Sully Was The Right Guy To Fly

This is the guy you want flying your plane.

sully.jpgI have been doing a little searching for info on “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot in today’s US Airways Hudson River splashdown. This is the guy you want flying your plane.

From SafetyReliability.com, Sullengerger’s website:

Chesley B. “Sully” Sullenberger, III is a captain for a major U.S. airline with over 40 years of flying experience.

A former U.S. Air Force (USAF) fighter pilot, he has served as an instructor and Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) safety chairman, accident investigator and national technical committee member. He has participated in several USAF and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) accident investigations. His ALPA safety work led to the development of a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Advisory Circular.

Working with National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientists, he coauthored a paper on error inducing contexts in aviation. He was instrumental in the development and implementation of the Crew Resource Management (CRM) course used at his airline and has taught the course to hundreds of his colleagues.

Sully is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy (B.S.), Purdue University (M.S.) and the University of Northern Colorado (M.A.). He was a speaker on two panels at the High Reliability Organizations (HRO) 2007 International Conference in Deauville, France May 29-31, 2007. He has just been named a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.

Global Warming Revisited

This is probably the only controversial subject I address on the blog – Global Warming. I think I’ve made it clear I’m a skeptic, and the others I know who forecast the weather are also mainly skeptics.

It’s not a small thing. If I’m wrong, I’m asking you to sit by and doom the planet. If the Global Warming proponents are wrong, they’ve asked that we cripple our industrial base, allow others to continue to spew ‘greenhouse gasses’… and all for naught.

Every time I feel my position is solid, I think of reading things like:

Dr Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California, analysed almost 1,000 papers on the subject published since the early 1990s, and concluded that 75 per cent of them either explicitly or implicitly backed the consensus view, while none directly dissented from it.

That always gives me second thoughts.

Now there’s more… but it’s nothing I ever expected. It’s an eye opening article in the Telegraph from the UK. In case the link ‘expires,’ I will place the actual text at the bottom of this entry.

Here’s a little excerpt:

However, her (Dr Naomi Oreskes, of the University of California) unequivocal conclusions immediately raised suspicions among other academics, who knew of many papers that dissented from the pro-global warming line.

They included Dr Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, who decided to conduct his own analysis of the same set of 1,000 documents – and concluded that only one third backed the consensus view, while only one per cent did so explicitly.

I have often feared Global Warming is a politically and not scientifically motivated

campaign.

I’ll keep my ears open for more on this.

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It’s An Addiction – I’m Not Alone

Katie Haffner had an interesting story about blogging in this moring’s New York Times. I always thought (and Helaine will confirm) I’d gone off the deep end with blogging, but this article makes it seem like I’m not so bad. There are others who have been bitten far worse.

Thanks God for small favors.

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Convicted Killers I’ve Known

I don’t think of myself as traveling in a rowdy or criminal crowd, yet there are two killers I’ve known in my life.

One was a friend from college, George. I lost touch with him only to receive a letter years later after I had appeared on Good Morning America. He was watching from prison.

George did his wife in and then buried her under a freshly poured cement basement floor. Considering the crime, and considering he was convicted of manslaughter and not murder, there must have been extenuating circumstances.

This seemed very out of character for George. I had never known him to be threatening or violent – ever.

The other killer in my life is a little more notorious, Mumia Abu Jamal.

I knew Mumia on the late ’70s when he was a newsman and I was a disk jockey at WPEN in Philadelphia. I remember him as being very soft spoken with a beautiful deep voice. His copy was very well written. He was lacked any knowledge of sports. For heaven’s sake, he was asking me for sports pronunciations and background.

Because of the station’s format and our “naming convention”, Mumia was forced to have a more Anglo first, middle and last name and became “William Wellington Cole.”

You can’t make this stuff up! In retrospect, that was embarrassing.

I have no idea whether he killed the policeman he was convicted of shooting, but my guess is, he did. He had become more radical over the years and, I suppose, angry.

This is all brought to mind since he was made an honorary citizen of Paris today.

I believe the French have really honed their revulsion toward us and our society to a fine, sharp point. This is just another way to tweak us.

It must be sad for them to live in a country that is no longer an important member of the international community. I’m not saying we have foreign policy geniuses running the show, because we don’t, but our opinion, muscle, and money still count for something. France, on the other hand, is a marginal player at best.

C’est la vie.

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Look Ma – I’m on Slashdot

I love Slashdot. How could I stay away from a site whose slogan is “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters.”

I am there at least 4-5 times a day, following their links to see the latest in high tech. It is Linux biased in much the way The Catholic Church is Christian biased. But, it’s geek and nerd populated and I share a certain sensibility with many of its habitues (though, unfortunately I no longer share the same generation with them)

Its readers, rapidly responding to the story postings, add insight, insult and everything in between.

What makes Slashdot so effective is its self moderating system which starts limiting what you easily read (you can always get to everything, but probably don’t want to) as users come on and rate the postings. Judging by what I see, there are a lot of people moderating at any given time, though Slashdot only gives you the opportunity to moderate every once in a while. Then, later, the moderations get moderated!

In many ways it is analogous to Google, where your association with others decides your relative importance and where your links appear.

Anyway, I’m writing all this because I finally got a posting of mine on to start a thread. It started this morning, early, when I saw an article in the New York Times about speeding up media (listening at double speed, for instance) and how that is a burgeoning field.

I have used that same technique in my studies at Mississippi State, watching DVD’s at double speed. For me, it’s been very effective. Now, it’s shared with others.

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