about the kit is it uses lots of 2.5mm socket screws and 2.6mm socket screws, rather than just sticking to one size. The trouble is a 2.5mm allen key fits the 2.6mm socket and tightens it most the way, until it starts to torque up then the allen key slips and strips out the head of the screw such that the proper 2.6mm allen key won't shift it - and a 2.5mm allen key looks just like a 2.6mm one so you don't know you've done it till it strips it.

But other than that it's pretty much perfect. I put the supplied main rotor blades on my blade balancer, and they balanced perfectly out of the box. I've never had that happen before. I can't wait to fly it, but at the same time I'm terrified of crashing something so beautiful! (I think I'll do the test flights in a wiiiiiide open space, I won't make the mistake I did with the HDX-300, doing the maiden flight in a constrained space!) The other thing about this heli, although people say it's a park flyer, it certainly looks big enough and feels heavy enough that it could cause much pain and suffering, so it ought to be preflighted just like a full-scale heli before flight.

Interestingly, I asked the guy who owns the model shop how he's doing in these credit-crunched times, and he says he's already sold more this December than he did the whole of last December, so it seems like at least the model-buying public are saying sod-the-credit-crunch.

Perhaps, in the Brave New World following all the financial crashes, there ought to be measures (perhaps added to anti-trust legislation) preventing any company from getting Too Big To Be Allowed To Fail. Perhaps the Big Three automakers should be broken up so they are the Much Smaller Nine?

Discuss.

I've found a useful trick while trying to write things in Spanish - if I'm not sure what I'm writing is correct, is to put the phrase I'm writing in quotes in Google. If it's right, I'll get lots of hits with the sentence fragment in context, where I can sanity check (and often learn something new). If it's wrong, I get few results. I have set my computer's language to Spanish so I get the Spanish Google by default.

A bit of a break from the usual geekiness on this channel, it's time for some human nature stuff.

On Wednesday, I went over to England with my Dad in The Truck of Love (a 7.5 tonne M.A.N lorry, the story of why it's called the Truck of Love can wait). The purpose was to go to Worcestershire and clear out my grandparent's house, which has just sold.

These were my grandparents on my Dad's side (my Grandfather on my mother's side is still going strong, and we had Sunday lunch with him). We stayed with my aunt and uncle in Worcester, which was quite interesting as my aunt is as mad as a box of frogs (in a good way. In fact, that entire side of my family is eccentric, that's where I get it from. For example, my Uncle Bob *still* hasn't left home and he's well into his 50s. And he only has a motorcycle license, and about 10 motorcycles, of which only one is functional at any one time. Others on that side of the family are still living in the temporary buildings, as they put a new roof on the house. They started that job in the 1970s. Oh well, there's time enough!)

On Thursday to Saturday we cleared out the house. We got it mostly done by the end of Friday, and on Saturday just needed to vacuum the floors and close up each of the rooms.

It was then the sadness started. Looking out of the lounge windows for the last time, into the garden illuminated by the feeble winter sunshine, glistening off the damp trees and grass.

My grandparents had that house built for them in the mid 1960s. It's a modest bungalow in what was then a new suburb in a village near Worcester. My Dad lived there too in his late teens. I remember going there with a lot of excitement as a small child, playing in the garden that seemed like acres when I was small. And still seemed like acres when I had to mow it when I was in my teens, after my grandfather had a stroke and wasn't fit enough to do it himself any more. There were so many memories of hot summers, endless pots of tea, my grandmother trying to be like Hyacinth Bucket, my grandfather telling her not to be so silly... little things like finding the snow shovel my grandfather made (he went through several iterations of trying to design the ultimate snow shovel, the latest of which, with "Experimental Daisy" written on it in marker pen in his writing is still in the garage for the new owners of the house. I don't know why he called the snow shovel "Experimental Daisy"). It just brought back a lot of sadness that now the door is closed on that forever.

I think both my dad and I were twinged with guilt when we got rid of the terrible particle board furniture my grandmother thought was the bees knees (very 1960s "Space Age" stuff, and absolutely hideous) and all of that yellow and orange patterned stuff that was so popular in the 60s and 70s that my grandparents never got rid of. I can remember them having it when I was a few years old. We had to be brutal in what we got rid of, there was only limited space in the truck, and there was furniture that had to be kept.

In this contrast of 60s dross ("everything must be new", my grandmother had specified), was some of the furniture they had kept from their previous house. I now have the oak dining room set that they had made for them in the 1950s. It must have cost them a significant fraction of their annual income - given that my grandfather ran a baker's shop in Worcester (the type that has nearly died out now, where the owner bakes all the bread and sells it in the same shop, and it's a standalone family business run in a building about the size of a normal house). The dining room table and cabinet was made bespoke and is all hand carved. To get something made like that now would cost several thousand, in fact probably still a large fraction of a typical middle class annual income - it must have taken years of savings in the 1950s for someone running a small family business. I think they would like it that it is still staying in the family.

I also kept the radiogram (a record player and radio combined) that they must have bought new in the mid 1960s. I thought it had valves (vacuum tubes) but it's all solid state. The record player still works but I couldn't get anything more than hiss out of the radio. Unfortunately, the instruction manual (which it still has!) does not have a schematic, which is quite unusual as many appliances of that period came with schematics so that you could repair them. There's also quite a bit of hum, so I suspect the filter capacitors on the power supply aren't in all that good shape. I'd like the radio to work (to give you an idea of its era, the manual talks of an add on you will be able to buy if stereo radio broadcasting becomes a reality!) - hopefully it's not some unobtainable germanium transistor that's gone phut. It'll be good to get it to work as the radio for my retrocomputing room (although I'll need a short range FM transmitter so I can listen to BBC 6 Music)

The house is sold now, and it's the end of an era. I have the last apple I will ever eat from that garden in the kitchen. Perhaps I ought to see if I can get some of the seeds to germinate. I hope the new owners like the house and enjoy the big garden that my grandfather specified on the original plans.