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SR-71 Blackbird Communication to Tower

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Re: SR-71 Blackbird Communication to Tower

#21

Post by cstross »

smhinsey wrote: post #15
ramidarigaz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Woah. $2500 is a lot of money. Is it out of print?

Looks like it's available for ~$200 as well. That's still pretty pricey, but I bet the $2,500 is due to some weird pricing arbitrage or something, you see that with used books fairly regularly on Amazon.

The $2500 one is, if I'm not mistaken, a limited signed special edition (they only printed a couple of hundred copies). The $200 one is the regular edition.

(Disclaimer: I own one of the regular ones, and didn't pay $200 for it. But it's a large form factor hardback printed on high quality glossy paper -- full of breathtaking colour images -- so even if they reprint it, don't expect to see copies on sale for less than $50.)

Re: SR-71 Blackbird Communication to Tower

#22

Post by blhack »

marquis wrote: post #18
kwantam wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fairness, the other part of the killer reputation has to do with apparent design instabilities as a result of the V-tail on the x35 models. Both these and the x36 models really are beautiful planes. Another airplane with the killer epithet because of its on average high power to wisdom of pilot ratio is the Piper Malibu and its later brother the Mirage. Again, a beautiful, fast, well-designed plane that gets out i…

Would you please explain what is meant by "get out in front of you"? I have very limited flying experience and am not familiar with what this means, in pilot terms: i.e. what would you experience as a pilot, and what would be happening to the airplane. Google didn't help in this matter.

When you're flying, your constantly planning what you're about to do before it happens. So like, when I get to this point on the map, I'm going to turn that direction. WHen I get to this point on the map, I'm going to take this altitude. When I get to that position relative to the runway, I need to make a 90 degree turn. When I get to this airspeed and this position I'm going to apply flaps.

And so on. Everything when you're flying is checklists.

Letting the plane get ahead of you means that things are happening before you're ready for them. This problem is made much worse in fast planes (like the bonanza) because things happen much more quickly.

Re: SR-71 Blackbird Communication to Tower

#25

Post by cstross »

kwantam wrote: post #16
blhack wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a plane called a Beech Bonanza that is nicknamed "The doctor killer." It gets this name because it's a single engine plane, which attracts wealthy hobbyist pilots (like doctors) but it's fast . Much much faster than what these hobbyist pilots are used to. This causes "the plane to get in front of them", and for them to crash.

In fairness, the other part of the killer reputation has to do with apparent design instabilities as a result of the V-tail on the x35 models. Both these and the x36 models really are beautiful planes. Another airplane with the killer epithet because of its on average high power to wisdom of pilot ratio is the Piper Malibu and its later brother the Mirage. Again, a beautiful, fast, well-designed plane that gets out i…

And of course, there's the classic Lockheed Widowmaker, the F-104 Starfighter -- in the "G" variant, purchased by the Luftwaffe, who ordered this high-speed fair weather interceptor with a whole bunch of bells and whistles bolted on, to turn it into a low-level all-weather fighter-bomber:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lockheed_F-104_Starfighter#Germ...

"Luftwaffe losses totaled 110 pilots" -- production run: 1,122 F-104G airframes.

Re: SR-71 Blackbird Communication to Tower

#26

Post by smhinsey »

cstross wrote: post #21
smhinsey wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like it's available for ~$200 as well. That's still pretty pricey, but I bet the $2,500 is due to some weird pricing arbitrage or something, you see that with used books fairly regularly on Amazon.

The $2500 one is, if I'm not mistaken, a limited signed special edition (they only printed a couple of hundred copies). The $200 one is the regular edition. (Disclaimer: I own one of the regular ones, and didn't pay $200 for it. But it's a large form factor hardback printed on high quality glossy paper -- full of breathtaking colour images -- so even if they reprint it, don't expect to see copies on sale for less tha…

That sounds a little more reasonable. Hopefully they do a reprint, I am a big fan of those large format coffee table style book, presuming it's about something interesting.

Re: SR-71 Blackbird Communication to Tower

#27

Post by shizcakes »

mdaniel wrote: post #5

Thank you again, http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ , for making my web browsing experience safe from the onslaught of backgrounds and fonts.

This is AMAZING. I didn't mind the maroon on beige as much as some, but I hate the crammed feel of a blogspot page, and it does an amazing job of freeing that content.

Re: SR-71 Blackbird Communication to Tower

#28

Post by gwtw »

http://www.regulation-london.com/attachments/images/product_...

http://www.flightsim.com/review/alphsr71/1.jpg

This happened with me and cofounder.

We were stealth mode and had developed a super fast NoSQL engine that we were keeping to ourselves. We were itching to go public, but needed to score our initial round of investors before we let out our competitive advantage. Our system was clever but obvious once you read about it, so we had to keep quiet. But we were already getting a buzz among the early adopters we had invited that we rocked.

Our social graph was very nimble I tell you.

Now Joey (not his real name) was in charge of PR with the startup. Normally, I like to wear all the hats in a startup at its inception phase, but the incubator program we were signed up with had put it out that they preferred co-founders, so here we were.

As it was our practice, we made a point of making the rounds of the various bofs, meetups, and what have you. The air was thick with repressed entrepreneural energies. Here you had the little startup doing their little dance. Ground check! Next up the guy with "serial entrepreneurs on board" and dancing the dance. Ground check! What indignities. Did PG ever go through all this?

http://www.thisdaytrivia.com/content/red_baron.jpg

http://philosophistry.com/scans/2009/06/paul-graham-face.jpg

I don't know but we gotta go through it.

Soooo, to make a very long (hehe) story short I was screaming in my vaneroid "smart" phone "we have the fastest No-SQL enginge!!!!" but I couldn't face my inner entrepreneur (standing right next to Joe, no less, mf..) looking at me like "dude! think!!" So. I held back, even though I was always the master of P.R.

But then, I had a warm tingly feeling in my crotch as I heard Joe perk up right next to me and say (in a very confident voice I must add) that "our social graph API guarantees O(1) response time".

Yes!

That's the day Joey and I became a team. Sure it was a shot gun marriage before that point but now I knew I had a real partner in Joe. It still gives me a hard on to think about that day!

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