Asking Questions
They tried their best to get me going this morning. Slow news day- no update on the possible aircraft wreckage in the southern Indian Ocean. Russia is consolidating its annexation of the Crimea, and there doesn’t appear to be a darned thing that will be done about it.
Don’t get me started on Venezuela- thankfully there has not been much reporting on the mass arrests of anyone who asks questions of the government. You have to poke a little to get the story, but it is quite remarkable.
I don’t want to rattle sabers- I am as war weary as the next taxpayer, but I have the nagging recollection that concession after concession does not lead to stability. Instead, it seems to inflate the confidence of the aggressor to up the stakes and double down on expansion. Maybe the anemic response by the West is the best we can do, but rewarding this behavior would only seem to invite more of it.
Oh well. Then someone threw the matter of the First Lady’s trip, sans media coverage, to the Middle Kingdom. I am not going to get spastic about it- First Ladies have traveled on their own before, also sans President, and my sensibilities are not particularly chafed by the size of the entourage of daughters, mother and 67 other security and administrative personnel carried by two Air Force jets.
This is what the First Lady does, and there is no point in getting huffy about it.
It has been a bad winter here in Washington, and it shows.
Heck, even I had to get away, though they did not let me stay in the modest Little White House at the Truman Annex in Key West.
Same deal for the First Family. In the last three months the First Family has been all over to get away from it: the two-week winter vacation on Oahu, with a bonus ten days at Oprah Winfrey’s place on Maui for the First Lady’s birthday. The President had that official trip to California to advise the Golden State on their drought and play golf; Michelle and the girls took at long weekend of skiing in Colorado, last week the long weekend on Key Largo, and now the China junket.
Well, so what? They tell me President Bush spent 31% of his time down on the ranch in Crawford, TX, and thus the talking points are that he used Air Force One as a personal taxi. The press was all over Mr. Bush about that, and of course also about Cindy Sheehan camped out down by the gate. That is the way it works, right? An alert media asking the tough questions and reporting abuse?
Funny about that. There is no press contingent on the China trip, by conscious decision. That is not to say that we will be in the dark about it, though. You will be able to get updates from the White House web site (http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/foreign-policy/first-lady-china-trip) and you can even pose questions that the First Lady will answer during her travels. Or someone in the entourage will.
Now wait, I was insistent that no one was going to get me distracted this morning. I have to be in Maryland, after all, and that, for me, is much more traumatic than a mere trip to the PRC. I need to find my internal passport and visa, search the car for objects that are legal here in Virginia and not there and divest myself of them so I don’t get in trouble with the authorities.
It seems so easy to get crosswise with them these days. I will just watch my step and try not to ask any questions. I have also been adamant that no media coverage will attend my travels, not unless they are willing to chip in for gas.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Vernal Equinox
Spring arrives here on the East Coast at 12:57 today. I may still be on the wrong side of the Anacostia River, but I am confident that this will signify the official end of this awful winter. It was something to hope for through this last storm. I have a pal back in Michigan who snapped under the relentless pressure, and is going to take sick leave to get the hell out of the state to get warmer.
He doesn’t seem to care where, precisely, and perhaps that is the point.
The word equinox is derived from the Latin words that translate loosely to “equal night.” Days and nights are approximately equal everywhere and our happy sun rises and sets due east-and-west. This is a challenging time at Willow, since the late afternoon sun floods in through the tall glass window at the street end of the bar, and can make it a challenge to raise the glass of happy hour white without being stunned by the dazzle.
It was leaden and dull last night, so there was no danger of retinal damage. Rafael, the energetic bartender, is moving to his own rhythm at Willow, and yesterday afternoon was his last regular shift. He got a position at what he calls a “Speakeasy” style bar-within-a-bar downtown, an interesting experiment. He took off his formal black shirt when he was done and came over to the civilian side of the bar to have a beer to commemorate the solemnity of the occasion. He explained that the way this little ten-stool joint worked was that he would be counseling food parings to the patrons based on what they were drinking.
“Interesting concept,” I said. “As soon as you are comfortable, drop us a line and the Regulars may pay you a visit.” I am going to miss Raf- he was always changing up his look- shaved head, goatee, no goatee, hair back, almost like his face was always doing back flips. Plus, he served. He was Coastie, knows his stuff, and works his butt off with a second job as a pastry cook. He plans to have his own place within four years. That takes energy, a feature that I have come to admire as I lose mine.
We talked about whether the winter was really over. As you know, at the equinoxes, the tilt of Earth relative to the Sun is zero, which means that Earth’s axis neither points toward nor away from the Sun. Old Jim would remind your that the tilt of the globe relative to its plane of orbit, called the ecliptic plane, is always about 23.5 degrees, which is why the wine seems sort of piled up on the left side of my glass.
(Orbital mechanics 101. “You are here.”)
The long range forecast is calling for another Polar Vortex event next week. I remember getting snow back in Michigan as late as May, but I am desperately hoping that we can stay above freezing next week, and that will be the end of it.
My correspondents desperately tried to get me riled up this morning over some of the more patent nonsense that is abroad in the land, but I had to let it go. The Aussies reported some objects in the water in a position in the southern Indian Ocean that would be compatible with the isochronal position data last received by the Inmarsat satellite from the missing Malaysian jet.
I certainly hope so. Then they could start the search for the black boxes and all the mystery will be revealed. Or not. The flight data recorder will only have the last moments of airborne activity to water impact, if that is what happened, and thus the critical minutes when the aircraft deviated from the flight plan occurred thousands of miles away over the South China Sea will have been lost hours before.
And maybe that is the point. I don’t know.
I do know about Spring. It is coming and I think I will be able to find it.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
The Corning of the Beef
I was sitting in the Bluesmobile, looking up the slight rise from the barn to the circular drive next to the fence around the farmhouse. “I am a Michigan-trained driver,” I said. “Why did you do this to yourself?”
I had been driving around the property to put tire tracks in the pristine snow to demonstrate that the place was indeed occupied, and got to the lowest stretch of gravel by the barn when I did a three-point and started back up, only to have the no-track light come on the dashboard. I had fun racing the engine, and rocked and rolled for a while before I realized that there was not enough traction in Christendom to get the hulking police cruiser up the mild slope.
Stuck until it melts, I thought, and then sighed and got the shovel out of the trunk and started the long dig upslope to expose gravel at the bottom of the ruts created by my previous blissful downhill passage.
The exercise convinced me that taking a pass on St. Patrick’s Day and letting the snow recede a bit was the right decision. Listening to the traffic reports the next morning- hung over drivers from the holiday were crashing all over and flattening tires in the potholes created by the snow- I knew that waiting it out was the right thing to do. The problem was that I had a hankering for a plate of Tracy O’Grady’s Irish celebration- corned beef, cabbage and vegetables, with Kate Jansen’s Irish soda bread on the side.
Since I was not going to be there for the real observation, I hoped there would be some off-menu leftovers I could get as a sandwich. That thought carried me up the 29 miles and 14 stoplights to the interstate, and then the thirty-two miles into the Imperial City. The radio was yammering about the usual- politics non-stop, the latest tid-bits on the missing jet, connecting the bitter cold to climate change, which, if anything, is chillier than any almost Spring in my recollection.
I slid into Big Pink at mid-day, and got to work on several lingering projects. First, I stopped in the lobby to collect my daily hug from Rhonda the Chief Concierge. “I thought you had gone back to the Keys,” she said with a smile. “I was afraid I was not going to get one.” She handed me the monthly box that contained two bags of Dazbog Russian Roast coffee that the headquarters in Denver mails me each month.
“I may have to drop this luxury,” I said, smelling the box. “Time to tighten up on expenses.”
She nodded ruefully and gestured at the sequined snowflake on her ample bosom. “My four dollar top from Macy’s,” she said. “All sorts of great prices for a Spring that doesn’t seem to be coming.”
We laughed and I walked back to the apartment where the Exterminators reported no evidence of mouse infestation, a minor triumph in the ultimately unsuccessful battle with entropy. I was thinking about luxury when the clock on the upper right of the computer signaled it was time for the daily extravagance at Willow. I took the police car over to Ballston and found a free place in the loading zone across from the restaurant, a savings of nearly $1.25 in parking fees from the rapacious County.
Old Jim was in his usual place at the apex of the Amen Corner and Jasper was serving the early happy Hour shift. I said hello to Jim and presented Jasper with a non-negotiable demand. “I want a corned beef sandwich. There have to be leftovers from yesterday, right?”
Jasper said he would ask, and then it was off to the races. I had not seen Jim in three days. A Navy buddy showed up, and we talked about port visits of decades ago. Katya the White Russian who used to bartend showed up with her almost-boss at Homeland Security, and we got off on Crimea and what was likely to happen in Mr. Putin’s march to restored glory, and then the missing 777. Chanteuse Mary came in to join the party, and though the crowd was a little thinner than usual, the company was superb and the conversation far-ranging.
We talked about moving someplace warm in exactly 22 months and five days, thought Mary said “Who is counting,” and then Jim said: “I heard there were deleted files on the Captain’s computer flight simulator they confiscated from his house. Maybe a clue.”
“I don’t trust anything I hear about anything anymore,” I said darkly. “I mean, it has been eleven days and we have zip-nada.”
Jasper topped off my white wine and said, apologetically, that there was not a shred of corned beef left and the kitchen was deeply sorry. My shoulders slumped. “I guess I will have to accept a non-negotiable response,” I said. “That seems to be the way things are going today.”
Tracy’s husband Brian happened to be walking by to get his laptop that lives down at the end of the bar and he heard what Jasper said, and he saw the resignation on my face. “There there, Vic. Where there is a will, there is a way. Trust Willow.”
He bustled off and I turned to Jim. “Maybe things will be all right, you know?”
Mary said brightly that Spring was coming, and the rebound in temperatures made the snow a just a minor inconvenience.
“I was not thinking that when I was shoveling out at the barn,” I said. “But I guess you are right.” I sipped my wine, and near the replenishment point Dante appeared from the kitchen with a square plate and a magnificent sandwich in the middle with a little ceramic container of Thousand Island sauce on the side for dipping.
“OMG,” I said reverently, examining the generous portion of the savory beef morsels between the perfectly browned toasting of the wheat bread, the simplicity and elegance of the presentation. Jim reached across and grabbed one side of it. Mary protested, but I said it was exactly the right thing to do with a sandwich donated by management for the Usual Suspects. And then we demolished it.
Spring is coming, sooner or later. It has to. It is after St. Patrick’s Day, right?
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Ports of Call
(The Diamond Hotel, Manila. Photo DH).
I enjoyed the snow day. For fun, I got the Bluesmobile stuck in the snow down by the barn, and got some exercise shoveling out the decks. They say there is another kick-ass storm heading this way for next week, and I am thinking a lot about the tropics, and Key West in particular.
The Keys are about as good as port visits go in the Continental United States, but I was drawn back to the more exotic ones by the fact that the JG is on the loose in the Philippines.
He didn’t write to tell me- that would be old school. I saw that the JG was staying at the Diamond Hotel on Roxas Blvd, at the corner of Dr. J. Quintos Street in downtown Manila on Facebook. Finally, he is getting to see the reason to love being in the Fleet! He has been there since October and aside from the oddly familiar exotic fact that his ship is home-ported in Japan, this is the magic of the experience and not just the part of Navy that totally sucks.
It sounds like the direct involvement with the missing jetliner is in the rear-view and the Fleet has moved on. There is too much uncertainty about that case that remains to be sorted out. The latest out of the investigators in Malaysia is that the way-points in the aircraft navigation system were reprogrammed after take-off, which is curious indeed.
USS Kidd has been relieved of the duty of boring holes in the Bay of Bengal, and the flagship on which the JG rides is apparently returning to the scheduled movements.
His previous update was a cryptic note that “Hong Kong was my kind of town,” a sentiment with which I fervently agree. There was something magical about the Crown Colony that has survived the transition to Special Administrative Region of the PRC. I am equally proud that both my sons have had a chance to visit China’s Front Porch, and experience the amazing fusion of British and Chinese life.
I am a little jealous of the JG’s presence in the capital of the Republic of the Philippines. I never got there in all my trips to the P.I.- there are clear advantages to traveling on the flagship, rather than some clunky but serviceable man of war. We bird farm sailors were restricted to the usual list of places: Pusan. Subic, Hong Kong, Singapore, Pattaya Beach, Mombasa and Perth were all Fleet Favorites.
The recruiting slogan used to be “join the Navy and see the world.” With the rise in terrorism, though, and the increased tempo of operations in the Indian Ocean to service the wars, things got pretty tough for exotic liberty ports of call.
(CV-41 USS Midway at anchor off Freemantle, West Australia in 1981. Photo USN).
The most legendary of the port calls from my time in the Foreign Legion was at Freemantle, the port city of Perth, Western Australia. The welcome from the residents, and particularly the ladies of W.A. was so legendary that some marital relations did not survive the four-day encounter, and there were some rueful faces on some USS Enterprise sailors who were waiting on the pier at Fleet Landing to turn themselves in after four years ashore from the last carrier visit. To this day, the most striking woman I have met was a raven-haired French-Vietnamese bartender who greeted us on the way back to the Landing on the last night ashore with a cheery “G’Day, Mate!”
Or maybe it was memorable because it was the last woman I saw for several months.
Anyway, it being a snow day, the internet was alive with misplaced energy. An old shipmate posted a picture of our ship at anchor off Freemantle. I thought it might have been our visit- the one in which we announced our arrival with an Air Wing FIVE mass formation flying up the Swann Estuary to Perth, announcing “Hi! We’re the US Seventh Fleet. How do you like us so far?”
Oh, man. The adventures the ensued. Sigh.
But it turned out it was the Freemantle visit the year after I did the PCS move to Korea- 1981. The comments were illuminating; and reflected the legacy of a crew determined to outdo their performance in 1979.
“that first day out of port, steaming north….. was probably the quietest day I have ever seem aboard a carrier at sea…… late, late sleepers……
“When the ship left port… as scheduled…. headed north along the west coast of Australia…. and for the next two days flew numerous COD flights to pick up late departees….”
“There were also a couple of young Aussie ladies discovered later on board by the time we hit Subic…”
Actually, according to official USN records, the count of Absent Without Leave was more than 200 officers and sailors, many of whom had to be constrained (the normal drill was to “clamshell” them in two wire Stokes Litters, and then they were lifted by C-141 to RAAF Learmonth on the northwest corner of the country, where we helo’d them back aboard…”
That beat my story from our visit, where our Squadron Operations Officer Black Cloud was the OIC of the UA Detachment and wore a big grin when he climbed off the helicopter with a handful of chagrinned troops.
The 1981 visit had a more spectacular defection: the Ship’s Surgeon. He stayed behind, resigned his commission and left his family in Yokosuka. One of my shipmates commented that it was crazy, and remembered writing all the OPREP-3’s to 7th Fleet, who responded that Midway was again setting PACFLT records.
You will note in the picture that Midway’s stern has a certain rakish angle to it. It is true, and that is what eventually ended her career.
CV-41 started life in 1945, built with the lessons of the Kamikazi attacks at Okinawa as a cautionary factor. She was altogether new class- a straight-deck carrier designated a CVB- or armored flight deck aircraft carrier. Sister ships were Coral Maru and FDR. They were impressive ships- Midway was the first to be modified with an angle deck. The acreage of the new flight deck was actually larger than that of a Nimitz class- and the solution to all that new center-of-gravity problem was to flood some of the voids on the starboard side of the ship with concrete.
That produced an odd, circular motion to the stern, which was quite startling for nugget pilots seeing it for the first time. It was a stately motion, not abrupt, and in a way, sort of appealing. It was a sway reminiscent of that of a lady of a certain age with confidence in her carriage.
Some idiot decided to base his Legion of Merit citation on fixing that stately motion. At an availability in the late 1980s, after returning from exile in Japan, she was modified with extended “blisters” along the waterline that significantly changed the slow, predictable and attractive sway into snap rolls that were very difficult to deal with. A couple hundred million in ship-alts, and they succeeded in ruining her.
I don’t know if the Captain that thought it up got his LOM or not. . That is what killed her as an active warship- they “improved” her into retirement.
At least she is still safe and sound from becoming razorblades or an artificial reef like all my other ships. As a museum and attraction in San Diego Harbor I think she still has a future under the Pacific skies. I think about those days under the Southern Cross with a certain longing. The sailors that are left behind to look for wreckage will continue to plow the skies to the west. They are gong to like Perth a lot, I think.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Nuclear Winter
(Refuge Farm triptych: porch rails, back table and trees. Images Socotra).
It was Saint Patrick’s Day eve as the late winter snow began to smother the Capital of the Free World, the mysteries continued. I am choosing to view them as farce, since no one can take this stuff seriously, right? Where have the grown-ups gone?
It was an apropos question, since I was time traveling anyway. I chose to get snowed in at the Farm, in the interest of being away from the Capital and the usual snow emergency nonsense. The time traveling thing apparently is one of those mental fugue states that transitions from occasional in middle age to permanent as the aging process continues.
I was sitting on the couch half-watching the basketball game and feeding Kodak slides through the scanner. In the process, I had been back in the late fifties and early sixties as I went through the contents of more of Raven’s archives, mechanically noting dates and the rare amplifying information from the little cardboard squares. Dad had been better about noting the context of the images in the 1950s- perhaps he was anticipating the tidal wave of images and information that now inundates us.
There cool stuff about long-ago events juxtaposed in the trays and carousels. There were images of Raven’s sketches and renderings of automobiles of the future, a place that at the time we did not fully realize we were condemned to live. He was an amateur shutterbug with an artist’s eye, an early adopter of Nikon technology and pretty good at it.
There was the amazing panoply of images: the SE Michigan Regional Soapbox Derby of 1958, some quite respectable photos of the Romney campaign for Governor of Michigan in 1962. A Segment on sailing regattas on the little lake by the cabin in Northern Michigan in 1966. The time trials at Indy in 1962….it is a little hard to grasp at this distance.
I saw how fast the snow was falling through the blue-white glow of the mercury vapor security light on the pole by the barn. I gave up on the cataloging and decided to read for a while and turned in.
The snow made nary a sound as it cloaked the property and the roads north. I ignored the alarm clock when the time came and went, but even the classical station that wakes me was fully engaged in the weirdness. It informed me that a team of Navy SEALs, with helicopter support from the guided missile destroyer USS Roosevelt, had bloodlessly seized the North Korean-flagged tanker Morning Glory before dawn (local) this morning at around 02002 GMT.
The boarding was made at the request of the Libyan and Cypriot governments, and the black liquid cargo will be returned to Libyan authorities. Some warlord in Behghazi was behind the renegade export, and this appears to be a victory for the Good Guys, if we could actually find any.
Nor can I tell you if this is related to the dozens of short-range missiles the Northerners lobbed into the waters near the Northern Limit Line. The Hermit Kingdom had previously denied that the tanker actually belonged to them, calling Morning Glory a “Stateless Ship.” Three men were arrested in Cyprus in connection with the affair- two Israelis and a Senegalese national- after they flew to Cyprus to rent a boat to go out and talk to the master of the tanker.
Trying to assess the extent of the snow disruption as I surveyed the immediate proximity- it was almost universal across the region- the headlines toggled between the mysteries. There is so much going on this snowy day that seems to be lifted from 1980s thrillers. I mean, this would not be plausible in a Tom Clancy novel.
The Crimea caper by Mr. Putin’s agents- you know, the thugs patrolling the polling places, widespread voter fraud, that sort of stuff is amazing enough, but the two other little diversions in progress- smuggled oil and rebels and missing airliners- read more than a little like a Robert Ludlum thriller from the 1980s.
The chattering classes of which I am part were engaged on several strands of analysis to try to make sense of it, once the coffee was made and the computer turned on: what is the most effective altitude for the detonation of atomic weapons, and why was that relevant in regard to the missing airliner?
Why was it that Dmitry K. Kiselyov, the top-dog Russian news anchor well known for his Howard Beale-style “mad a hell” diatribes appeared before an image of a mushroom cloud to remind his viewers the Russia was “the only country in the world capable of turning the U.S.A. into radioactive dust.”
Bombast? Good God. I was hoping we were beyond all that. Kiselyov was tapped by Vlad Putin to head the new national media outlet- which essentially makes him the equivalent of the old Minister of Propaganda.
This is quite literally more than anyone should have to endure on St. Patrick’s Day, you know? Particularly before the second cup of coffee. I could go on, but like I said, I am viewing this as farce, not reality.
Plus, I have some shoveling to do. Three days to Spring, hahaha. This really was a sort of Nuclear Winter, but like everything else, not quite what we were thinking that meant.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Oh, Crap
I joined Old Jim and Foggy Bottom John-with at Willow’s Amen Corner last night. I had been futzing with taxes, though my heart was not in it, and I needed to talk to people about the increasing feeling of weirdness I am getting. Chanteuse Mary got off work in The Chamber early and was ready for a glass of wine.
I know I was. Maybe it is the solitude during the day, I don’t know. Jon-without and TLB and the Lovely Jamie rolled in sequentially with Jerry the Barrister.
Jerry was hungry and was eyeing the Herb Sausage Crusted Mini Rack of Pork with Buttery Savoy Cabbage, Julienne of Apples & Endive with Shallot & Apple Jus. I envied him the gusto with which he attacked the platter. I just wasn’t hungry.
Jamie is dealing with the multiple crises by fleeing the city: if Russia invades Ukraine and we get another five inches of snow, she will deal with it looking at the sand and light blue water. She booked a trip for a few days in the Dominican Republic, one of my favorite Caribbean destinations, though it is only accessible by boat or commercial airliner, a mode of transportation of which I am increasingly skeptical these days.
The bar filled up rapidly- Fish and Wildlife was out in force, and the high-top tables were all full with couples and professional women catching up. “So,” said Old Jim. “What hallucinations are you into this evening? The Malyasian jetliner has now been missing for more than a week. The Malaysians in charge of the investigation had a press conference in Kuala Lumpur. Did you see it?” Jon-without fumbled for his smart phone and punched up a tiny map composed of concentric circles arcing northwest and southwest:
“Yeah. They confirmed a lot of what has been dribbling out over the last week. The transponders on the jet were deliberately disabled and its last signal came about 7 1/2 hours after takeoff.”
“Seven and a half? That is almost twice what they were saying earlier when they claimed that the ACARS transmissions were detected four hours later.”
“Yep, means they could have ended up as far as Kazakhstan or deep in the southern Indian Ocean,” said John-with with prim efficiency. He deals with matters of state on a daily basis, though this one is an entirely new wrinkle. “They had some cool graphs to show. It looked to me like they got an ellipse – they are translating it to the press as ‘two search boxes along a line oriented northwest to southeast- about 1500 miles out southwest of KL.”
“I used to live KL. Great town. Beautiful women,” said John-with thoughtfully.
“Yeah,” I said. “They are. And the jet had a lot more gas then they first said – which isn’t all that rare – the only requirement in filing is to state that at takeoff you have enough gas for the flight, plus 45 minutes of max consumption as a margin – that gives you a range of 2500nm, more or less. But a 777 has long legs – the version with the shortest legs has a 5,000nm range – and this one I believe had about a 6,000 mile range.”
“It sure as shit went a lot further than the Andaman Islands if it flew that long.”
“Yes. And what about the jump in altitude from cruise to 45,000 feet. That is very interesting.”
“Was that ACARS reporting or that Malaysian military radar contact in the Strait of Malacca?”
“Couldn’t tell what they were talking about. You know the problems with non-cooperative targets and radar, if that is what it was.”
“If it went that high, what was the point? Deliberate decompression? The rated ceiling for the triple-7 jet is below Flight Level 45. The aircraft would be hanging on the blades up there, ready to stall.”
“Well, what happened to everybody inside? Did they pass out or die?”
“Another great question. It almost suggests that whoever was flying the jet wasn’t actually on it. I tried to find if the cabin pressure could keep up with the pressure- and I still don’t know. We exceeded all sorts of things in Navy jets, but they were built strong.”
“Yeah, it’s a mystery. It seems weird now but will be perfectly clear once we understand what happened,” said Jon-without. He is an engineer by training, and takes a commonsense approach to these things.
John-with darkly mentioned the idea of someone wanting to “repurpose” the aircraft, if it in fact landed some place. It had been the topic of discussion in his meetings that morning. The implication being that maybe if the aircraft was indeed on the ground someplace it might be later used as a missile.
“Crap,” I said. “I was looking at imagery of the former Royal Navy Airfield at Gan, in the Maldives, in case it was a place they might have landed. It is a commercial place now, though. Off the beaten track but still with people working there.” I looked at Boomer the Bartender perched on a step-stool in clear violation of OSHA regulations, moving some bottles of liquor up next to the televisions that are rarely turned on. This isn’t a sports bar, after all.
“Maybe the answer that makes sense is that this was a trial run for a multi-aircraft operation similar to 9/11. It possible that something really bad has happened- or is beginning- and we don’t know what it is.”
I mentioned a pal’s theory of hacking into the flight controls and gaining command of the aircraft that way, and that if something like this was true, it could be a test for a simultaneous mass attack. “Maybe the erratic altitude- up to FL 45- was perhaps a demonstration of gaining proficiency for off board controllers. The Malaysians searched the pilot’s house and found a sophisticated flight simulator with several display screens.”
“What do you expect? The guy is a pilot, for Christ sake.”
“That is science fiction, right?” growled Jim, reaching for his Bud. “Maybe they were going to fly the airplane into a building in Mumbai and they screwed it up.”
“I dunno. Maybe it is just a way to deliver an electromagnetic pulse weapon to some other place. You know, those dumb nuke things are supposed to fry all the computers within line of sight and imagine what would happen with that.”
John-with was not happy with our scenario. “An EMP attack against the US? Wouldn’t that have to be at high altitude over Kansas?”
I said, “Try it high over Manhattan or Philly and see what you get. Maybe that is plenty. If they refuel the thing they are only 6,000 miles away.”
“Crap,” said John-with. “Too much to deal with for a weekend.”
“I dunno,” I said. “Maybe they will hit Dublin. It is Saint Patrick’s Day on Monday after all.”
Old Jim waved for another Budweiser. “The important thing is to avoid crowds and public transportation.”
“I have been doing that for a long time,” I said. “Why isn’t anyone uptight about the Russians advancing their Defense Condition?”
“That is so Cold War, Vic,” said Jon-without. “We have all sorts of new stuff to worry about. A Russian invasion of East Europe seems downright quaint. I am going to worry more about the snow. I might not be able to walk to Willow on St. Patrick’s Day.”
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Ides of Something
So, it is the Ides of March, the murder of a man on the Rostrum in Imperial Rome that now marks the transition from the Roman Republic to the Empire. I am suspicious of metaphors, and think they are way too pat a way to make a point. I had this nice story going that collides directly with what has me alarmed, and I don’t think that is too strong a way to put it.
I have a Ham radio pal who reported this nugget the other day about a foreign Navy that has not abandoned manual Morse (the USN has, long ago):
“I looked at the CW skimmer at 0730 this morning. The skimmer software copies thru a software radio all the CW (morse code) signals on the 40m amateur band overnight. The Russian sub bases on their Pacific coast and elsewhere have beacon transmitters that rotate beacon duty to keep in touch with their boomers. This morning the skimmer copied for the first time, and strongly, four beacons (CW letters F- Vladivostok, R- Izhevsk, M- Magadan and K-Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky> ) at the same time, honking away. I have never seen all of them on at the same time, so maybe they are at higher DEFCON due to the situation in Ukraine.”
I responded: “Yes, and I am hoping someone reminds the NSC what it means.”
Between that and the missing airliner I wound up with two stories this morning, and I honestly don’t know where to go, except maybe punt and just go with my original thought. I feel now the way I did in the weeks that lead up to 9/11. To this day I can’t figure out how all the personal and professional events of that summer got rolled into the feeling of anxiety about the fact that something big was about to happen and there was not a damn thing I could do about it.
Anyway, the story I was going to do presented the way Harry Truman lived after his time in the White House was done. I was going to compare and contrast with the way recent occupants of the White House do by comparison, but I can’t do it.
Some would tell me indignantly that W spent 31% of his time out of the capital down on the ranch in Crawford, and he used Air Force One as a personal taxi. On the other hand, it takes 56 armored vehicles, including 14 limousines and a pre-positioned aircraft carrier and special bulletproof glass to add to the hotel windows to support a one-week executive trip to some other continent. I mean, what’s the big deal?
You can see on a visit to the Little White House that Harry and Bess Truman’s lives were very different. The desk upstairs is a modest thing, and at that simple piece of furniture, Harry left a significant body of accomplishments behind him: desegregation of the military, the 1947 restructuring of the national security establishment into the Department of Defense, that sort of thing.
(The unassuming desk to the middle left is where some of the most significant events in the history of America’s national security were reviewed while Harry was on vacation).
But the way he left Washington is even more impressive than his accomplishments.
After turning over the White House to Mr. Eisenhower was inaugurated, Harry and Bess drove home to Missouri by themselves. There was no Secret Service following them.
The only asset Harry had when he died was the house where he lived back in Independence, Missouri, and that came to the Truman’s via Bess’s Mom. After leaving politics, his sole income was a U.S. Army pension reported to have been $13,507.72 a year and a modest Social Security check. Congress later granted him an ‘allowance’ and, later, a retroactive pension of $25,000 per year.
Harry was a bargain. Oh well. Anyway, you can see that could lead you directly into a discussion of which of the post-Imperial Chief executives was the most flagrant in the exercise of the perquisites of the modern office, and I am not going to go there.
Let’s just dance off that with a casual observation that things seem a little out of control, but that is true about everything, isn’t it?
(Harry in sand at the Little White House in Key West).
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Old and New
(The amazing new Club House at Army-Navy Country Club that replaced the stately and crumbling old one that had its roots in the original 1924 structure. Photo ANCC.)
It is not the Ides of March until tomorrow- you know, the one in which the Bard commended us to beware, due to lean and hungry look of yon Cassius.
If I see him tomorrow, I will for sure let you know. Mr. Sluggo suggested we get together for lunch yesterday, and I was eager to catch up. He is under a regimen of care for one of those nasty cancer things, seems to be responding well, but I wanted to catch up.
Mr. Sluggo is a fighter pilot of the old school- he started out in F-8 Crusaders, a swift jet of a certain age whose operators were known to be of the wild-and-wooly old school. I read the NATOPS manual for the operation of that weapons system and was not surprised to see the notation in bold face that helpfully reminded Crusader jocks that in extremis, the airplane could always be used to ram an opponent.
Anyway, after the minor confusion of advancing age in linking up at the 1924 Lounge over at the Army-Navy Country Clubs posh new club house we tucked into the issues of the day. Naturally, aviation-related matters dominated the discussion. Sluggo left the cockpit to become an acquisition specialist, and he knows his stuff.
We talked about what might have happened to the missing Malaysian 777- I doubt that anyone is the counter-terror, security or aviation industry is talking about much else at the moment, as the jet and 230 passengers and crew remain un-located after almost a week.
Maria brought me a glass of Chardonnay and Mr. Sluggo opted for the iced tea. We talked about oncology and health, and the identity of some old shipmates on a digital image found on the laptop by the son of a recently deceased comrade.
“Note to self,” I said, taking a sip of wine and blinking at the brightness of the cold chilly day outside the window. “Get someone to destroy my computer the instant I am not able to sit in front of it.”
Sluggo laughed. He explained the whole catastrophic destruction theory, and the problems with it. Boeing knows how to build a structure, unlike the Airbus people, whose early 300 series jets had a distressing tendency to lose major flight surfaces due to de-lamination of structural spars. “American Flight 587 went into Sheepshead Bay after departing JFK because the spar in the tail delaminated and failed. Airbus fixed the problem, but who has time to look at the serial numbers to find out if the airplane you are getting on was built before or after? I told my friends to just not get on any Airbus 300.”
“I think that is what Iran Air was flying when they ran into USS Vincennes and got shot down,” I said. “And that may be why Iran was really behind the bombing of Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie a few months later.”
“Could be. But this one is really strange. I really like it as a Bond thriller, Imagine this scenario: suppose some hacker used a zero-day exploit in the software to gain control of the aircraft and fly it remotely? This could be something entirely new.“
“I saw a lot of reporting recently about hackers and cars- apparently they were able to hack into the controls and apply the brakes and shut down the engines. But wouldn’t you still have to have people to subdue the crew?”
Mr. Sluggo shrugged. “I think you would still need someone on the inside to make it work, but you would not need a trained flight crew to do it, like 9/11. That would be the old way. Maybe there is something entirely new happening here.”
Maria the phlegmatic waitress asked us if we were ready to order for the third or fourth time, and we finally acquiesced. I went for the classic Caesar salad, and Sluggo opted for the Army-Navy Club sandwich. I sighed. That used to be my favorite order in the casual dining room in the old clubhouse. It comes with chips, not fries, but with three slices of bread, and spaghetti and meatballs the day before, I was way over the line on carbs for the week.
This is the way I remember the old clubhouse sandwich:
Three slices of toast interwoven with ham, turkey bacon and cheese, cut in quarters, toothpicks in each to hold it together with chips in the middle. Nice, predicable and tasty. Comfort food from the Old Club.
“But think about it. We have ACARs reporting that the aircraft was operated for as many as four hours after the transponders were shut off sequentially, which indicates it could not be one spontaneous catastrophic incident.”
“OK, OK, but why?”
“Well, imagine you are a hacking entity- maybe state sponsored, maybe not. Suppose you have developed software and hardware to intrude on fly-by-wire systems, specifically those used in Boeing aircraft, and you want to test it for future use.”
“All right. I am game- we have helpers on the jet to eliminate the crew. Maybe they gas everyone, incapacitate the flight crew. Then the ground controllers direct the plane to some remote place in the Indian Ocean where it will never be seen again and crash it into the sea? If you intended to land it and flew toward India or Pakistan the military radars would pick you up right away.”
“Very few people these days actually track anything with raw radar returns. But you could do it that way, driving it to deep water, hopefully never to be recovered. Just another mystery, though you would now know that the concept worked and is available for the next step- maybe another 9/11 that is even more spectacular.”
“You would need some deep pockets for that,” I said. “It would take George Soros or the Koch Brothers to bankroll it.”
“Or a nation state. Suppose you were Iran, knew the jet was coming, and had access to runways and hangars to conceal it once it was on the ground.”
“God, that sounds like a hallucination.”
“We won’t know until we get the cockpit voice and data recorders, and if whoever has the jet has access to it on the ground, those are long gone.”
“Ack.” I took a sip of wine and contemplated the possibilities. Maria returned with my salad, which looked good, but I was stunned when I saw what she slid in front of Mr. Sluggo: It was not the white bread quarters skewered with cellophane topped toothpicks.
This was a gigantic sandwich, split equally in two halves, rich with a layer of white chicken, and I could smell the bacon that layered lavishly across tomatoes and cheese and the dollop of mayonaise. Separating the two halves was a mound of those twice-cooked chips, dark and curled and inviting.
“Jesus,” I said. “That is a huge change. It looks delicious.”
“I will take half of it home,” said Sluggo.
“It would still make two sandwiches,” I said in wonder. “New building, new Executive Chef, new menu.”
“It’s change you can believe in,” said Mr. Sluggo.
I had to agree with him as I ate my lettuce. Maria boxed up the half and the remaining chips to take away, and we agreed to catch up in April.
I rose, remembering I had to contact my attorney on an unrelated matter. “Maybe we will know the answer to the mystery next month.”
“It took them 23 months to find the black boxes on that Air France jet that went down in the South Atlantic. They will figure this one out,” said Sluggo with confidence.
“I hope it is before whatever it is that comes next,” I said.
“Never can tell,” said Sluggo, and we walked out into the chill brightness of a winter that just won’t let go.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
Lunch With Argo
(The Willow Lunch Counter Special for Wednesday: Brian’s spaghetti and meat balls with the best damn garlic bread I have tasted lately).
CNN was running the Chinese satellite imagery of the three chunks of possible debris not far from the point of last contact with the missing Malaysian jet, and that was where the matter stood as I dashed out of the house to meet Argo for lunch.
I don’t know why this event far away has gripped me with such fascination, but it is the old analyst in me, I guess, and the manifold mysteries in this bizarre story.
Argo and I were last together in the continuing hunt to identify and visit the remaining 36 stones of the original 40 that were the first monuments of the new Republic: the District of Columbia Boundary Markers.
If you missed that account of attempting to slog along the coastline of the Potomac River to pass under the expressway and onward to the Stone at SE9 I can send it to you. It was an epic and failed adventure in the wilderness contained within the borders of Your Nation’s Capital.
We had a good plan, but my bad leg and the rough terrain won. We realized that there were only two viable plans to succeed: one would require a driver to drop us off by the fence that protects the interstate from intrusions by deer, somehow find a breech in the links, hike down the embankment, and take the Stone from the shore side.
Argo looked over at me, then, as I was attempting to come to terms with failure. “The answer is to make an assault from the water.” I realized he was right, and all we would need to do was charter a boat and then just sail right up to the Stone, which is located just above the high water mark on the shore.
Then came winter, and all the rest of it, and I did not think of the Stones until last week, when I got a note from Argo that claimed a new boathouse was going to open at National Harbor, and from there, it would be a relatively cheap and easy paddle down to the Stone. That would close out the odyssey that began a decade ago, and culminated in adventures in the wildest parts of the District, which includes the Impound Lot, Potter’s Field and a sliver of wilderness bounded between whizzing traffic high above and the big placid river on the other.
Anyway, it seemed like lunch would be a good way to plan the way ahead, and we agreed that noon on Wednesday would be a good place to start. I was pinned down by the Jorge, the Guatemalan Exterminator, who was disassembling the lower front of the dishwasher to see where the mice might be hiding out.
“No spoor or droppings,” He said, peering under the appliance. “That probably means you have only had a visitor, not an infestation.” Then we tried some of my pigeon Spanglish, and talked about his impending visit home, and the fact that in the seven years he has been servicing Big Pink, this is his first visit to my unit. “I put you on the list for a visit next week,” he said with a smile, and I told him a had to split due to an important commitment.
I scrambled out to the parking lot under skies that promised change, and not for the better. I drove the Bluesmobile over to Willow, since this was a two-fer. In addition to catching up with Argo, it was a chance to try the Willow Lunch Counter.
This is a big deal. I don’t go to sit-down restaurants for lunch unless there is some reason to combine it with social or business purposes. I preferred to eat at the desk when I was chained to one, and the white tablecloths and heavy silver of the formal dining room were special events.
The bar was technically open, and Tracy would have someone on duty just in case there were some Key West style early drinkers, or someone in the dining room wanted a glass of wine with their meal. But normally the bar and high-top tables on the other side of the aisle were empty as a tomb.
I don’t know whose idea it was, but Willow decided to capitalize on the space by turning it into a Lunch Counter. They gambled that people who wanted a civilized quick lunch were not the same ones who patronized the formal dining room. Moreover, the people who were standing in the long lines at the food trucks over by the Ballston Metro stop were paying around ten bucks for the privilege of getting food in a
(John Philip Falter’s classic image of the American Lunch Counter. Brian adopted it as the symbol of what Willow is trying to do to provide a decent lunch at a reasonable price for the bureaucrats of Ballston).
Voila! The Willow Lunch Counter was born. The concept was straightforward: there is a daily special, and the soup-and-half-sandwich, and with complementary soda or iced tea the fixed price was ten bucks.
It was genius, and the place was almost full when I walked in, almost precisely on time.
Argo was seated in the cocktail nook checking his messages when I arrived, and we were able to snag Old Jim’s stool at the apex of the Amen Corner, and I slid into my usual spot. All was right with the world, and despite the fact that I have cut carbs out of my diet, I decided that whatever the daily special was, I was going to enjoy it.
I don’t recall that the subject of the stones ever actually came up. “So apparently,” Argo started, “the Rolls Royce people in the UK get technical updates about the health of their engines. They told the Wall Street Journal that the engines on the missing jet communicated with them four hours after the transponders cut out.”
“Or were turned off,” I said darkly. “If so, that is a game changer. That airplane could have gone down in the Indian Ocean- or landed somewhere.”
Baby J the new bartender approached us and seemed to be happy to see us. She explained the specials- it being Wednesday, it was Brian’s spaghetti and meatballs with fresh grated Parmesan cheese and garlic bread- but she mentioned the half-sandwich or Panini with soup, which happened to be that delicious cauliflower cream- and when Argo seemed interested, she ticked off the specials for the rest of the week.
“Monday is meatloaf with two sides, Tuesday is the brisket chili, Thursday is the cobb salad, and Friday, New England clam chowder with Kate Jansen’s Irish Soda Bread.”
“Whoa,” said Argo, and then Tracy herself came into the bar area with a case of wine to store in the open bays behind Baby J.
“We will change every month,” she said. “Try to keep things fresh.”
“It is a fabulous idea, Tracy,” I said firmly. “I have been wanting a plate of spaghetti and meatballs since it got cold, but I don’t keep or cook pasta at home. You have to keep this on the menu- and that brisket chili.”
“We will consider all recommendations,” she said gravely, “And your interest in the menu is appreciated.”
Argo laughed. “That is like thanking some taxpayer for his interest in National Defense.”
“Best insult we had in the service,” I said, thinking back.
“If that airplane is still out there, someplace, there is going to be a hell of a story.”
“Yeah, and 230 people alive rather than dead. Or something.”
Lithe Dante the waiter came up and gave me a hug from behind as he slid two large white china dishes filled with just-right noodles, spicy marinara sauce and gigantic meatballs in front of us. I won’t even bother to describe the garlic bread. Kate Jansen has outdone herself- again.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303
The Art of Flight
(File photo of EgyptAir Flight 990 on a better day. Photo Wikipedia).
I am so over this winter, and it won’t get its claws out of us. I was awake at one thirty, still wrestling with the time change. I have given up on the tossing-and-turning thing, and just pad to the kitchen, looking for evidence of mouse infestation, pour a snort of Bailey’s and read for a while on the iPad. There was a special election to replace C. W. “Bill” Young, one of my favorite southern politicians when I was working on the Hill, and the unfortunate news that we are going to get hit with the edge of another front that will bring storms, possible tornadoes and a temperature drop of almost 50 degrees this afternoon.
I should have gone back to Key West when I could have. No update on the missing jet, which according to my on-site sources is “a pain in the butt.”
The Exterminator is supposed to show up at some point this morning- Rhonda at the Big Pink Concierge Desk told me that the current wave of terror apparently was first reported by the unit across the hall, and it was not surprising that the tiny rodents had snuck under my front door and taken up digs under the dishwasher. “Humane traps,” she said primly. “It happens periodically, mostly on the first floor.”
“I expect that would probably be the case,” I said. “At least until the little things master the art of flight.”
I decided to get out of the apartment for a while to let the mouse/mice have some time to themselves before the outbreak of hostilities. The jet thing was bugging me, since I had arrived at a variety of theories by the end of the day. When I saw Old Jim at Willow, he told me the wreckage had been found, and I was briefly buoyed by the idea that we would soon have some answers,
Unfortunately, that was older information than mine, and at the end of the day- which for me was around eight-thirty PM, we were back to square one about what happened. In the first flurry of correspondence of the morning, a senior analyst whose views I respect summed it up nicely: “We don’t know squat.”
They are tearing apart the information on the crew this morning, on the chance that the Pilot and First Officer might be complicit in what happened, whatever it was. The case of EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999 was advanced in support of that possibility, and I remembered the event pretty well- it happened about twenty minutes into the outbound flight from JFK and about seventy miles south of Nantucket Island.
Onboard the Boeing 767-300 were a hundred American tourists and a couple dozen mid-to-senior grade Egyptian military officers, twenty-odd Canadians and a sprinkling of other African citizens. The flight originated at LAX with only three dozen passengers , with the majority boarding in New York. Airline rules required two complete flight deck crews be onboard to split the duty for crew-rest considerations. The relief captain was a fellow named Gameel al-Batouti, a 59-year-old veteran pilot with more than 12,000 flight hours and over 5,000 hours in type.
Things started off routinely, and Flight 990 checked through three controllers as it climbed to cruising altitude. Then something as inexplicable as what happened to the Malaysian jet occurred. New York Air Route Traffic Center lost radar contact abruptly, could not raise the aircraft on radio, and then requested nearby Lufthansa and Air France flights try to raise EgyptAir on the radio and look for anything out of the ordinary.
That is where the matter had to stay for a while. There were jurisdictional issues, of course: like the missing Malaysian jet, the incident occurred over (and in) international waters, and according to ICAO rules, the tiny Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority had jurisdiction for the investigation.
That obviously was absurd, as the situation in the South China Sea will be if the missing airplane is located. Anyway, the Egyptians asked the American National Transportation Safety Board to handle it in their name. Navy and Coast guard units arrived on scene and did commendable work on the recovery, locating the cockpit data recorders within a couple days.
(The crucial last minute of the flight of EgyptAir 990. Chart courtesy NTSB).
That is where things began to get strange. I am sure you recall what the recorders revealed. Al-Batouti replaced the Captain in Command who made a trip to the lavatory at about the twenty minute mark of the flight. The recording said he muttered the phrase “Tawkalt ala Allah”, which translates from the classical Egyptian Arabic dialect to “I rely on God.”
A minute later, the autopilot was disengaged, immediately followed by the First Officer again saying, “I rely on God.” Three seconds later, the throttles for both engines were reduced to idle, and both elevators were moved three degrees nose down. That would result on a zero-G regime, which would definitely get the attention of everyone on board. Batouti repeated “I rely on God” seven more times before the Captain in Command returned and asked repeatedly, “What’s happening, what’s happening?”
Apparently there was a struggle for the controls, since the flight data recorder reflected the elevators then moved into a split condition, with the left elevator up and the right elevator down, probably resulting from the left seat pushing forward and the right seat pulling the stick back.
At the end of the brief drama, both engines were shut down as Batouti movied the start levers from “run” to “cutoff.” The Captain in Command is is heard to say: “What is this? What is this? Did you shut the engines?” The rest, as the Bard said, is silence.
That was the version of the NTSB report, which was not taken well by the Egyptians. Some speculate that it was President Mubarak himself who declared that nothing of the sort could have happened, and his safety people issued their own report that the elevators failed and it was all Boeing’s fault, and probably an American conspiracy and maybe someone shot down the aircraft.
It was as expected as it was bizarre. I recall running into the Egyptian version of reality one time on a tour bus, heading from al Iskandria to Cairo, when our guide cheerfully explained that they had won the Arab-Israeli War.
Oh well. I suppose it is possible that something like what happened to EgyptAir 990, but just about everything is possible at the moment, and I have heard stranger theories over the last couple days.
I imagine we will just have to cool our jets and wait to find out.
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303