Johnny Wants A Plane...

[hells_half_acre]

I have to research light aircraft for a story I'm writing, except that I'm afraid to type it into google for fear that the Americans will find out and misinterpret and put me on some no-fly list, and then I won't be able to go to my friends' wedding in Bermuda next summer.

I'm also avoiding going to sleep because I don't want to wake up and have to work for 7.5 hours. Today I slacked off so much, I probably only got two hours of work in. It's ridiculous. I'm such a very horrible employee. I keep trying to think of jobs that I wouldn't mind doing, and I keep coming up with nothing. When left to my own devices, I tend to just read or write all day...but I just read predictable romances, because anything not predictable makes me too nervous. And I don't have the self-confidence or discipline to be a writer. Plus, you know, I'm not very good...I mean, all the literary tricks I've ever pulled off have always been by accident.

Once, I wrote a poem about Hamlet and handed it in instead of doing an essay. The teacher gave me an A, because I had used a lot of the same words as Shakespeare used in the play. I was happy for the A, but quite embarrassed by the comment, because I hadn't done it on purpose - I just have a slightly antiquated way of talking sometimes. Hamlet is my favorite tragedy though. There are so many good lines in it. Plus, it's basically a play about procrastination, so I can relate.

Obligatory Supernatural Topic:

You know what kind of annoys me? When people write wee!chester fic where Sam and Dean know that it was the yellow-eyed demon that killed their Mum. Boys and girls, we know for a fact that Sam and Dean did not even know that it was even a demon until mid-way through S1. I can't remember now when they found out about the yellow-eyes, but that might not even have been until Sam SAW it in Salvation. So, ladies and gentlemen, please stop writing fic where Dean is 9 and is all like "Sammy, we'll kill that yellow-eyed Demon and then I'mma going to take you to Disney World, bitch." Because although the sentiment is nice, the mistake ruins it for me. I apologize if this seems unnecessarily harsh.

Seriously, look it up...first half of S1 is all "the thing that killed our Mom", then John calls from that telephone booth and he's like "whazzup, my homies? Muthaf*ckers a DEMON, my bitches!" ....yeah, ok, I took some liberties with the script...I think it was more along the lines of "It's a demon...a pretty nasty one at that."

Ok, so...a good sign for when I should go to bed is when I start doing dialog in really stupid slang. And yeah, work is going to be even worse on less sleep, so I should probably go to sleep now...
 

Comments

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Ooo! Thanks! The An-1 is actually really close to being exactly what I was picturing (besides the position of the door, but that's not a set rule of the story or anything - I can easily change the position of the door in the narrative).

I was picturing a plane that was probably half-neglected. So, repairs are more careful than a kick, but the paint job isn't as important to the owners. The plane takes off from a country airfield...you know, the kind where it's farmers fields all around and then one of them just happens to have some hangers and a landing strip, and there's your airport. It goes on short runs, I think...obviously, since the owners are throwing people out of the plane, they tend to be up to no good (with a plane, for some reason).

[auriliawestlake.livejournal.com]

Then I'd definitely go with the An-2 - her range tends to be right around 500 miles or so before needing refueled (and that particular model's been in use for long enough to make it a realistic 'beater' of a plane). Her controls, unless they've been retrofitted, are all analogue (the altimeter, compass, etc.), so no computer-controls (though it is possible, if, like I said, she's been retrofitted). Just about the only 'high-tech' gadgetry she'd have in her is her transponder (the radio-beacon that identifies the plane to the tower controllers); I'm not sure if the FAA requires 'black boxes' for planes this small, though, so if it can be avoided, you might want to skip that bit.

And I used to live on the other side of one of those surrounding farmer's fields to a country airport, so I know exactly the sort of airfield you're aiming for. I used to watch the crop-dusters take off and land all the time - it was fun for me (and why I started mainlining airplane intel), though Mom and Dad always bitched about the noise.

Good luck with your story, and lemme know if you need anything else! Happy writing!

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much. Yes, the An-2 sounds perfect. I don't even think a blackbox will ever factor into the story (at least not the part we here about), so it's not that important if the plane does or doesn't have one. And actually, not being computerized might add a cool pilot-distraction-irregular-flying bit when things turn sour on the plane, so that'd be neat too.

Thanks again! Oh, one more question...what is the technical name for those double-wings on the plane?

[auriliawestlake.livejournal.com]

Um...huh? The 'double-wing' thing? I assume you want to know what the term is for an airplane with a double-set of wings, yes? It's 'biplane' - not to be confused with a 'triplane', the notorious plane of WWI's Red Baron. The lower set of wings allows the plane to be somewhat narrower (wingtip to wingtip) than an airplane of the same height, mass, and length would be otherwise (because that second set of wings allows for more lift - this is common to many transport/cargo planes that rely on a prop, because a propeller provides far less forward thrust than a jet does). To my knowledge, the lower set of wings doesn't have any special term - just 'lower' or sometimes 'secondary', depending on the speaker (actually, the only guy I knew who called the lower wings 'secondary' was a retired Air Force pilot who regarded the whole class of biplane aircraft as something akin to kiddie toys).

The plane would still have an autopilot, just to clarify things - in older aircraft like this one, the 'autopilot' switch would simply mechanically lock the controls into whatever setting they're in when the switch is flipped; any course, altitude, or speed changes have to be done manually. And, like with even modern aircraft (discounting anything currently in use or development by the soldier-boys), all take-offs and landings have to also be handled manually.

Something you might find useful - my Dad wasn't a pilot, but he was in the Army for a lengthy amount of time in the sixties and flew all over hell and back. When I was going through my 'all things flying' phase, he was fond of saying how taking off was the easy part, but landing was a bitch. He also said that landings were nothing more than controlled crashes, and he also reiterated the old flying adage, "Any landing you can walk away from is a good one."

You know, one of these days, I'm gonna see about taking flying lessons. All this plane chat's reignited my love of things with wings and propellers and whatnot. I know of a place not too far from here that offers them for ten grand (which isn't that expensive - you finish the program with a highly-marketable pilot's certification).

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's what I meant. I thought it might be biplane, but then I wondered if that was a make of plane or something and not the general term....this is how little I know about airplanes, it's pathetic.

My Dad used to have his pilot's license, back when he was a volunteer fire-fighter in Northern Ontario...you had to get pilot's licenses for that, because of forest-fires and whatnot.

I like it when passengers applaud good landings. People don't do that so much anymore, I suppose. People used to applaud movies too. In German universities, students applaud when lecture is over. I think the world needs more applause.

[auriliawestlake.livejournal.com]

The world also needs more folk like yourself, who aren't afraid to admit when some area of their knowledge-base is lacking. It's kinda like me and medical crap - I may write about it, but at least I note down when I'm not entirely sure if something's right.

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Ha, thanks. Yeah, I'm fully prepared to admit when I don't know something. I once spent about an hour researching Metallica, just so that I could write one particular line of dialog in my SPN/HP story. I don't like to be wrong. :-P

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

Another question for you:

Do you know anything about parachute flights? Or maybe just open doors on planes? I'm just wondering if they take off with the door open, or if they open it when in flight? I always thought that pressure changes made doors impossible to open mid-flight, but we've established that I know next to nothing about aviation.

[auriliawestlake.livejournal.com]

It depends entirely on how high up they're going before starting the jump and what sort of plane they're using - military jumps, for example, tend to happen from higher up than show-jumps (or for-fun jumps) and most military jumps happen from a plane equipped with a hydraulic jump-platform (when they don't happen from helicopters). As far as the beater plane discussed above is concerned...well, if it was used primarily for jumps, then the door would likely have been removed (because opening it at speed and altitude, though not impossible, is a bitch - think opening a car door while doing sixty MPH down the highway). Prop-powered aircraft go much slower than jets and jets are where you get into needing to maintain the cabin pressure; most prop-powered aircraft (including the beater from above) tend to have a max speed of about seventy to eighty MPH (dunno what that is in kilometers...um, about 130, I think). The max height on a chute-jump flight is dependent on the skill of the team doing the jumping (if I recall correctly, my granddad once told me that anything lower than 500 feet or higher than 5000 feet was best left to highly skilled professionals - he was in the Air Force - but this intel was given to me nearly twenty years ago, so I'm not wholly copacetic with it). And needing the door closed to maintain cabin integrity isn't an absolute necessity until you get up to about eight to ten thousand feet above sea-level, when the air gets real cold and real thin really quick.

Damn, is this making sense at all? I've been up waaaay too long at this point.

[hells-half-acre.livejournal.com]

That makes perfect sense! Thanks so much, that's exactly what I needed to know :-)

Man, if I ever get this novel published, I'm totally thanking you in the author's notes.

[auriliawestlake.livejournal.com]

*sheepishly rubs the back of my neck*

Ya really don't gotta do that, ya know.