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Here’s an interesting video on future hovering spy drones.  Well, my hopes are there are no wars in the future and that these future hovering spy drones will only serve to prevent wars.  Where are my tax dollars damn Uncle Sam?

This video shows, which is a lot of fun to watch, shows STARMAC, the Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent, described as “a testbed of 6 quadrotor helicopter unmanned aerial vehicles that fly indoors and outdoors to experiment with autonomous agent algorithms.”

via wired

Da pochi giorni è on line il nuovo Blog del Team Beat Fly dal titolo Sensual Vision.
La nuova piattaforma WordPress accompagna e sostiene l’altra faccia del Team, che da oggi si propone con una valanga di nuovi Argomenti, risorse, iniziative, tutorials e materiale proveniente dal mondo del web. La splendita modella inglese Danielle si è prestata come nuova testimonial per il concept del nuovo Blog che sfrutta tutte le potenzilità della piattaforma WP.
Tanti i nuovi argomenti affrontati: dal marketing alla comunicazione fino a riflessioni sul codice CSS, AJAX e Flex. Un Blog a 360° per tutti gli amanti del web e di tutto quello che gli gira attorno.
Non Perdetelo!
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Recently Muneco Medina With Fly Society Was Arrested Last Night March 4th For Promoting His Mixtape and Passing Out Flyers for A New Club Night. Muneco Medina real name Eric had a long record with Texas and Louisiana Police department. What became a routine stop for suspicion once Jefferson Parish Police Ran eric’s name that was a wrap for him. so this is what he wants everybody that supports his music to keep pushing it and passing it along to the next person that has never heard of Muneco Medina.

And big shouts out to my homie Kingsteelo that is upstate his damn self. at the bottom are links to there myspace page keep them alive.

Currency holla.

..

support our falling soldier by uploading up any pictures that you have of them and spread them around. these two kats was all music, its just fucked up that music isn’t free and studios don’t come cheap. So how do you pay for all that well you can get a job but you will never have time to use it. Hustle and flow is the only way to get it in this game. but it all has a price, freedom is one of them but don’t let there music stop, just keep posting it everywhere. this pic is just the tip of the ice burg. join in on the spreading and help us get this music to the masses..

Join in on the Discussion and talk about fucked up situation’s with the law.

here is the myspace page to both my homies that are trapped behind closed bars.

Muneco Medina
KingSteelo

Jeff Zacharias is my certificated flight instructor, or CFI. He's the guy who taught me how to fly. I found him after sending an email to a bunch of local CFIs describing my specific goals and needs. His reply was the first and the best among several. We scheduled a demo flight on November 26, 2006, out of San Carlos, and it went fine.

After the lesson I asked Jeff all the usual questions you're supposed to ask a prospective CFI, in particular what percentage of his students pass their checkride on the first try. His answer was more or less "not applicable," because he hadn't sent anyone yet to a checkride. Usually you expect an answer somewhere very close to 100%, so this was technically a disqualifying answer, but I had a good feeling about Jeff, so we settled on a weekly schedule from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Wednesday mornings at San Carlos.

Twice I did my best to kill Jeff. First, in March we were at Livermore Airport doing touch-and-go landings, and on the takeoff roll the plane began veering toward the left of the runway. I had been trying to avoid dragging the brakes during taxi and takeoff, so I'd overcorrected by leaving my feet on the floor unless I really meant to effect a control input. (As I write this eight months later it sounds ridiculous; you're constantly putting in at least some pedal input just about whenever the plane's in motion.) As I realized what was happening, I froze. I was afraid to lift my feet and put them back on the pedals. I recall a visceral fear that I'd flip the plane if I touched the pedals, much as you might if you quickly spun your car's steering wheel on the highway.

We were at nearly 50 knots and headed for the rough along the side of the runway. Today I know several different ways to handle this situation, but at the time as a junior student I'd have certainly nosed-over the plane at a deadly speed.

This was the first time during our instruction that Jeff had to take control from me. The recovery was straightforward: jam on the right rudder pedal, pull back to lighten the load on the wheels, and moments later we were in the air and safe.

We discussed what happened later that day in email. Jeff's attitude was these sorts of incidents are part of learning (specifically that p-factor is huge when you're already off the nosewheel and at full throttle), and that it was no big deal. I took comfort in his response, and didn't let it crush my self-confidence.

The second time I tried to kill Jeff was a few weeks later in April. We were at Hayward Executive, getting closer to my first solo flight, practicing all sorts of emergencies and unusual situations (broken flaps, broken trim, engine-out, short but very high approach). I was too high but the flaps were "broken" in an up position, so I had to execute a forward slip, which is a maneuver in which the pilot yaws the plane but rolls in the opposite direction in order to thwart the airplane's naturally clean aerodynamics and cause it to begin to descend quickly without gaining airspeed. For some reason that day I decided to pull slightly back on the yoke during the maneuver, forgetting that one usually needs to push the plane's nose down in order to keep it safely above stalling speed.

If that was too technical, here it is again in layman's terms: if a plane keeps moving forward fast enough, then the wings lift it and it stays airborne. If the plane slows down too much, it turns into the aerodynamic equivalent of a rock, which, as you may know, falls right out of the sky. You don't want to stall the airplane, and you especially don't want to stall it when you're doing a forward slip, because that leads to a condition called a spin that is generally fatal below 1,000 feet.

The moment Jeff realized what was happening, he reflexively shoved his hands at the yoke, thereby pointing the nose down and increasing our airspeed. He simultaneously issued a wryly phrased admonishment that it would be better if I didn't kill us both. I believe we got close to 52 knots, which is quite close to the stalling speed of a Cessna 172 in the flaps-up configuration (even though the airspeed indicator can be inaccurate in low-speed and slipped conditions), and I'm not sure I'd have corrected in time on my own.

Anyway, as you have no doubt deduced, I failed on both attempts, and we lived to fly again. But my respect for Jeff's restraint, patience, and perspective increased dramatically after these two incidents. I'd have vowed never to fly again with a spaz like me, but it rolled right off Jeff. I think this epitomizes what makes a good instructor good: a determined, unflappable willingness to sit quietly in the right seat and let your student make mistakes, while at the same time staying alert to prevent fatal mistakes.

I could go on, but this is the web, and your attention span is consequently short. So here are some bullet points:

• Jeff videotaped my solo and edited it into a DVD. Amazingly cool and kind of him.


• Jeff was almost never late to a lesson, even though we started at 6 a.m. on weekdays. The one time he was late, I coincidentally forgot to set my own alarm and slept in, and we almost simultaneously called each other, apologizing and begging to reschedule to 7:00.


• During the three hours of my checkride that took place over nearly a month, Jeff went through heroics to ensure I was prepared to succeed. He showed up on his own time to make sure my checkride paperwork was correct. He offered to fly me IFR to get me to Watsonville, where my examiner was stranded. He juggled his work and personal schedule to fit in spur-of-the-moment lessons when I was feeling out of practice. It was gratifying to have another human being on Earth who cared at least as much as I did that my checkride went smoothly (which, other than scheduling, it did).


• Jeff always responded quickly and thoughtfully to my emails. I have no idea how many unbilled hours he spent composing his replies over the last year, but I'm sure the total is substantial.


• If Jeff has an ego, he never showed it to me. Like me, he's a software guy, and when you get two of those types talking about any technical subject, eventually they're going to get into some kind of disagreement that rises to the level of religion. Aviation has just as many styles, dialects, schools of thought, and gray areas as software development, but nothing between Jeff and me ever escalated -- though he did have to try pretty hard to disabuse me of some notions. I've been fairly described as abrasive and stubborn in the past, so I have to give Jeff credit.

All this, and he's a genuinely nice guy, too. Oh, and that question I asked him last year about his percentage of students passing their test on the first try? His answer is now 100%. :) If you're looking for an instructor, give him a call.

This morning was exhausting. I just took a two-hour nap and feel like I've slept for a week.

Phase checks aren't graded, and they aren't pass/fail either. They are what they're called; a "check" at this "phase" of flight training that the student is moving in the right direction. But they certainly could be graded like school exams, and if they were, I'd have passed with a C+ grade.

The ground review section was fine. As usual I had to think for a few seconds before coming up with the right answers for some airspace questions, and there was an interesting question about a new kind of emergency (stuck throttle). I didn't know a few answers (What does HIWAS stand for? What is the cause of an overvoltage problem?), but there weren't any chronically deficient areas.

We got in the plane and flew off to our imaginary destination, a desolate spot in Nevada. In spite of my examiner's proper concern that error induced from the unpredictable liftoff from SQL (runway 12 or 30 plus various traffic conditions can lead to quite a different heading toward a waypoint), I got lucky and arrived at the Sunol Golf Course VFR waypoint right on time. However, I had to make things more interesting than that. I looked down to my left and confirmed we were over the lake, but the golf course was up ahead to the left, so I waited until we were overhead it, and then a minute longer to get to SUNOL, then turned onto the Victor airway toward Sacramento.

Unfortunately, I was about to learn that I had identified the wrong golf course: one that was about six miles past the one that constitutes the informal visual checkpoint west of SUNOL. We'd turned a significant distance north of our course.

Ever the optimist, Patti turned the situation into a genuine version of the lost procedure, and asked me to look out the window (as opposed to using GPS or the VORs) to figure out where we were. Although I quickly identified the lake near Byron, I didn't have enough of a sense of scale to quickly turn that into a fix on our position. I had to circle for quite a while to decide that we were right between Tracy and Modesto, close to the north side of Tracy. I got the right answer, but it just took too long.

Next, Patti asked me to divert to New Jerusalem. I got this essentially right: heading 140, about eight nm away, arrive in four minutes, use 0.6 gallons of gas. I put us on course for the airport and sure enough saw a lonely runway below us at the expected time. However, it took me far too long to convince myself that it was the right airport; I didn't have the A/FD in the front seat, and that was the only way to tell that New Jerusalem's runway was indeed 12/30. So I had to reach into the back seat and fumble around for the book. But eventually it worked out, and when I announced my answer, Patti said it was correct. Again, right answer, just too long to get it.

We talked through the entry and landing pattern, and unfortunately Patti was satisfied, because she skipped straight to a simulated engine-out emergency. I went through this procedure correctly, but my spiral downward wasn't lined up properly such that I could exit right onto final. Instead, my entry into the spiral was on the centerline. So on exit, I had to turn to get on final. This led to a sequence of problems: getting on centerline late caused me to be late to adjust the glide slope, which caused me to be too high, which gave me too little time to get my approach speed correct. I was too fast, too high, and too close to the runway. About halfway down the runway I decided to go around, which I did. This was the right decision in the situation, but I shouldn't have gotten into the situation. I clearly failed the engine-out emergency.

Next was hood work and navigation to a VOR. This was fine. Coming home to SQL was fine. There was a 7-knot right crosswind on the soft-field landing that I handled OK, but I fell into an old habit of relaxing the controls on touchdown and didn't keep the ailerons pushing against the crosswind, so we drifted off centerline on the post-landing roll.

Something new: it turns out that Tower can hand you to Ground without saying "taxi to parking, monitor ground point six." What he actually said was "Contact ground point six" but didn't clear me to taxi. I would have failed this on a checkride because I misheard this as clearance to taxi and started rolling before Patti kindly pointed out the mistake.

And finally, I let my mind distract myself in the parking area. While running through all the mistakes I'd made during the phase check, I skipped pulling the mixture full lean and just shut off the mags. I didn't notice the problem right away because this particular plane sometimes takes a while to sputter to a stop with the mixture full lean, and the behavior was identical to that. Patti quickly figured out the problem, though, and all was well. We later joked that we needed a new section on the phase check for how to shut off an airplane.

As of a few hours ago, I am officially a private pilot! Today I passed my FAA practical test, informally known as the "checkride." This means I'm now legal to fly passengers in airplanes, subject to about 700 exceptions, qualifications, and limitations.

You know that heavy lead vest the dentist puts on you when you get your head X-rayed? Imagine wearing about three of those for five months straight, and then one afternoon taking them off and suddenly being as light as you used to be. That's how I feel! Beginning in July of this year I've been "just a few weeks" away from my checkride, and I've put much of my life on hold as a result. Little did I know that weather would delay my cross-country flights for many weeks, that a dozen little things would conspire to delay my checkride prep again and again, and that my checkride itself would take six weeks to schedule and almost a month to complete. I'm excited to have my life back.

I'll write more later.