Flying To Another State For An Abortion: Fill & Download for Free

The main reason Argentina lost is the one Zachary pointed out, they never thought they'd have to fight the war. They didn't expect an armed response from the UK, so they didn't fully prepare for it in terms of timing or troop deployment.As to timing, they struck too early. If they'd have waited until the heart of the following Southern Hemisphere winter (say July of 1983) both aircraft carriers, HMS Hermes and Invincible, would have been out of the fleet, as well as the polar support vessel HMS Endurance and the Landing Platform Docks HMS Fearless and Intrepid, though the carrier HMS Illustrious would have then been in service. The fewer resources (particularly troop landing vessels and combat aircraft) that could be brought in a smaller, Illustrious focused task force, would have had to immediately deal with the South Atlantic winter weather. It’s quite likely the UK would have determined retaking the Falklands wasn’t possible in those conditions and with those resources.In addition, delaying just over a year would have meant the full compliment of Super Étendards and Exocet missiles ordered from France would have been on hand and fully operational. As it was just 5 missiles and 6 Super Étendards were available, and the Argentines had to complete the pairings to make them operational themselves after the French technical teams were pulled out.Another revision of history is that Argentina could have equipped their aircraft carrier, the Veinticinco de Mayo, with UK procured Harriers, but chose instead to buy Naval Skyhawks from the United States. Harriers would have been able to launch for the planned mass raid on the task force on May 2nd that was called off due to the unusually calm wind preventing the Skyhawks from launching.As long as we are revising history, we can go further back in time, say 20 years to the early 1960’s, and the Argentine armed forces could have converted to all volunteer, professional armed forces, rather than a conscription army. The conscript Argentine forces were plagued by systemic limitations of lack of training and experience by the conscripts and lack of respect by officers and senior NCOs for the inexperienced conscripts. This was no way to go to war against a seasoned, professional UK military.Even with the history and timing as it was, they still could have won based largely on their superior geographical position and logistical situation. There's no getting around how difficult it was for the UK to fight 8,000 miles from home.Here's how it could have ended differently, in roughly priority of likelihood of changing the outcome:Dumb luck. If one or two of the 5 Exocet air-to-surface missiles had found its way to the UK aircraft carriers, HMS Hermes and Invincible, it might have been game over. Initial targeting of the air-to-surface Exocets, and in-flight re-targeting by the missile itself, was done by selecting the largest radar blips. Sometimes this meant a carrier was targeted but technical issues prevented a hit, and other times a large merchant ship (Atlantic Conveyor) looked like a carrier on radar.Target the merchant and troop ships, rather than the warships. Rarely were the supply and troop carrying ships targeted during airstrikes. The focus was on either the carriers (Exocet) or on the first target of opportunity (dumb bombs). The task force had enough warships to afford the losses, but fewer troops than the Argentines and a very stretched and tenuous supply line and logistics situation. One of the single most effective military achievements of the war was the sinking of the Atlantic Conveyor (see #1 above) and this was by accident, since the Atlantic Conveyor was not the intended target.Utilize the correct land forces. Argentina's best troops, and its troops from the South most suited to mountain and cold weather environments were held back in Argentina to defend the border with Chile and less-experienced and lesser trained units from the warm North were used, reducing the combat effectiveness and morale of the troops in the Islands.Correct bomb triggering. Throughout the conflict Argentine pilots were dropping their bombs too low and they were not arming, resulting in hits to the ships, but not detonations of the bomb ordinance. If this had been corrected by either flying higher (pilots would have needed to be even more brave than they were, and the losses may have been untenable) or triggering the bombs to arm sooner (risking damage to the fighter, but ensuring the bomb hits were effective) or retarding the bombs (it’s not clear this technology could have been quickly procured after the start of hostilities given the largely effective worldwide arms embargo UK diplomacy was able to coalesce) then many more UK ships would have been lost, tipping the scales in the Argentine favor. Better communication between Naval pilots and Air Force pilots could have brought this issue to light before the conflict.Fleet on fleet action. Unusually poor wind caused a coordinated air attack from the carrier Veinticinco de Mayo to be aborted on the morning of May 2nd and later in the day the HMS Conquerer submarine sank the cruiser the ARA General Belgrano. This caused the Argentine Navy to lose its nerve in dealing with the 3 nuclear attack subs and to return to port and not participate in the rest of the war (except the air arm of the Navy which conducted land-based operations throughout). The Navy could have continued to risk sinking by subs and engaged the task force with its air and surface to surface Exocet assets. Movements of the Argentinian Navy

Range is not the issue, here.This is a Vickers Wellesley bomber. As you can see, even by the standards of the time, it is a very odd looking bomber even for its age (it entered service in April of 1937). Less than two hundred were built, and its wartime service was confined to the Middle East. Not surprisingly, the header image of the Wikipedia article is a modified Wellesley of the Long Range Development Unit, an RAF developmental unit that took the world open-course long-distance record twice (or maybe three times, being that I’m not sure that the LRF was in being the first time the RAF set the record, in the mid-20s).The RAF, in other words, was very, very serious about long range flying.The third record, which held through World War II, was set in November of 1938 after about a year of developmental flying* was 7,162 miles (Ismailia, Egypt—Sydney, Australia), and 68 hours in the air. It was set by two of three Wellesleys, flying in formation, the third breaking off and landing on West Timor with engine problems. This is important because the LRDU set out to show that not only could it set a record, it would not be a “freak,” but rather something that any of its specially-modified planes could do.Apply this range to North Atlantic convoy operations, and you pretty much get a plane that can intercept a convoy when it leaves medium range air cover east of Halifax, and circle it until it reaches the limit of medium range air cover west of the United Kingdom.Which is not what happened, of course, on account of that being nuts. Why? What’s the difference between range and very longe range marine patrol capability?I offer you two trans-Atlantic flights: in the first, Amy Johnson and Jim Mollison flew from London to New York in 1933 in what was basically a de Havilland Tiger Moth. Could the RAF have escorted convoys with their basic trainer? No, of course not, although that’s not going to stop me from posting a glam shot!Here’s another historic image. It’s not a glam shot. In fact, considering the circumstances, be glad that you can’t see more details, unless you’re into bodily fluids:These are survivors of the Bermuda Sky Queen, an ex-British Airways (Imperial and then BOAC during its years of service) Boeing 314. On October 1947, the Sky Queen, then owned by a chartered airline out of New York, set out from Northern Ireland westbound for Newfoundland with a crew of 7 and 62 passengers aboard, which doesn’t seem like much, but is almost twice what an Atlantic airliner carried. To make a longer story shorter, on the afternoon of the 14th, the navigator woke up (the CAB was offered no explanation for why he was asleep), crunched the numbers, realised that they would need 22 hours to reach Newfoundland (1790 miles) versus the 19 calculated, and that, therefore they weren’t going to make it. The flying boat then set down on the high Atlantic opposite the weather ship, Bibb, whose crew, with heroic gallantry in the finest traditions of the US Coast Guard, were able to remove all passengers safely from the tossing, wrecked boat over the next twenty-four hours.How did an experienced crew, flying a veteran of the Atlantic, with a correct weather forecast, get their estimated time of arrival so wrong? It appears that the problem is that the Sky Queen took off from Foyne overloaded, but that was not uncommon under the wartime conditions with which the crew were familiar. What seems to have happened is that the pilot, doing the navigator’s job, calculated that he was still within his margin of safety. The problem is that every shortfall in initial range requires increasing engine rpm to get speed up, which increases fuel consumption, which decreases endurance, which requires still higher engine speed, which requires still more fuel , and since the relationships are not linear, you approach it iteratively, and if miscalculate, you end up grotesquely wrong.However, it could just as easily have been heavier than expected headwinds, or icing, that might scuttle such a long range flight. Or, especially in wartime conditions, the engine might be down on power for some reason. And there you go, superb long range performance, an order of magnitude better than the Tiger Moth’s, and you end up setting down in the mid-Atlantic.Let’s look at a verbose and pedantic account of the LRDU Wellesley as a way of getting at the issues as they existed during the Battle of the Atlantic. I wrote it, and I’m embarrassed about it, so I’m going to edit it. However, I’m not going to edit the footnotes, because while they’re embarrassingly padded, too, someone might be interested. That said, some of them might be stranded by the editing I’m about to do. Hey, it’s Quora, not the CUP. You get what you pay for. I’ve edited in some comments in bold. And hopefully this catches your eye so that you notice that the rest is a cut and paste extract, and don’t hold me to unreasonable standards of coherence. I mean it! I’m throwing fifteen-year-ago-me under the bus right —The LRU’s Vickers Wellesley single engined bomber were only minimally modified aerodynamically, but their engines were very special plants, burning 100 octane fuel at a time when the RAF standard was still 86 octane, even if switching over to 100 octane. The first lesson of the record pointed to the performance of Bomber Command: a bomber that could fly 7300 miles in 68 hours by a formation flight could deliver a formidable amount of bombs. But it also showed that the Wellesley could fly a reliable 48 hour ASW patrol at 1100 miles. [Like I said, except that that would be nuts.][i]A long range record begins with fuel capacity, and thus disposable lift. To set their record, the LRU’s Wellesley’s had to carry an immense amount of fuel. At a rated empty weight of 11,000 lbs, they lifted off at 19,000 lbs. [That might not seem that good, but that’s because some people exaggerate the performance of their planes. Looking at you, Polish Air Force.Also, the geodetic structure of the Wellesley is pretty amazing, all things considered, and if you look at the footnotes, you’ll see I’ve cut a lot of irrelevant considering here, mainly about the Liberator.][ii]Besides quantity of fuel, the Wellesleys of the LRDU also had very fuel efficient engines. The 9 cylinder, 28 litre radial Bristol Pegasus XXI engine used in the Wellesley was clearly obsolescent, with its oversized cylinders and necessarily low engine speed. Yet it was also a proven winner. It had set three consecutive height records, and even more impressively, an Italian license-built version had powered the Savoia-Marchetti SM 79s that swept the first five places in the 1937 Marseilles-Damascus-Marseilles long distance air race. Still, the Pegasus XXI itself got most attention from novel ancillary engine equipment, notably a constant speed airscrew and a supercharger. Both were crucial (along with the 100 octane fuel burnt) in permitting the Wellesley to achieve more than 1000 hp at takeoff, and a maximum of 825 hp at a cruising altitude of 4,000 feet, but presented new problems. The previous generation of long range records had been very much products of the heroic age of aviation. The skilled pilots who set them had been able to control their engines almost by instinct, setting them for fuel-efficient flying by hand-adjusting the mixture control with an eye on the tachometer. This was impossible on the more complex Pegasus, and Bristol engineers added a Claudel-Hobson “variable datum controlled” carburetor to the supercharger, and constant speed propeller. Without this equipment, it would have been impossible for the heavily-laden VLR aircraft of the war years to both take off and patrol efficiently.[Next, fifteen-years-ago-me lets off some pure history of technology research on the fuel question. Now me wants to remind all you tech-bros out there about the “carburetor that thinks for itself,” and ask you to please stop bumpfing about the imminent AI revolution that’s been imminent since at least the 1890s]The Long Range Unit was one of the first RAF units to employ 100 octane gas, achieving a 14% improvement over the performance of contemporary RAF units operating with then-standard 86 octane. The Liberator I likewise employed 100 octane, but by the winter of 1943, further improvements in refining capacity provided a useful supply of 100/130 fuel giving a further 30% improvement in engine maximum output, particularly in takeoffs. Such improvements did not come out of the blue, for “doped” gas had been used by assorted amateur racers and record setters for over a decade by the time of the Battle of the Atlantic, but the RAF had long dragged its feet over octane upgrades. Until relatively late in the thirties it had aimed to fight the next war on 73 octane. There were two reasons [one of which I’m editing out as irrelevant] for this. First, high octane fuels required relatively inefficient and expensive catalytic reforming in entirely new facilities. To put this in perspective, every Liberator V that lifted off on a VLR flight carried the total gas recovered from 260 barrels of East Texas crude, while at the same time world high octane gas production was only 350,000 barrels/day, a total that was inadequate, with logistical losses, for the needs of Allied air forces. By 1945, output had reached almost 1 million b/d . . . .[i]But what about weather? The crew of the Sky Queen tried to blame an inaccurate weather forecast for their mistake, and it was a weather ship that saved those babies. Well. . . By the way, it looks like, in all the details I did share, I failed to note that the prevailing winds on the Atlantic (and behind the LRDU in its record flight) are west-to-east. Surprisingly enough, flying out into heavy head winds and back with equal tail-winds does not balance out, by the way.Just as improved fuels transformed the circumstances of air operations, so weather had a profound capacity to affect Atlantic operations. The early Atlantic flights took substantial advantage of the prevailing heavy winds, even in summer. For a “VLR” aircraft flying west into the gap in the winter of 1943, those winds were a severe hindrance. When coupled with icing conditions and poor weather over the airfields, Atlantic winter weather could easily neutralise apparent VLR capability. In order to operate over the Atlantic in the months when poor flying weather could be expected (November–March), aircraft required high quality weather information. Fortunately, this requirement had been fully grasped by the CAD long before the war, and Britain had by 1936 a fully developed Empire-wide weather reporting network linked to civil and military airports. The Imperial dimension of this effort meant, above all, the Canadian weather tracking stations spread across the subarctic and British stations in west Africa and Caribbean that monitored the great “weather factories” that influence the north Atlantic. This effort was greatly complicated by the lack of scientific penetration into the Arctic, by far the most important of the regions not only for Atlantic flying but also the strategic bombing effort in Europe. This network meant little, however, without a capacity to provide timely information to actual aircraft. Particularly, it was vitally important to give aircraft in the mid-Atlantic the earliest possible warning of icing fronts, since it was usually necessary to chart a course around it. The CAD’s linked weather stations in Newfoundland and Ireland provided the basis for this service. By the spring of 1941 the prewar Anglo-American route across the Atlantic had been transformed into a larger scale“Atlantic Ferry that exploited the prevailing winds to fly American and Canadian-built aircraft to Britain. In the fall of 1941, a return service based on Liberator transport variants began, traversing the gap with loads of ferry pilots and VIPs a year before the months of crisis, while in the spring of 1941 the Americans began building bases in Newfoundland, northern Canada, and Greenland that included substantial aviation facilities, largely again for Ferry purposes. In company with the British-built airfield complex in Iceland, these facilities provided the infrastructural basis for the later ASW air effort.[i]In the absence of major airfields and meteorological facilities on Iceland, Greenland, and Newfoundland, it was impossible for the RAF to develop a prewar north Atlantic landplane-based maritime cooperation policy. Now, any interwar proposal to build British military facilities on the Danish insular protectorates would have been utterly futile as well as unthinkable. However, the CAD-built airbase on Newfoundland did at least supply the rudimentary infrastructural requirements of such a strategy, and the CAD’s effort to establish an Atlantic commercial service was very closely followed by the service press, indicating a lively awareness of its military potential, even if the concern at this point was probably the German surface fleet. It might be thought, then, that the Air Staff might have foreseen the need for a landplane to cover the gap during the winter months. There were powerful reasons to go slow in these matters, however. First of all, the cost of airfield construction in these remote areas was immense, and so was the consequent necessary investment of resources, and in Iceland’s case, shipping. More importantly, the polar weather frontier was at this very moment yielding not to a sudden interest, but to technology. British meteorologists had been conducting intensive research on Greenland and to a lesser extent Iceland for over a decade. Nevertheless, reputable scientists still held simply ludicrous misconceptions about Greenland’s role in storm generation. The simple fact was that the instrumentation needed to supply reliable forecasts of Atlantic Arctic weather was still lacking. Weather radar, and that wonder of mid-century electronics, the weather balloon (“radiosonde”), filled the technical side of the requirement. Neither centimetric radar nor the miniaturized, automated instrumentation of the radiosonde could have come before it did, or it would have been developed to support strategic bombing, where it was equally necessary. But there is also something to be said for the sheer mass of information that the unlimited funds and labour made available by wartime conditions. The American official historian offers the example of the 26 USN ASW frigates converted into weather ships. (So the weather information required for VLR ASW was generated by ASW escorts made surplus by the collapse of the German campaign in the central Atlantic.) In other words, before contemplating operations in the gap, the RAF or CAD had to build expensive facilities on Newfoundland (begun before the war) and on Danish territory, raise several thousand personnel and a medium-sized navy for weather reporting, and more significantly from the perspective of this article, deploy a number of new electronic technologies.[ii]Got all that? Here’s an ad from Flight in way of a reward.So what’s the tl;dr? That perfectly adequate range can turn into far too little due to even a minor navigational or metereological error. One icing front, or zero-zero conditions at Gander, and that’s the ball game. Hope you have the fuel to abort!To get around these problems, very long range operational flying over the North Atlantic required a whole set of technical innovations in aircraft design that delivered reliable long range across a wider set of initial conditions; and the building up of an enormous ground support infrastructure. Aircraft range in World War II conditions isn’t some magical thing that some designers can put into a plane, and others can’t. It’s cutting edge aeronautical science across a range of disciplines.And I haven’t even talked about navigation or the combat load, yet![i].For Atlantic aviation and meteorology through 1939, see F. Entwhistle, “Atlantic Flight and its Bearing on Meteorology.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society (hereafter Quart. Jour. Roy. Met. Soc.) 64 (1938): 217; “Transatlantic Meteorology,” Flight, January 6, 1937, 4-7; for weather’s impact on surface ASW operations, see David K. Brown, “Atlantic Escorts, 1939-45,” in Battle of the Atlantic, ed. Howarth and Law, 465; and Werner Rahn, “The Campaign: The German Perspective,” in Battle, 548.[ii]. For the costs of British airfield design development and construction in general, see Philip Gordon Hudson, “The Development and Construction of Airfields and Runways for the Royal Air Force, 1939-1945,” in The Civil Engineer in War: A Symposium on War-time Engineering Problems, 3 vols., ed. Institution of Civil Engineers [Great Britain] [London: By the Institution, 1948], passim, and for costs, 11–13; some enlightening comparative perspective can be found in Lenore Fine and Jesse A. Remington, The Corps of Engineers, 3 vols, United States Army in WWII Series (Washington: GPO, 1971), 1: 613-649; for the development at Gander specifically, see Carl A. Christie, and Frank Hatch, Ocean Bridge: The History of Ferry Command (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 21-40; cited costs (£10 million for Reykyavik, $12 million or more for Gander, no costs cited for the Greenland airfields) are from “Atlantic Air Conference Ends, in Flight, 4 April, 1946, 347; and “Civil Aviation News,” Flight, 26 December, 1946, 701-702; and Flight, 18 July, 1946, 17; for the prewar meteorological situation in the north Atlantic, see H. Lamb, “A Visit to Iceland,” Quart. Jour. Roy. Met. Soc. 65 (1939): 244; and Gordon Manley, “Meteorological Observations of the British East Greenland Expedition, 1935--36 at Kangerdlugssuak, 68°10' N, 31° 44' W.” Quart. Jour. Roy. Met. Soc. 64 (1938); for wartime applications of centimetric weather radar, see R. H. Maynard, “Radar and Weather,”Journal of Meteorology 2, 4 (December, 1946): 214-5; and R. M.Poulter, “Science and Weather During the War: a summary of Forecasting Progress,”Quart. Jour. Roy. Met. Soc. 71 (1945): 391-6, for a more skeptical position, see F. H. Smith, “A Reply to R. M. Poulter,” Quart. Jour. Roy. Met. Soc. 72 (1946): 205-6; for weather balloon progress, see C. M. Botley, “The British Radio-Sonde,” Quart. Jour. Roy. Met. Soc. (1946): 170-3; for the high Arctic weather reporting network, see George R. Thomson, et al. The Signals Corps, 3 vols., a work in the United States Army in WWII series (Washington: GPO, (?)- 1957), 2: 275-90; and for the Atlantic weather fleet, see Charles C. Bales, and John F. Fuller, America’s Weather Warriors, 1814-1985 (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 1986): 65-6.ing Aircraft: ME��3 0[i]. For high octane fuels, see William Haynes, ed. American Chemical Industry, Vol. 6, The Chemical Companies (New York; London: Van Nostrand, 1949), 151-3, 216, 380-5; Maxwell Smith, Aviation Fuels (Cambridge, U.K.: G. T. Foulis, 1970), 20-2, 34-5, 50-6, 71, 73, 231-8; and N. O. Rawlinson, “Chapter 13: Aviation Fuels,” in Modern Petroleum Technology, 3rd. Ed., Hon. Ed. E. B. Evans (London: By the Institute of Petroleum, 1962), 495; on Allied fuel supply see Robert E. Wilson, “Petroleum and the War,” Transactions of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers 37 (1941), 508-09; and S. J. M. Auld, “Some American Thoughts on To-morrow’s Oil,” Institute of Petroleum Review, 1 (1947), 107; and W. M. Holaday, “Wartime Refinery Operations and Their Effect Upon Motor and Aviation Fuels,” SAE Journal, June, 1946, 303–9; for the development of 100/130 gasoline, see Henrietta M. Larson, et al., History of the Standard Oil Company (New Jersey): New Horizons, 1927-1950 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 503; for a review of British fuel and aeroengine policy, see Andrew Nahum, “Two-Stroke or Turbine: The Aviation Research Committee and British Aero Engine Development in World War II,” Technology and Culture 38 (April, 1997): 336-48; there is no comprehensive monograph on British prewar aviation fuel policy, but F. R. Banks laid out the Air Ministry policy change by implication in “Fuels and Engines,” Flight, 28 September, 1939, 269–70.[i]. Long range flight details, see Flight for Oct. 13, 1938, 311; Nov. 10, 1938, 414, Ibid., Nov 17, 1938, 458; Ibid., June 15, 1939, 616; December 16, 1937, 601; May 20, 1937, 502; and Aviation, December, 1938, 52 also G. H. Burchall, “North Atlantic Flights in 1938,” in H. G. Thursfield, ed. Brasssey’s Naval Annual, 1938 (London: W. Clowes, 1938), 209-19; according to Owen Thetford, (see Aircraft of the RAF Since 1918 6th Ed (London: Putnam, 1976),) modifications of the Long Range Unit’s Wellesleys were confined to a long cowl to cover the specially-modified Bristol Perseus XXI engines used in them.[ii]. For comparative disposable lift figures, see H.F. King, “Transports Today and Tomorrow,” Flight, 28 April, 1938: c–f; R. A. E. Luard, “Transport Comparisons,” Flight, 6 January, 1938, 16; for a general analysis of the parameters of long range flight, see F. M. Green, “Aircraft Propulsion,” Proceedings of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, 156 (January–December, 1947): 176–9, 182–5 for the relationship between statics and aerodynamics, especially in Germany and the role of airship design, see Lutz Budraß, Flugzeugindustrie und Luftrüstung in Deutschland 1918–1945 (Düsseldorf: Droste, [1998]), 29–31, 78–80; an article on geodetics was published in the July, 1936 Aviation by Vickers engineer Oliver Stewart, (“Egg Shell Airplanes: Geodetic Construction Increases Bomber Range 2 1/2 Times,”Aviation, July, 1936, 23–25; a similar but anonymous article (“Great Circle Engineering,”) was published in The Aeroplane, 6 January, 1936; the weight problems of the Halifax are discussed in Brian Johnson and Terry Hefferman, Boscombe Down 1939–45: A Most Secret Place [{London}]: Jane’s, {1982},1–13]; and explained by the highly critical comments of retired Air Ministry Director of Technical Development W. O. Manning, and Hawker Chief Designer Sidney Camm to J. Robinson, “Some Developments in Aircraft Production,” (J. Roy. Aero. Soc. 43 (1949): 39–66); the importance of these methods in American aircraft production is underlined in T. P. Wright, “American Methods of Aircraft Production,” Jour. Roy. Aero. Soc 43 (1939): 51.); for an overview of these methods as used in the B-24H, see Irving Brinton. Holley, Jr., Buying Aircraft: Matériel for the Army Air Forces. A work in the series US Army in World War II (Washington: GPO, 1964), 541; the importance of component finish can be seen by comparing the average price of structural elements in the British aeronautical industry compared to engineering industry average in 1935 (O. W. Roskill, “The Census of Production, 1935,” Engineering, 7 July, 1939, 5, and 14 July, 1939, 36); for the arduous design effort behind the final Lancaster, see Francis K. Mason, The Avro Lancaste (Bourne End, U.K.: Aston, 1989), 27–30.*In the course of which, one of the LRDU Wellesleys took off on an autopilot-controlled course out to sea and was never seen again. No one is sure why, but the press decided that it was “German spies.” Just FYI for those who might be writing a pulp novel.

.People are surprised to discover how long airline pilots are away from home.Let’s say you’re a seasoned captain flying Los Angeles (LAX) to Boston (BOS) transcontinental round trips. A much-desired route. It is non-stop, six hours each way and isn’t into JFK or Newark. Those airports experience chronic congestion. In bad weather, flights may be diverted to other airports, including Boston’s Logan Airport.You’ll be flying a Boeing 777. The “Triple Seven” is a wide body carrying about 300 passengers. It, too, is seasoned. Introduced in 1995, it has become a reliable workhorse for the airlines. Pilots love it.In your spiffy uniform, you leave your family and suburban home in Glendale, California at 7am Monday, arriving LAX 8:20 am. Co-pilot already there. You love flying with this guy: he’s knows what you want before you know what you want! He briefs you on weather enroute, at BOS and alternative airports. A front is moving in over BOS. Where’s the jet stream? Swooping along nicely at 38,000′. Could cut time to Boston.Fueling is, of course, critical. Co-pilot has worked that up. Dear reader, if you’d like to read a fascinating account of fuel loading gone disastrously wrong, Google up: Gimli Glider.The “Glider.”Co-pilot descends to the tarmac. Down there he’ll kick the tires, look for suspicious puddles of hydraulic fluid and examine the plane’s lower exterior. If you were flying from a Third World country, he’d check the wheel wells for stowaways.Co-pilot is holding an E6B Flight Computer, an analog device rarely used by today’s pilots. (Maybe the airline’s computers were down?) I used the “wiz wheel” training for Private Pilot in 1967.10am Departure. Right on time, the tower snaps, “American 10, push.” You radio the pushback tug below the nose that your brakes are released, let’s do this. The tug gathers up your nose gear and starts pushing half a million pounds of airplane to taxiway Bravo.On time! Love it! Delays put you in a really foul mood. Crew suffers. Not this fine Southern California morning. During the night, Santa Ana winds blew L.A.’s iconic smog out to sea. Severe clear. You’ll fly the eastbound leg, co-pilot the return. He’ll run the radios this leg.“One start,” you command. Co-pilot flicks switches. A rising moan from the left side. Tug retreats. “Two start!” Ground is gabbling at co-pilot, “American 10…via taxiway Bravo…hold short for landing traffic….blah, blah, blah.” You gently throttle up a touch of break away thrust and we’re rolling! You pinch yourself. As a boy you gazed up at those contrails and dreamed. Now you’re in command of a giant flying machine yourself. Can there be a better job in the world? Can there?“Okay, no more talk about that girl ‘til we’re above 10′000′. Sterile cockpit, remember?”“Flight attendants be seated for take off.” You swing onto two mile long runway 24. Beyond is the Pacific. Aligned. Cleared. Pushing those two levers forward unleashes a thunderous surge of power. Never ceases to enthrall!The sound issuing from the engine’s gulping mouth is different from the thundering rear. It’s a high grinding snarl. The engine is grinding up air molecules, smashing them together and setting them on fire. That creates thrust. We’re moving at over 100 mph now, the plane shaking like a creature itching to get off the planet Earth. Co-pilot snaps “V1!” Can’t stop now! And then, at 160 mph, “Rotate!” You pull back on the yoke and…she’s airborne. Smooth! “Gear up.”As you climb, you glance down. Black specks on the ocean: surfers.“Adios” Co-pilot tells LAX tower and then introduces us to the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) out in the desert at Palmdale. They clear you right up to Flight Level Thirty Eight (38,000′) Co-pilot grins. He knows how much you love tail winds and now you just got yourself a nice 120 mph one.“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain. Blah-blah-blah…expect to land in Boston about 20 minutes early.”Uneventful crossing. Oh, except a celebrity in First gets into a snit about the temperature of her champagne. You go back and sooth ruffled feathers. The deliciously attractive flight attendant thanks you profusely. And winks. Hmmm.Snowing hard in Boston. Visibility is for shit and Logan is down to one icy runway. Approach Control vectors [non-pilots: this means giving the pilot a course to fly] you out over the Atlantic to hold. Good thing you told the Co-pilot to take on that extra 5′000 lbs of fuel. Experience.You’re ready to shoot Logan’s 4 Right ILS approach. Your Triple Seven is equipped to land—herself—in zero/zero conditions. This is called a Category IIc approach. Exciting! You will do nothing but watch the plane land itself—you hope.“500!” a male voice says out of nowhere. The radio altimeter calling altitude.The tower clears you to land. The snow is driving into the warm, yellowish landing lights and flicking wing tip strobes. “Beautiful,” the co-pilot says. He’s a bit of a poet. The cockpit is a cozy room, the instrument panel its glowing hearth. Can there be a better job? Really. Can there? You’re riding a massive machine and it’s doing all the heavy lifting.The landing gear lights are blinking red. A rushing sound and ka-thunking below. Three green! Gear is down and locked.“100!”A whining sound as Triple Seven gives herself a nice 20 degree helping of flaps, causing a slight shuddering.The unseen tower speaks: “American 10, negative traffic in the ship channel.” Because Logan Airport sticks out into Boston harbor, a ship’s metal mass passing under the ILS could bend the super sensitive CAT IIc radio signals and possibly trigger an aborted landing. Co-pilot thanks tower.The massive plane is glued to the Glide Slope, gently surging the engines. She tweaks the heading into the slight cross wind. You marvel.“50–40–30–20-10- Retard! Retard!” She retards the throttles smartly as the ILS lights flash under you. You hold your breathe, wanting it to be good—then—a trembling. Seams in the plane shiver and rattle—we’re on the ground! More than good, brilliant! And in zero/zero. A furious roar as she applies full thrust reverse, tugging you against your harness. Smart move on this ice! Planes have gone off the end of icy runways at Boston.The passengers deplane, smiling, thanking, not knowing it’s really the plane they should thank. The Co-pilot loves this part, standing in the cockpit door, groundlings looking up at him with respect, even awe. You feel just a touch of…jealousy. But he’s a good pilot, let them think he did it all.Whew! You, a tanned creature of Southern California meet snowy New England. The swirling snow is beautiful. It muffles the thundering take offs. You can see your breath. On the American shuttle over to the Hilton, guess who’s aboard: Miss Winking Flight Attendant is who. The Co-pilot grins as you invite her to dinner. This is…unusual.Return flight is a sorry affair, made unhappy by goddam Air Traffic Control (ATC) putting you smack into the teeth of the jet stream. Plus turbulence frightening passengers. You wheedle and and beg ATC the whole way west, “We’re experiencing chop here at thirty eight. Any chance for higher?” Negative. Jerks!“For the tenth time, American 10, unable!”Now you’re feeling the pull of home. You’ve flown enough to recognize this Homeward Bound Syndrome. (HBS) You made up the name, but the condition is real: any obstacle to getting home produces anything from irritation to barely contained rage. A pilot must not give in to these. Disasters have occurred because of HBS. Tenerife comes to mind….1977, Tenerife, the worst aviation disaster—583 dead—Dutch KLM Captain had HBS. No other explanation.You’re going to be—ugh—the hated L word. But then, joy! ATC vectors you onto the fast Profile Descent into LAX. All is forgiven. Precious minutes recovered. It’s a sled ride over the San Gabriels, into the smog pit to land on 24 Left.“I don’t trust any air I can’t see.”“Hey, I think I know a short cut.”The co-pilot’s landing is a thing of beauty. You praise him by saying “Oh…yeah!” loudly in your coolest voice. Then you busy yourself with Ground on the radio. Something’s not quite right. She pauses when she says your gate.Never mind. You’re On Time! Oh, those wonderful words. You’re all happy as the co-pilot taxis to American’s gates. Hey! WTF? Some piece of shit is sitting in YOUR assigned gate! Well, give us another! No, the dispatcher snaps, the piece will push momentarily. Just cool it.COOL it? You know this is what passengers hate: you’re there…but you’re not there, sitting out on the tarmac, engines running, stuck. They’re itching to jump up and grab their carry on—but know better. You sooth them with your well-practiced, gravelly Voice of God voice.“Momentarily,” my ass! Your 2pm arrival stretches to 2:15pm, then 2:20pm. Now you can feel waves of hate coming from the passenger cabin. FINALLY at 2:25, the piece pushes its sorry butt back and you dock at the jetbridge, steaming. The passengers give you dirty looks deplaning. Hey, come on!“No, Skipper, seriously! You do NOT want to ‘go have a word with her’.”Leaving the co-pilot to put the ship to bed, you scurry for the Honda. That 25 minute delay was torture. You’re a creature of schedules-ON TIME schedules. Thirty two hours away from home. You last saw the kids & wife for—what?— 10 seconds the day before, a brushed kiss good bye in the kitchen, thirty two hours ago.Twice you’ve crossed the United States. You’re jet lagged out, a wild pendulum of emotions: grumpy and glad, happy and sad. Okay, you didn’t mean to go off on that dispatcher, but —excuse me—where is OUR fucking gate. Your emotions swing, eyes tearing up at the prospect of seeing them after thirty two hours. How will they greet you? Indifferently? Who the hell is this guy?And to think you almost bid the Los Angeles to Auckland, New Zealand run with it’s 15 hour 25 minute flight!You pull in the drive. Oh, there they are in the side yard, just home from school. They come running joyfully!“Dad! Dad! We missed you. We really missed you!”Oh yes, it’s a great job and you love it, but….Thirty two hours of being missed?.Now, Reader, look at those hours. Most workers are away from home for, what?, maybe ten, eleven. Surely I surprised you..“&*%$#! They’re taking their sweet time getting us OUR gate. Man, let’s get this puppy parked!”