Mario colours and engine-off procedures
We do a nerdy dive into Mario title colours and marry them with entropy. Then we rehearse the first step when an engine quits in a single-engine aircraft. In case our children pull the throttle when we're on the simulator, or something.
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New articles
The Most Mario Colours Revisited
I love it when people start from obscure observations and then take them surprisingly seriously and expand on them as far as they'll go before snapping. This is what Louie Mantia did when determining the most Mario colours. All I did was stretch it even a little bit further without breaking it.
In the end, Louie Mantia has more love for the subject and probably got the conclusion right, but I hoped for him to be wrong so that my childhood would not be a lie.
Full article (5–12 minute read): The Most Mario Colours Revisited
Flashcard of the week
Back when I was toying with flight simulators a lot, I read See How It Flies, which I recommend to anyone interested in aviation. It's an excellent web-page-slash-book.
Some of the things it teaches are the automated reactions a pilot is supposed to have to various potentially dangerous scenarios, such as
If you lose power, what's the first step?
There are a lot of things one could do, but one that goes before all of them, to ensure there is maximum time to (a) find a suitable landing place, and (b) attempt to fix the problem in the air while going there.
Pitch for optimal glide speed.
Any airplane has a particular angle of attack where they maximise lift over drag. This means they stay in the air for as long as possible (both in terms of time and distance). Attaining this angle of attack immediately when power is lost gives more time for everything else that needs to happen. In cruise, this usually means pitching up slightly (but not too much!) and during e.g. climb, it means pitching down, which probably doesn't come instinctively.
As the book says,
The first thing you must do is lower the nose. You must lower the nose a lot. You must lower the nose right now.
[...]
You may be wondering how rapidly to lower the nose. The answer is, as rapidly as you can without pulling negative Gs.
It's not that rapidly attaining optimal angle matters in most cruise situations, but maybe, one day, the engine quits just after take-off during the climb. In that situation, every second is precious.
Oh, an interesting fact about the optimal lift-for-drag configuration is that the distance the plane goes in that condition is not determined by its weight at all. Throwing stuff overboard won't help the airplane get to a further landing location. The only effect of removing mass is slowing down the descent rate along the same glide path.
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