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I have told practically no one about this, but I had a horrendous episode—and it might have been the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ll never know.I was in Air Force pilot training and they had a program entitled Golden Flow that involved random urine testing for drugs.Go ahead, pause for a moment, and have a good laugh over the name of the program. Yes, Golden Flow was really the name. Okay? Let’s continue.One day I got a note to go donate a sample. No biggie. I’ve never smoked anything ever in my life and I’m the kind of drinker who can knock off half a bottle of beer three or four times a year.Three days later I got another note that said the lab had a problem with the sample and I had to do it again. How annoying, but fine, I didn’t give it a second thought.THE HORRORS OF GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENTThree days later I got a note to meet in the office of the hospital commander, a full colonel. I walked in and in addition to him was every colonel on base: the base commander, the wing commander, the training commander, and then two captains, my squadron commander and my flight commander. They asked me to sit down.The hospital commander then informed me that I had tested positive for heroin and that I was being terminated from the Air Force. The first test was positive and the second time I went in was to confirm it and that also tested positive for heroin.There was nothing I could do. No appeals. Anyone caught by project Golden Flow was guilty until proven innocent and there was no way to prove innocence.The colonel who was the commander of the hospital did all the talking and he was a real asshole. He raged on and on about how I’d put Air Force planes at risk, you know, all the horrible stuff you’d say to anyone who actually flew Air Force jets while on heroin.IT MADE NO SENSEBut everyone else in the room was silent. Looking back, I’ve always taken that to mean that they were looking at everything else but the test:I’d been married nearly five years and had a four-year-old child.Only a few months earlier I’d graduated from college with a degree in aerospace engineering.I’d finished USAF ROTC as a Distinguished Graduate, first in my class.I was now right at the top my class in Air Force pilot training.We’d had three major 100-question academic tests up to that point—out of the six we’d do during the year—and I had scored 100% on all three. No one scores 100% on those tests! I was a legend among the commanders who were sitting in that room.They all knew I didn’t smoke or drink and that I was kind of a nerd who studied all the time and on rainy days when the rest of the class went to the Officer’s Club to drink beer and smoke cigars, I went to the simulator building and flew extra rides—hence the reason I was leading in the class.These are not things that one would expect from a heroin user.GLEEFUL JOYBut none of that mattered to the commander, nor to the Air Force program.The colonel who ran the hospital was absolutely joyful with glee. The Golden Flow program had been under challenge and he loved the program. He figured that catching a pilot training student was exactly what the program needed to keep going.I mean, seriously, the guy was enjoying it. He felt vindicated after defending it for so long.LUCKY MEBehind the scenes the other colonels started making calls. It was all done in secret, but I later got hints that they had arranged for some outside investigators to come in.It turned out that they quickly found a pattern of several other people—not pilots—who had complained of their innocence after testing positive. And, upon checking into those guys, investigators also felt that they were the opposite of the kind of person who would be using heroin.Somebody wondered: Why is it that on this base the people who are testing positive for heroin are the opposite of the type they normally see?Lucky for me, within weeks, they cracked the case when they discovered an airman in the lab who was selling a service of swapping urine samples for a fee. When one of his clients got tapped by Golden Flow, this clever entrepreneur would swap samples with someone he knew would be clean. Up to that point, he’d never been stupid enough to choose a pilot, which would raise big suspicions.He knew that the first positive was basically ignored and the person had to come back for a re-test. Only the second positive test was grounds for dismissal. And so, his client had given him two samples and he watched for the return of the victim so he could swap in the exact same drug the second time.THE AFTERMATHI never found out if the other innocent guys were re-instated. I hoped so.But what I do know is that a few weeks later, I was called into the same office, with the hospital commander sitting, as before, behind his desk, and all the other colonels as well as my two captain commanders there as well.I sat down and the hospital commander, with his hands trembling almost uncontrollably, read a letter of apology and announced my re-instatement.I went back to the flight line in great relief.The next day I found out that the hospital commander had taken early retirement and we’d be getting a new colonel. And I found out that project Golden Flow, an Air Force-wide program, had been cancelled!I always wondered if that incident helped me in the end.Before it happened, I had been doing very well and had a shot at being first in my class. But being near the top of the class one-third of the way through was not at all like being #1 at the end. But after that, I always felt that everything that could break my way, broke my way and I did, indeed, graduate first.SPECIAL ASSIGNMENT HELP?Shortly after that fiasco, something weird happened to the Air Force assignment system for pilot training graduates.Up until a few months before my class graduated, a block of assignments went to each class and they chose from that list by class rank—with the #1 graduate going first.But that was a hit and miss system because there was no guarantee what would be in each class’s block.And so, for just six months—beginning a few months before my class graduated and ending a few months after my class graduated—the Air Force tried out something new: whoever was first in the class could choose any aircraft in the Air Force they were qualified to fly. And the rest of the class chose from the traditional block, which was short by one aircraft. We couldn’t choose an SR-71 because those required a couple of thousand hours, but just about everything else was open to me.And I chose to fly VIP transports at the elite Andrews Air Force Base in Washington, which was something I could not have taken before that window opened and I could not have taken after that brief assignment experiment ended.BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME?Four years to the month after being told I was going to be dishonorably discharged for using heroin, I was standing on the ramp at Andrews Air Force Base, chatting with the President of the United States and the First Lady.I’ve always wondered if the project Golden Flow disaster was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’ll never know.

(Please be aware that this is my attempt to summarize an aspect of a very detailed statistical model in rather non-technical, non-mathematical terms.)Autocorrelation is a situation that arises from an ordinary-least-squares regression analysis in which an important assumption about sample data, namely that all error terms (variance, or “sigma squared”) for all observations are independent of each other, is violated. This assumption underlies the predictive nature of regression models; in simple terms, the assumption is that multiple replications of an analysis (with different samples, at different times) will always produce the same error terms, per measured variable; further, these error terms will show no correlation across observations.For example, we might study the relationship between income and attitudes toward saving for retirement among American workers. We might find in our survey that higher-income individuals rate saving for the future more important, than do lower-income individuals; the data show, further, that higher-income individuals save a greater percentage of their pay for retirement, than do lower-income individuals.In the US, however, many higher-income individuals have access to employer-provided programs (such as retirement accounts with employer-matching funding, IRA’s, and the like) that are not available for many lower-income individuals. Differences in employer help/support for retirement savings might lead to higher or lower percentages saved, but be uncorrelated to the individual’s attitudes about the act of saving for retirement. If our study does not control for the differences in employer support, than the variances represented by the data would show correlation.A common test statistic, the “d” or Durbin-Watson statistic, can indicate presence and magnitude of autocorrelation in many regression models. Redesigning some variables with a generalized-least-squares (GLS) regression model (versus the ordinary-least-squares, or OLS model) often can provide better variance indicators.

No. The US had been toying with tiltrotors before the Ka-22.The Germans had a concept but it never flew, the Fa269The first tiltrotor to fly was the Transcendental Model 1G in the mid-50s.The US Air Force began to favour funding another project, the Bell XV-3, and this is probably the best choice for a true ancestor to the V-22. The XV-3 first flew 1955, and was successful in it’s use of the tiltrotor concept, despite some issues.A crash lead to the program ending in 1966, but it was not for nothing. The lessons learned lead to another project, the Bell XV-15, first flying 1977.In 1983, due to fallout from Operation Eagle Claw, the Department of Defense put forward a proposal for something that would be better suited for similar jobs than helicopters, the program being called Joint-service Vertical takeoff/landing eXperimental (JVX). Bell and Boeing teamed up and proposed essentially a larger version of the XV-15, which of course would become known as….V-22 OspreyWhile the US was looking at the XV-3, the Soviets were of course looking at a similar concept.Kamov Ka-22 “Hoop”After some delays, it flew 1959. It only saw brief operation service. Out of 4 built, 2 of them crashed. They were retired prematurely in 1964, the remaining aircraft scrapped. Replacing them, the Mil Mi-6 “Hook”.EDIT - Other aircraft that could tilt rotors, jet engines, wings, etcAgustaWestland AW609Bell 65 ATVBell Eagle EyeBell V-280 ValorBell X-22Boeing Vertol VZ-2Canadair CL-84 DynavertCurtiss-Wright X-19Doak VZ-4Dornier Do 29EWR VJ 101FLUTR Model 1Hiller X-18LTV XC-142Zhuchenko Vertoplan