April 2012
I am the kind of person to whom anything can happen, and usually does.
My brother Mike calls to ask a simple question. “Do you want to go south for the winter?” he inquires.
I say yes, thinking a few days on the beach at his Sanibel Island timeshare will be a welcome antidote to the months-long overcasts and lake effect snow squalls common in northeast Ohio this time of year.
For me, an acute cabin fever typically starts to bloom with the first frost, and it is in full fester with the arrival of snowflakes by late autumn. The misery and restlessness persist for all of winter, until the last 100-pound, gravel-encrusted ice bomb drops from the wheel well of my Jeep in early spring.
My reverie is shattered when Mike says, “We’re not going to Sanibel.” There is a slight pause on the telephone. “We’re thinking about heading a little farther south this time, leaving in couple months—are you in?”
And just like that, a weekend on Sanibel turns into a three-week expedition to Antarctica.
In my imagination, I recline on a chaise longue and watch the water quietly lap at the sands of Florida’s Gulf Coast. In real life, I am getting hurled off my cot in the pitch black of night, while a Russian ship captain skates our souls down the backsides of 70-foot swells in the open ocean off of Cape Horn.
“Storms are frequent in the Drake Passage,” a ship’s mate tells me. “If you fall overboard without your life vest, swim as fast as you can to the bottom,” he advises.
I confess that I am not a very good swimmer. “It doesn’t matter,” he replies. “You’re dead either way.”
Life’s adventures inspire a fondness for the equipment, clever gear and latest gadgets designed to improve our safety and comfort at a time when we need them most.
Occasionally, a gadget exists simply to make a task a little less onerous or more interesting. I am thinking of an ingenious mechanical contraption that, when you turn the little wooden handle, it miraculously peels, slices and cores an apple. I have one stuck to the kitchen counter.
Most pilots are gear freaks. For some of us, the affliction is slight. For others, it is compelling, and borders on the maniacal. I recall once seeing an old Piper Super Cub for sale. It had a restored cockpit fitted in leather and an instrument panel that would have made an Airbus captain’s jaw drop. It rested on amphibious floats monitored by a water and air gear position advisory system and had boundary layer vortex generators on the wings.
Back in the 1940s, Mr. Piper might not have imagined ferrying one of his machines from Lock Haven to anywhere, outfitted with much more than the most basic equipment. Yet today, this Piper aircraft for sale actually had its instrument panel extended to hold everything you would expect to find, and much more.
There was a digital IFR-GPS, Nav/Com and transponder, a fuel flow computer, graphical engine analyzer and data recorder. The VOR, LOC and GS were integrated with an electronic HSI—and right next to it, a Stormscope. It had an XM Satellite Weather receiver, digital audio panel and a CD player with built-in, noise canceling stereo headsets.
This is just what I can remember—but then again, I didn’t look in the backseat. That I remember it at all should be an indication of my membership in aviation’s fraternity of gizmo geeks.
The proud owner of this remarkable machine was a fly fisherman. He seemed, at first glance, to also have an equally remarkable array of fishing tackle hanging from his customized vest. On his head was a smart Australian Tilley hat. A pair of tortoise shell polarized sunglasses hung from the patented eyewear retainer draped around his neck. His hip waders and boots were impeccable.
Seeing such a magnificently appointed man alongside such a splendidly refurbished flying machine was a sight to behold. For just a moment, I basked in a vicarious wish—though the thrill was short-lived, since I knew even less about fly fishing than I did about swimming.
Why do some pilots sport giant wrist-mounted computers that predict the weather, report altitude, local barometric pressure and the current time in Dubai?
Why does your flight bag weigh as much as a baby moose?
And just what is our fascination with flashlights? Not those old-school incandescents—I mean the ones with Krypton bulbs and high-tech tri-color LEDs that, with a flick of the switch, will shine a beam of white, red or cool aquamarine on some nocturnal problem without impairing a speck of our night vision?
The answer to all of these questions is Gizmo Zen. Gizmo Zen is that profound enlightenment that comes from the direct, experiential realization of being one in the moment with a technology that is performing exactly the function for which it was designed and intended.
We all know it can happen. We don’t always know when, or how. But one thing is certain. Having just the right technology tool, widget or gizmo at your disposal will increase the possibility of achieving inner peace and harmony. It is hard to know what exactly will be required at any given time, so pilots acquire a lot of things in anticipation.
It is kind of like when, on a solo flight to somewhere, you ditch into Lake Michigan. But before your airship sinks, you fish out that inflatable life raft from underneath the backseat—the one that is advertised to be “easily deployed by children, exhausted pilots, or boaters.” It is, and now you’re in it. So you kick back inside to watch a few episodes of “Lost” on your iPod while search and rescue locks on to your GPS-enabled ELT.
Or, it is breaking out of a cloud deck at night on the VOR-A with a failed COM radio, so you key seven clicks into your portable handheld transceiver and see the HIRL snap on to illuminate the runway directly in front of you. Your glide path splits the PAPI beams into exactly two whites and two reds. All is right with the world.
It might be parking in the grass at Oshkosh knowing that when a gale kicks up over Lake Winnebago, the patented tiedowns adhering your airplane to the earth will assure you’ll find it in the same place when you return.
At 1,500 feet AGL on a summer afternoon, it is feeling your cheeks touch the bottom of your goggles in the cool, 90 mph air while you are neck-deep in the open cockpit of a 1930s Stearman. You only notice it when you smile… so, you smile a lot.
The polar opposite of Gizmo Zen might very well be Chindogu—the Japanese art of creating things that are, from a practical point of view, almost completely useless. Inherent in every Chindogu is the spirit of anarchy. If the Cat in the Hat hadn’t lost his “moss-covered three-handled family gredunza,” it probably would have made a good Chindogu.
In the spirit of a higher quality of living (and flying), we have stick-on sensors for the cockpit to sniff for carbon monoxide that we can’t smell, and portable travel johns infused with a special gel to neutralize what we can smell. There is a collapsible bike that will fit into your LSA, and if you don’t have room for a large toolbox, the maker of the original Swiss Army knife now has a collectible with 85 tools that weighs about two pounds and costs around a thousand bucks. (I think I know a fly fisherman who might be interested.)
While it is not quite ready for the present, a futuristic U.S. patent has been awarded to a California company that has plans for a safe, silent personal flight device using electromagnetic ion propulsion as its primary thrust generator. This jet pack will draw its power wirelessly from earthbound inductive green power broadcast stations.
We’ve got ergonomically designed tri-fold lighted kneeboards and portable traffic proximity avoidance systems complete with elevation and azimuth data output that can be layered over a route in real time on our GPS moving map displays.
With a special cell phone interface you can call for an FSS briefing from the cockpit and never remove your headset. On a long flight, your loved ones and Internet fans can track your adventure via live updates to a blog with a personal satellite messenger.
Of course, for almost every pilot who lives in anticipation of the next advance in gizmology, there is another who quietly abjures. These individuals are not aeronautical Luddites. They rather just prefer the bare necessity of the technological, favoring instead parsimonious selection and application. Being “in the moment” can harmoniously coexist with an ultra-technical world, and Anti-Gizmo Zen is no less powerful in its perfection.
Many a pilot’s perception of the world embraces the rational and the romantic. Often this means encompassing irrational sources of wisdom and balancing them with science, reason and technology. This is the stuff of inspiration and the galaxy where gizmos are born.
By the simple virtues of hope, physics, curiosity and a little magic, combined with equal portions of art and engineering, we routinely strap ourselves into winged machines that only slightly conceal us from the controlled explosions beneath the cowling. We harness this source as we travel across some of the planet’s most inhospitable geography, and we do it with the practiced nonchalance of a Japanese chef slicing an onion in midair.
So once in a while, a technology might save a life, or on another day, help peel a really fine apple. Either way, Gizmo Zen has a unique way to levitate us above the mundane—just like flying. One thing is certain: I can stop wearing that life vest now.
UPS is at the door, delivering my new, green-powered jet pack.
Joe Murray is a professor at Kent State University and an instrument-rated private pilot. He can often be found flying old airplanes in and out of grass airfields and farms around the Midwest, mostly looking for a free lunch and homemade pie. This year, to celebrate the 75th Anniversary of the Piper Cub, he will fly a 1946 Piper J-3 on a 1,670-mile adventure to Dayton Wright Brothers Airport via consecutive landings in all of Ohio’s 88 counties. (See www.lostinoscarhotel.com.) Send questions or comments to editor@www.piperflyer.com.
RESOURCES >>>>>
Personal flight vehicle and system;
ion-propelled jet pack drawings
google.com/patents/US7182295
Wenger giant Swiss army knife
wengerna.com/giant-knife-16999
wiggle.co.uk/images/wenger-Giant-
Knife-zoom.jpg
wengerna.com/stuff/contentmgr/files/
0/a45137daa224e9531cb3050458faee64/image/wenger_giant_knife.png
Apple peeler, corer, slicer
img.alibaba.com/photo/224010570_2/Cast_Iron_Apple_Peeler_and_Cutter_K_702__small.jpg
site.unbeatablesale.com/img032/wdc4320.jpg
