September 26, 2023 Dateline: Greenwich

The Liberty Gazette

September 26, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: The impetus for a brief respite in England was to see the ancestral home of the Elys. That is, Ely, England. We built the whole trip around the one day we would spend in the small town with the giant cathedral. More on that in another episode. For starters, we knew better than to expect we’d have a ton of energy to do much our first day after an overnight flight, so we planned it light and leisurely. Arrive at Heathrow about 12:30 in the afternoon, catch the Heathrow Express across London to Greenwich, and do something touristy: straddle the Prime Meridian, so we can say we had one foot in each hemisphere at the same time. It’s the line of 0 degrees longitude, so it splits the earth from north to south, delineating the east and west. 

Flying is among the professions that use Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) as a standard of reference. We use it for filing flight plans, getting weather reports and forecasts, and other tasks and communications. Wherever you are in the world, your location is measured from this position; you’re either east or west of the Prime Meridian. So, there we stood, at the center of time. Almost.

Mike: According to Royal Museums Greenwich (www.rmg.co.uk), the location for the original zero-longitude line was voted on by 23 nations in 1884. Before that, almost every town in the world kept its own local time. There was no international agreement on how time should be measured, when a day would begin and end, or even the length of an hour. By the mid-19th century, railways and communications networks were expanding, making an international standard for time absolutely necessary. Greenwich was selected because the U.S. had already decided to base our national time zone system on it, plus, observations made from there gave astronomers the ability to map the sky. That was important in a time when the vast majority of the world’s commerce moved by boat, meaning shipment of most goods was dependent on sea charts and sailors who could navigate by them.

A century later, after more precise measuring (by satellite) was available, the line was moved. The “true” Prime Meridian is only a bit more than the length of a football field to the east of the original line.

Linda: There’s an observatory, a museum, and a beautiful park in the lovely village of Greenwich. If you search the web for photos of the Prime Meridian, you’ll mostly find pictures of a thick brass line on concrete. That’s just outside the observatory and museum, on the back patio where you exit after touring the displays inside. The cost is £18 per person. But if you don’t intend to go inside, it’s easy enough to find the continuation of the line in the park below the observatory. It doesn’t cost a dime to straddle that, and you’ll have a few pounds saved for a pint at the Greenwich Tavern across the street.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

September 19, 2023 Gimme Some Shade

The Liberty Gazette

September 19, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: While being whisked away in a Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” for a much-needed vacation, I was intrigued by the electronic window dimming technology. No more shades to lift or pull. Just push a button below the window and you’ll send an electrical current through a layer of gel inside, between the multiple layers in the pane. The current causes a chemical reaction in the gel that changes its thickness and hence its opacity. The lowest voltage results in a clear view, while the highest voltage gives you pretty much total black-out. As we crossed the pond to London’s Heathrow, I played with the window dimming like it was a toy, pausing in the clear state to admire the enormous wing flexibility. I wonder what airplane lovers of the past would think of it. 

Mike: We visited the Churchill War Rooms Museum under the British Treasury building in the Whitehall area of Westminster on our visit to London. We were told it would take about 90 minutes to go through the exhibits. However, it was so interesting and informative we actually spent more than three hours and could have taken longer. Being in that bunker brings to life the world during what was then Britain’s “Darkest Hour.” It is a dark place lit by lamps where those assigned to the war room not only worked 16-18 hours a day, but for periods of time rarely saw daylight. Secretaries shared a sun lamp, each getting 20 minutes a day. While the building was fortified, it probably could not withstand a direct hit from a heavy bomb. We learned a lot more about Winston Churchill too, including his flying lessons. 

He took up flying lessons in 1913 at the Royal Naval Flying School in Kent after first being somewhat skeptical about the concept. He felt duty-bound to take his first flight but then became an enthusiast. But he wasn’t a natural, and he had several close brushes with disaster as did many flyers in the early days. He was finally convinced to give up training following a crash he had in 1919 in Paris. But he never stopped believing in the value of the airplane and supported it throughout his lifetime. 

He also took many opportunities to put his hands on the controls when he was a passenger. In December 1941, right after Pearl Harbor, he went to see President Roosevelt. His warship sailed through U-boat-patrolled waters to Norfolk, Virginia. After three weeks at the White House working out war strategies, when Churchill returned to England, he and his staff flew 18 hours in a Boeing 314, making him the first world leader to cross the Atlantic by air. On that flight, he took the controls of the lumbering giant as a relief pilot. Wearing his military sunglasses and chomping on his cigar, it is said that he enjoyed the view and a brief respite from the world’s troubles.

Linda: I guess his military shades were his own version of dimmable windows.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

Where Churchill slept

September 12, 2023 By George!

The Liberty Gazette

September 12, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Linda: We’ve flown the Elyminator up to the Pacific Northwest a few times, and I’ll be darned if I didn’t just find out about something we’ve been missing, and it’s been literally right under our noses. We’ve flown over the area, but we didn’t know! Surrounded by Moses Lake, Wenatchee, and Ephrata – all of which are towns we’ve visited – in between Seattle and Spokane, sits George, Washington. It’s one square mile with a population of 516, and they clearly have a sense of humor. 

On the Fourth of July each year, the community of George, Washington hosts a celebration like no other. They start the morning with breakfast in the community park – biscuits and gravy or French toast. Then they take those full bellies for the two-mile “Cherry Bomb Run” to burn off some calories and make room for something special. But first, the Grand Parade. Anyone can join in the parade. They just have to be ready to line up at the Martha Inn staging area an hour before and sign a participation waiver. After the parade comes the signature event.

For sixty-six years, the community of George, Washington has been serving up the World’s Largest Cherry Pie. The pie is made by members of “the Georgettes,” a non-profit group that supports the town’s events and activities. They mix up 75 gallons of pie filling and bake it in an 8-foot by 8-foot pan in a specially-built brick Dutch oven for three hours, cool it for four, then serve it up fresh in the Pie Pavilion. Ice cream optional (but who wouldn’t want it?) It’s free, but a $1 donation per serving is suggested to help pay for the ingredients, which cost a bit over $800 this year. The whole pie weighs in at half a ton. Better be there by noon when they start serving or you’ll be out of luck! I really love the motto they’ve adopted: “If you believe that something is impossible, please do not interfere with those who are doing it.”

Of course, live entertainment by a few bands fills the afternoon, and then like all towns across America, a stunning fireworks show tops off the day. But it’s that whole big pie idea that gets the attention. I think if you’re going to name your town after America’s first president, you almost have to incorporate all the trimmings, and go big or go home – and that’s no lie! 

The city streets are named after varieties of cherry trees, and everyone knows the story of young George Washington supposedly having admitted that he chopped down a cherry tree, saying, “I cannot tell a lie.” History can be fun when it’s brought to life like this. And you can bet that there in George, Washington, they aren’t dealing with any of those kinds that think we should erase history. If our country survives the present and planned turmoil, George, Washington will be one place we can take our grandchildren to savor some history lessons.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

September 5, 2023 Rocking a Farmer's Wings

The Liberty Gazette

September 5, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: We flew to the northwest in the Elyminator in late spring to visit family we had not seen in a long time. After the loss of my older brother last year, we felt a more urgent need to spend time with those we love. That sense was almost prophetic as Aunt Delores passed away last month. With her gone, there is yet another piece of my past that seems to have been archived. 

My cousin’s grass farm in the fertile Willamette River Valley of western Oregon has been like a second home. When I was a kid, our family vacations were to the farm. We built hay-bale forts in the loft of the huge red barn, plinked with 22s, went fishing and swimming in the river that bordered one side of the property, and drove farm equipment, even as a preteen. It wasn’t uncommon to see a combine lumbering down a country road with a 12-year-old at the helm. 

One of my first experiences with airplanes was at an airport not far from the farm. At a jump zone in a neighboring town, we’d lay in a cut alfalfa field with our eyes scanning skyward. Black dots that emerged from a high-flying plane would get larger until their multi-colored parachutes blossomed and the jumpers zoomed, spun, and floated to a patch nearby. The glass-nosed, twin-engine plane landed and took another load aloft. There was a kid sitting in the nose looking out that window. How I wished I was him. 

Later, when I started to fly, the farm in Oregon became one of my favorite destinations. My first flight there was in a Cessna 172 from Fullerton in Southern California. I took Aunt Delores for a ride, to see the farm from a different perspective. She loved it.

Later, I took my sister and a coworker, along with her four-year-old son, in a bigger, faster plane. We made a fuel stop in northern California, so we could drop my coworker off for a grandparents visit. Sis and I continued toward the farm, landing at the nearby McMinnville Airport. At the farm, one of my cousins and I each hopped on a three-wheeler ATV and went out to measure the length of one of the recently harvested fields. I went back to the airport and flew the Cessna 210 to that field and anchored it to a windrower and a tractor while enjoying our farm-stay. 

The day we departed, we had a family reunion, where we gathered for a feast in the shade of towering old oak trees. In the afternoon, everyone accompanied us out to the field to watch us take off. As we lifted off and the landing gear folded up into the airplane, someone thought the wheels had broken until someone else explained that was normal. I climbed out a little way, banked the airplane, and made a zooming pass, rocking our wings to say, “so long.” I imagine Aunt Delores is now rocking her wings, too.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

August 29, 2023 "A" is for "Airplane"

The Liberty Gazette

August 29, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

“A” is for “Airplane.” So are “N” and “C” and “G” and many other letters. Have you ever noticed letters and numbers on airplanes and wondered what they meant?

Every airplane has an alpha-numerical identification similar to license plates on cars. It’s often called a tail number and is assigned when the airplane is registered to a new owner. When an airplane is new, it must have the number painted on a vertical surface, such as the tail or side of the airplane. 

Like cars, airplanes’ registration numbers help governmental entities tax people more. Unlike cars, when we’re traveling in our airplane, we are identified by air traffic control by our tail number. Scooting along the complex network of highways in the sky, when we press that mic button to communicate with a controller, we don’t say, “This is Linda,” or “This is Mike.” We say November-Two-Six-Niner-Fife-Eight, the correct pronunciation for our tail number. It’s also commonly referred to as a callsign. There’s a whole published glossary for pilot-controller communications for the standardized way in which we talk. But the “November” part of it is to identify the airplane’s home country, the U.S.A. “C” denotes an aircraft registered in Canada, while a “G”-registered airplane comes from Great Britain. This was decided in 1944 during the Chicago Convention of the International Civil Aeronautics Organization, a branch of the United Nations. 

But there were tail numbers before then. The idea came from the use of callsigns by radio operators. All around the world, as early as 1913, radio callsigns began with a letter, followed by four more letters, and each country was assigned its own first letter. This was the first format used in the aviation industry. 

In the U.S., owners can apply for a special letter-number combination of up to five characters after the N, but most airplanes keep the number series assigned to the manufacturer when the airplane was built. If an airplane is de-registered, that N-number can be assigned to another aircraft. 

There may be between two and five characters after the N, but the first of those must be a number between one and nine. There may be up to two letters, but they have to be at the end of the callsign. For instance, John Travolta, who started flying at age 15, has a fleet of a dozen or so jets and other aircraft all of which sport tail numbers ending in “JT”. His Bombardier Challenger 601 is N392JT.

So why an “N” for us? Because the U.S. Navy was the first to use it as an identifier way back in 1909.

Callsigns can also be nicknames. For airliners, these are followed by the flight number. British Airways still uses “Speedbird” from their glory days of the Concorde. UPS used to have the callsign “Brown Tail,” which unfortunately induced much mocking (and which we heard they paid an ad agency a lot of money to come up with). Now they use UPS. More letters for the alphabet soup.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

August 22, 2023 Safer Flights, Lower Costs

The Liberty Gazette

August 22, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Have you ever wondered why so many airplanes are mostly white? Well, there are a few reasons, and you can probably guess some of them. 

First off, as the saying goes, follow the money. When you consider that over time, aircraft have to be repainted, the cost of paint can really add up. Especially for larger jets, which can take 120 gallons to cover, costing a couple hundred thousand dollars each time the paint job is redone. If you go with white, it lasts longer than colors, which dull and fade at a faster rate. Fewer paint jobs over the life of a single airplane, not to mention a whole fleet, makes accountants happy.

Interestingly, white paint also weighs less than colored paint because of no pigment additives to bump up the scales. We’re talking a difference of several hundred pounds, over a thousand for larger aircraft. This affects fuel burn, because the heavier it is, the more fuel required to make it fly. For airliners, an all-white plane versus a colorful one can be the equivalent of the weight of eight passengers. Passengers pay for tickets and paint doesn’t, so that’s easy math.

And of course, a used airplane which doesn’t require much change in paint is easier to re-sell. 

Another aspect to consider is heat. White reflects the sun, that heater in the sky you’re a little closer to in an airplane than you are on the ground. Darker colors absorb more heat, requiring more energy to make the inside comfortable. Remember the Concorde? (Incidentally, it is making a comeback.) Highly reflective white paint was crucial on that airplane because flying at Mach 2 produces a lot of heat. The nose and leading edges could reach over 260 degrees Fahrenheit at supersonic speeds. Air France’s Concorde was briefly sporting Pepsi-blue (just for a couple of weeks), which restricted the high speed it was known for to only 20 minutes. 

The most important reason to champion white paint is for safety. It’s much easier for maintenance crews to see damage on an airplane painted white than on darker colors and multi-colored paint schemes, and to find and fix leaks and cracks. White is also easier for birds to see and avoid. Remember that bird strikes happen lower in the sky than your ultimate cruise altitude, so take-off and landing are when these collisions are a risk. Birds are usually above the airplanes at that point, so looking down, with the earth below the airplane, white will get their attention better than something that blends with the colors of the ground. Come to think of it, that applies to search and rescue as well. 

Colorful paint, then, could be argued to be an unnecessary expense. So why do some companies opt for colors? Brand identification and the attraction of snazziness. Who doesn’t love the lively paintings of Star Wars, the Smurfs, Hello Kitty, and Iceland Air’s stunning Northern Lights? Kinda puts you in the mood for a fun flight. 

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

August 15, 2023 New Life for an Old Favorite

The Liberty Gazette

August 15, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Mike: The Consolidated PBY Catalina is an amphibious WWII maritime patrol bomber first built 90 years ago (“PB” for patrol bomber; “Y” the code assigned to manufacturer Consolidated Aircraft). It was used in both the Pacific and Atlantic theaters to spot and track enemy U-boats and naval ship movement.

I fell in love with the Catalina, a lumbering old beast, when I read a Flying Magazine article about the Flying Calypso, owned and operated by famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. Jacques’ second son, Phillippe Cousteau, was the pilot of their PBY-6A. The article was about the plane and how they used it for exploration. Its speed, barely over 100 knots, was about five times faster than their explorer ship, the Calypso. The airplane gave them more options. They sometimes carried a single-seat gyrocopter on board when they needed to film in remote locations. They’d take it out and assemble it on the spot. The little gyrocopter was more maneuverable and worked better for tight filming shoots. Today’s explorers would use a drone for this type of filming, but the PBY gave them plenty of space to carry the copter and was quite practical at the time. 

When I was in college, I met a retired airline pilot who flew PBYs during the Korean conflict and later piloted one in a two-ship formation trip around the world. That journey took months with them splashing down in such exotic locations as Kwajalein in the Pacific, and Hong Kong. The romance and challenges of such a trip would make any pilot envious. 

The PBY mystique has been the inspiration for television shows and movies because of the way it skims a lake’s surface and sends out long jets of spray as it skids at high speed around corners in a river. It starred in the short-lived series titled, “Spencer’s Pilot,” and the humorous opening scene of the movie “Always.” The airplane’s long wings, mounted on a pylon high above the fuselage, and general rough-and-tough look make the perfect introduction for a swashbuckling pilot character. 

I have always wanted to fly the plane and once trained a Learjet crew who also flew a PBY for their employer. They thought there was a possibility I might fly with them, but it never developed beyond talking. My chances to fly one have become fewer, as all but a handful of Catalinas have been retired from flying due to age. But now, Florida-based Catalina Aircraft has acquired the original type certificate for the PBY. The company plans to revive the Catalina in both civilian and military versions using modern materials, turboprop engines, and today’s technology. The to-be-reintroduced aircraft will pack more power, run smoother, and be lighter, making them more efficient and perform better. This will expand their mission capabilities.   

It is still in the planning stages, but if the production line is once again started, perhaps I may yet get to fly one, and future generations will benefit from and come to love this unique aircraft as I do.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com

August 8, 2023 And the Winner is...

The Liberty Gazette

August 8, 2023

Ely Air Lines

By Mike Ely and Linda Street-Ely

Skytrax launched its first global customer satisfaction survey in 1999. Their work has become a quality benchmark in the airport industry, surveying travelers at over 500 airports and handing out “Top 100” awards in over 22 categories. These are passenger choice awards, so they focus on airports with commercial passenger service. Airports such as Bush and Hobby, but not Liberty Municipal. Still, we believe there’s something in this for everyone, for every airport manager, because we can all seek new ideas and aspire to greatness. 

A long list of survey topics covers facilities, prices, and services ranging from an airport’s website and app to their public address system for boarding and other calls. Every aspect that reaches the customer is surveyed and ranked. 

The best all-around airport for 2023 was awarded to Singapore’s Changi Airport. They have been voted #1 for 9 out of the last 11 years. Tokyo’s Haneda Airport is consistently voted the cleanest airport in the world, and the Istanbul Airport has been named this year’s “World’s Most Family Friendly Airport.”

Seattle’s Sea-Tac is the highest-ranking U.S. airport, landing at number 18. But two major Houston airports each bumped up one spot over last year, with Hobby arriving at #32 and Bush at #35. Within specific categories, Houston Airport System (HAS) clinched an historical Number One spot for a brand-new category, “World’s Best Art in an Airport” in 2023. 

HAS has a remarkable defined art program. With more than 350 pieces on display, it’s one of the largest public art collections in the global aviation industry. Appraised value: $28 million. We’ll suspend the discussion of use of taxpayer money for now, but rest assured it has not escaped us that the city of Houston is doing something entirely different than encouraging students to submit their best work. Mario Diaz, Director of Aviation for Houston Airports, likes to pair the magic of flight with the magic of art, where celebration of the two is greater than the sum of their parts. The city made an effort to support a few artists during the height of the biological warfare deception by commissioning 10 major permanent works. They also have the only airport artist-in-residence program. 

In addition to visual art, music is noteworthy in Houston’s airports. The group Harmony in the Air moves around to perform on stages at all terminals at Bush and Hobby. We were pleasantly surprised and enjoyed their music last December as we headed out for Christmas break.

On a slightly smaller but no less important scale, the Texas Department of Transportation’s Aviation Division recognizes significant efforts by airport managers and sponsors (cities and counties) for general aviation airports. In April, Tradewind Airport in Amarillo was named “Airport of the Year,” and Robert Vargas, who manages the Andrews County Airport, is this year’s “Airport Professional of the Year.” 

Whether striving to offer the best shopping or dining, the lowest costs, or best security, recognition encourages people to do their best and feeds enthusiasm for these goals.

ElyAirLines.blogspot.com