The Reno Air Races Crash + October 6 update

When Tom saw the news about the Air Races crash on Friday he called Gene on his cell phone, knowing that's where he'd be. Gene and his son Chris were already packing up to leave. They'd been about 75 yards from where the plane hit.

Normally they would have been in one of the VIP boxes down in front but Gene was doing a barbecue for the group he was with and they wouldn't let him do it in the box. So he'd brought his camp trailer and was doing the cooking up in the back. There wouldn't be much to do until the weekend as the box was empty on Friday anyway. Tom was going to join them on Saturday when a much bigger crowd would be there.

When the plane went out of control Gene said it looked like it was coming straight down at him and he had a split second to think of running, but even in that split second he knew he didn't have the time to run anywhere. If it was going to hit him it was going to hit him. Right afterward Chris ran down to the crash site. Gene started to follow a few minutes later but Chris was already on his way back and told him not to go down, body parts were everywhere, it was a mess.

People wandered by the trailer covered in blood and Gene helped them clean up. Everyone seemed to be in a daze. A woman from his group came up and asked for some water and he gave her a bottle from the ice chest. When she turned around he could see her back was covered in blood and bits of flesh. Later he got in a conversation with a man who had also been close to the wreck. Same thing -- he turned around and his back too was plastered with human debris.

It was a good thing it was Friday and not the weekend with the big crowds. It was a good thing the plane came down vertically; if it had come in horizontal at that speed it would have taken out most of the grandstand area. It was especially a good thing that the fuel didn't explode. And for Gene of course it was a good thing he was doing the barbecue that day.

Tom and Gene have known each other for thirty years or so. Both have loved airplanes for as long as they can remember. Tom always wanted to be a commercial pilot and when his sister became a flight attendant ("stewardess" in those days) she paid for his first flying lesson. His boss at the drugstore lent him the money to take the full training at the Reno-Stead school, a real bona fide aviation academy that turned out commercial pilots. He took the courses in the few spare hours between his job and family life with a wife and new baby, got in 160 of the required 200 hours of flying time and passed the licensing exam before the academy went bankrupt. Which left him short of the full training and owing on the loan.

Twenty years later his wife struck up a conversation with a flight instructor in the waiting room at her doctor's office and passed his card on to Tom. So he went for lessons at the local airport and got licensed as a private pilot. He says he is probably the most overqualified private pilot in the country what with all the training he'd had at the academy, even instrument rating, even a course in meteorology. I never heard of lenticular clouds until he told me about them. Apparently the Sierras are one of the few places they form. They look like stacks of pancakes, caused by the swirling air currents near mountains.

Gene got interested in taking lessons from the same flight instructor after hearing Tom's story. He too became a pilot, and over the years the two of them would get together on weekends and fly somewhere for breakfast, up to Quincy or Chester in California or out to Hawthorne or Winnemucca or Elko. The local casinos would send someone to the airport to pick them up if they let them know they were coming. They never gambled but usually had a big omelet before flying home. They joked that it wouldn't be the flying that killed them but the cholesterol. When Gene's son Chris grew up he too became a pilot, now flies a corporate jet.

I asked Tom if the air races attracted a lot of pilots and he said I ought to go watch the private planes take off from Reno airport after an air show. So many pilots come into town for the event it is an air show in itself to watch them leave. "Hundreds?" I asked. Oh yeah, hundreds, a continuous line of four-to-six-seat Cessnas and Pipers and the like from the parking areas to the runway. They line them up on the runway two abreast and send them off in pairs. Two or three minutes apart, he wasn't sure about the timing any more, he hasn't gone to watch in years. If the wind was cooperative they'd have both the north-south and east-west runways stacked up at the same time, and then a pair could take off from one and the next pair from the other in half the time from only one. His wife got him a radio so he could hear what the tower and the pilots were saying to each other.

The investigation of the crash has focused on mechanical failure, and there are pictures showing a piece of the tail had fallen off. Some have suggested the pilot must have controlled the plane to keep it from hitting where it would have done much more damage, but Gene is sure that isn't what happened. He thinks something had knocked out the pilot, maybe a heart attack or maybe the heavy G's from taking a fast turn around a pylon. He says you can see quite clearly in some of the pictures of the plane coming down that there is nobody in the cockpit. It's a canopy type windshield and he'd be quite visible if he were still sitting up as he should have been. Gene is also sure he wasn't conscious because the plane came down at full power and a pilot at all conscious would have instinctively pulled back on the power. It hit the ground still going full bore. There was not enough left of the pilot's body for an autopsy.

Two days after the wreck Gene still talks about it in a quivering voice.

Neither Tom nor Gene knew any of the ten who were killed, though another friend who was there told Tom he's sure one of them was someone he had met years ago, but Tom didn't remember her. A lady who leaves behind eight children. The friend is going to see if he can find the photo with the two of them in it.

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Got this email from Tom forwarded from someone who had the results of the investigation into the cause of the crash. I get the gist of it though some of the pilot jargon is over my head:

Galloping Ghost crash

Ok... here's the skinny on the accident.... A P-51 normally has two trim tabs.. one on each elevator... this one had one and other one was fixed in place.. He was warned about the forces being put on that one tab. It failed.. He had at least a 10G load when the plane pitched up from the loss of the trim tab and he went "nighty night" and probably never woke up.

The telemetry downloaded from Galloping Ghost revealed an 11g pull-up, fuel flow interrupted on the way up, and then the engine restarted when fuel flow resumed at the top of the arc. The aircraft was making 105 inches of Manifold Pressure on the way down.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .Here's another "theory" of the crash from experienced racers.

In 1989 this type of thing happened to another pilot but he lived to tell the story.

When flying a P-51 at 450+mph you need to have full nose down trim to keep the plane level.

The elevator trim tab broke off and the aircraft immediately went in to a 10G climb, confirmed by the G-meter.

The pilot came to, from the sudden blackout and realized he had slipped through the shoulder harness and was looking at the floor of the airplane.

He was able to reach the throttle and pull it back to slow down and was able to recover and land.

A month of personal disasters

Well it's been quite a month for horrible experiences of many sorts for me, beginning with the smoke problem but including one disaster after another involving my computer, which meant I lost quite a bit of work and therefore income. I hope it's all over now but as they say time will tell.

If these are Satan's attacks I suppose I should be happy because I must be doing something right in that case. I do have a project I've begun working on that I think and hope is from the Lord, the kind of project that needs Him to guide me at every turn or I'll mess it up. Keeps me coming back to Him when I've hit a snag and want to give up, which happens frequently, but nevertheless when my computer won't do what it's supposed to do and my income falls to zero I'm prone to lose the solid faith I need at those times.

We're admonished in scripture to rejoice in ALL circumstances, because it's ALL good although we usually don't have the perspective to understand it. And I do try, at least ask the Lord to give me that spirit of rejoicing and resting in Him no matter what demonic interferences are going on around me. I even prayed for the ability to love my neighbor as my apartment and my lungs filled up with the smoke. "All things work together for good to those who love God and are the called according to His purpose." I ran that one through my head frequently.

Thought I'd spend this post describing all those disasters, but maybe this is enough. Or as I have the habit of doing, I'll sign off with the idea that I may yet come back and add all that. You never know.

Update on the smoking situation

After nearly a whole month of suffering from my neighbor's smoke, at long last, as of yesterday afternoon, the property manager got her to go smoke behind the laundry room and I can breathe again.

It turns out there is a law against "endangering the health or well being" of another person, which is grounds for eviction. I thought there simply must be a law along those lines, it's insane to think that a person could smoke freely even when the smoke stings another person's eyes, makes her chest hurt, prevents her from opening a window or turning on the A/C, and generally makes her miserable in her own home. Thank You Lord that there is such a law.

The neighbor's attitude had been that "this isn't California and I'm not doing anything wrong!" but I think the principle of the thing finally got through to her --the threat of eviction if nothing else. But best of all I don't think there are any hard feelings on either side and I'm very glad of that since I've been hysterical over it more than once and could easily have said or done something I'd regret. Insufficient prayer of course.

I did get an anti-pollution mask that worked great for a few days at blocking out the smoke, although of course having to wear a mask in my own home wasn't fun, but after a few days the smell of the mask materials started to nauseate me and I had to give up wearing it yesterday.

So the manager's intervention came just in time.

A Rant Against Smokers' Rights

I used to be a smoker, even a very heavy smoker for a few years, but I quit 22 years ago this month and am SO happy I did. What a horrible addiction.

But now I'm unusually sensitive to smoke and avoid it if I can. I don't go places where I know there will be smoke in the air. I don't know if my sensitivity is due to having been a smoker myself, but I've thought it may be. People who have never smoked don't seem to have quite as much trouble with it as I do now.

But whatever the reason, it is very hard on me to be around smoke now. It makes my chest hurt, it stings my eyes, and after some time of exposure it gets up into my sinuses where it causes me to smell smoke for a couple of weeks whether there is any actual smoke in the environment or not. Then it's the smarting eyes and the tight chest that tell me if there is or not.

When I was a smoker I was oblivious to the effects on nonsmokers, as I think most smokers are. It seemed to be mostly a matter of aesthetics, people not liking the smell, rather than anything harmful. You adapt, you go to the smoking section in the restaurant, you smoke on countless front or back porches because the smell of smoke is not wanted in the house, and so on. We heard "scientific" reports of the supposedly harmful effects of second-hand smoke, but such reports have an abstract quality to them. I don't recall anyone complaining that the smoke actually hurt them.

Now I know that it hurts and I know it the hard way, by being trapped in my own apartment with the smoke from neighbors' cigarettes and no right to protest against it. They have the rights. At least in my state they do.

For the first four or five years I lived in this apartment I had the same neighbor to the south of me and he didn't smoke. Then he moved out and there have been half a dozen or so different tenants in that apartment since then, all of them smokers. The management requires them to go outside to smoke because they don't want the apartment walls plastered with the tars and permeated with the smell of smoke. What that means is that the smoke comes into MY apartment next door.

It comes through the window if I have one open, of course, and it comes through the A/C if I have it on. What else do you do on hot summer days but run the A/C and open windows to cool the place down? I can't do that if there is smoke in the air. But it also comes in when everything is shut up. I think that might be because I do have to run a fan since I can't do anything else to keep the place cool, and the fan may suck the smoke in through the cracks around the door and windows. Just a theory.

Mercifully most of the tenants haven't been heavy smokers and were gone most of the time anyway, but while they were smoking it was an unpleasant experience for me. When I once asked the manager if there was anything she could do about it, the answer was no.

Now I have a new neighbor and she's home most of the time and she has friends there with her much of the time and they ALL smoke. And at least one of them is a very heavy smoker. Someone smokes sometimes well into the night so I can't even have a window open during the coolest hours any more.

This is pretty much unbearable. It is the smokers who have the rights, not the victims of the smokers, a very odd injustice. Sure, it's a personal habit but this particular personal habit happens to impact others, very seriously too as I now understand from experience. I'm sitting here with smarting eyes as I write. Tenants are normally protected from other tenants' habits that encroach on them but not from smoking. I did a little research on the rights involved in this sort of situation and it doesn't look good for the nonsmoker. They've got laws against smoking in public places but not in apartments. Apartment managers sometimes try to accommodate people but that doesn't always happen.

I found one case, back in the 90s but as far as I can tell the same attitudes still pretty much prevail -- a man had lived for some time in an upstairs apartment when a very heavy smoker moved into the apartment below him. He would wake up to a cloud of smoke in his bedroom. He got an irritation in his eye from it that required medical treatment. The management said there was nothing they could do about it. When he politely approached the smoker, she agreed to smoke in a different place but that didn't last long. She was aware that she had a "right" to smoke where she did. Finally the management sued HIM for "harassing" the smoker, which merely meant the request that she smoke elsewhere. The court decided against him. He was evicted. Amazing.

I've ordered a carbon-filtered mask from Amazon which should arrive early next week, to wear in my own apartment, because my neighbor has the right to inflict her smoke on me.

The science of carbohydrate metabolism, not that I know much about it

An old thread on a book about the low-carb diet by someone named Taubes got revived at EvC and I've been following it more or less. Molbiogirl keeps arguing that insulin isn't the problem but nobody else has said it is, so I lose track of the argument and tend not to read her stuff very carefully.

PD and Percy explain that for them it's all about what helps you lose weight and that the underlying chemistry involved is of secondary interest if at all. That's my concern too. But also, if diabetes is in the picture, as it is for me, you pretty much HAVE to restrict carbs because they raise blood sugar -- and that has been borne out over and over in my own experience with using the blood sugar monitor to check. Carbs raise the blood sugar, not protein and not fat, at least not to any comparable degree.

Part of the argument from Atkins -- and probably Taubes -- is that insulin is normally produced in response to raised blood sugar, its job is to keep blood sugar on an even keel, and that weight gain occurs when it begins to malfunction. As I got it from Atkins, when more carbs are taken in over a long period of time than get burned off through normal activity and exercise, insulin first begins to be overproduced in reaction, which can bring the blood sugar down even to the level of hypoglycemia, then begins to be insufficiently produced, as if it's wearing out, eventually to the point of diabetes, but on the way there something happens to the metabolism such that you start gaining weight.

The usual idea is something called "insulin resistance" at the cellular level which prevents insulin from doing its job of controlling the blood sugar, which then gets stored as fat. I hope I have this right but it's part of the Atkins system I didn't spend much time on and may have it wrong. Apparently this is the part of the science that molbiogirl disagrees with, but it does seem irrelevant to the purpose of the thread -- which is about the role of too much carbohydrate in causing obesity and that is pretty well documented, not to mention supported in countless testimonies, including my own and some other contributors to that thread.

Diabetes is a condition of hard-to-control high blood sugar due to malfunctioning or nonexistent insulin production. If you still have some insulin function you can possibly manage the diabetes with diet and that's preferable to drugs, but uncontrollable blood sugar due to lack of insulin production leads to death by starvation unless insulin is administered, because insulin is necessary to deliver the sugar to the cells. When sugar is consistently at high levels in your blood that means it's not getting into your cells, and high blood sugar itself leads to all kinds of organ damage and damage to blood vessels.

Right now I apparently still have some insulin function but its activity isn't always predictable. As long as I keep carbs low, getting carbs mostly from nonstarchy vegetables and keeping starchy carbs and refined carbs to an extreme minimum, I don't get scary blood sugar spikes. But my blood sugar still isn't down in the normal range consistently and maybe never will be. I'm continuing to lose weight, however, and still hope to get blood sugar even better controlled.

Probably my last word on Atkins and dieting in general

The following should be written in the past tense now as you'll see from my last paragraph, but I'm keeping it present because it's even now mostly what I'm still doing and I only very recently changed in any case.

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I've been continuing my new eating regime and continuing to lose weight slowly, about three to four pounds a month, which is a rate I'm happy with. As I've said, I've been doing a loose version of Atkins, the differences being that I'm counting calories, which he discourages, and allowing my own chosen level of a daily carb count of 25-to-40 grams. This allows slow weight loss and keeps my blood sugar within acceptable limits.

The starting phase of the Atkins diet, the two-week Induction phase, keeps you under 20 carbs a day, and I've never tried to be that strict with myself although I have had some days when my carb count comes in at about 20. I do believe the testimonies that the Induction phase gets most people off to a very motivating large early weight loss without hunger, but I'm just not that organized or disciplined. What I'm doing takes organization and discipline enough for me. I'm not sure how many carbs he allows after that beginning period, I'd have to go look it up, but I recall that you are to gradually phase carbs back in one at a time to test their effect on your weight loss, and to avoid any that interfere with the loss until you are at or near your goal weight -- and even then for most people there are some carbs you are going to have to recognize you have to keep to a minimum for the rest of your life.

I recently encountered a typical misunderstanding about Atkins that I would like to answer. This was from my doctor, who is happy enough with my weight loss and not trying to discourage me from what I'm doing, but did express what is apparently a common notion that the Atkins diet is "just meat and fat." In his book Atkins mentions that people often get this wrong idea about the diet.

This idea may come from mistaking the Induction phase for the diet itself. But there are four phases to his diet and I didn't really study them all since I ended up skipping the Induction phase and did my own thing with the basic formula of majoring in protein, keeping carbs low and not worrying about fat. He is aiming for a special effect with his Induction phase, speeding up the burning of your own body fat which occurs when the carbs are kept under 20 grams. I'm counting calories instead because losing weight fast isn't my objective and I don't want the technical concerns that require you to do a home urinalysis to be sure you're burning fat as he wants you to. Maybe I'm just lazy but since I am losing weight it hasn't become an issue. Some people who have a really hard time losing weight may stay in the Induction phase for a long time, but it's not the norm of his diet. There is also a very specialized diet he puts a very few rare individuals on for a brief period because of their severe metabolic resistance to weight loss, which is, interestingly, all fat (cream cheese, pork rinds, macadamia nuts for instance). He only keeps them on this for a few days as I recall. But these are exceptions to his basic diet plan and it's not fair to characterize the overall plan by them.

In my own experience Atkins is mostly "meat and non-starchy vegetables," not "meat and fat." The very strict minimal-carb Induction phase is meat and green leafy vegetables, which are the lowest carb vegetables, even in that case not really describable as "meat and fat." You do have more meat proportionally on this phase because of the low carb requirement but still you can have a slice of tomato or some spinach with your bacon and eggs and a very large green salad at your other two meals, or one large green salad and some steamed asparagus or the like.

The idea that Atkins is loaded with fat is also wrong. It's simply that he doesn't restrict fat, considers it very important to get enough fat because fat satisfies hunger which is crucially necessary when you want to lose weight. So you are allowed the bacon and eggs, you don't remove the chicken skin, you can have a chicken salad or an egg salad made with real mayonnaise, and you can put butter on the cooked vegetables -- it doesn't affect your weight loss and it helps with the hunger. You have to use a non-carb salad dressing like olive oil and vinegar, and the oil is another fat that adds up the calories if you're counting, but again not interfering with weight loss. And he gives lots of research information showing that fat is NOT the health hazard people have been claiming for decades, in fact that cholesterol counts DECREASE on his diet. My doctor agreed that this is so.

My own sloppy version of Atkins usually results in a plate that is a half to three-quarters non-starchy vegetables, hardly all "meat and fat," -- except for breakfast which is harder to do that way. I've been gravitating to having lean ham rather than bacon with eggs for breakfast and thinking of putting the egg on a bed of spinach cooked in butter with onion [July 24: I tried it! GREAT combination egg and spinach!]. Eggs Florentine is a spinach-based egg recipe that could be adapted to eliminate the carbs. The famous Joe's Special of San Francisco is something I want to try for breakfast when I get around to it -- a perfect Atkins style meal -- hamburger with onion and spinach all scrambled together with eggs. So even at breakfast this way you are getting some vegetables. At dinner I usually include a salad with three or four raw vegetables, and a cooked vegetable as well, alongside the meat -- which is only three or four ounces and may be beef or pork or fish or chicken etc., not a huge slab of beef or whatever people imagine Atkins inspires. I may saute the meat in oil or butter and don't worry about the fat, but neither the meat nor the fat is in great quantity. (Of course some people may require greater quantities of both. If you read Atkins you'll see how individual the diet plans can be based on different metabolisms).

In fact, since I've been eating this way I've noticed that I buy a LOT less butter, even only a quarter of the usual, probably because it's the "bad" carbs that need butter -- the potatoes and rice and bread that I'm no longer eating -- except for the occasional half slice of rye bread or a Wasa cracker. I can eat steamed vegies without butter though sometimes I'll add some. I've also been using a lot less mayonnaise, no doubt because I don't have sandwiches any more. I now put heavy cream in my coffee instead of milk because of all the carbs in milk, but you usually need only a very small amount of cream compared to milk. Overall I'm sure I've reduced my fat intake by quite a bit.

Of course I can't claim to be doing the Atkins diet, but I do believe what I'm doing is based on his principles enough to justify these claims in his favor.

However, although I did want to defend Atkins, all that has changed for me recently anyway as I'm now eating according to the Lord's leadings instead of according to Atkins or my own reasonings. Much has stayed the same, some items have been eliminated as luxuries, and the overall calorie count has gone down by a couple hundred points. The Lord's objectives are not the same as a dieter's. He's interested in training a believer in obedience and self-denial and weaning us away from worldly attachments. The result will certainly be weight loss as well.

I'm an Atkins fan

What I've been doing to lose weight is a sort of rough-and-ready version of my own of cutting carbs and calories, and otherwise I'm not following any particular diet plan. I mentioned in an earlier post that I've read up on some of the plans and got tips from them but it's just easier for me to make it up as I go along than try to follow any particular system.

However, I have been reading in my old copy of Atkins' Diet Revolution, and have to say he makes terrific sense. I found another book based on his diet that's aimed specifically at diabetes and its precursors, found it at a remaindered price so I got it.

I'm convinced. Atkins was way ahead of his time, if that's the way to put it. He was right anyway, and the medical establishment still hasn't recognized his well researched information, let alone the food industry. People still talk of Atkins as if his diet were a recipe for deteriorating health just because it contradicts the party line. Most "diet" products out there are reduced fat and high carb -- and THAT's the recipe for deteriorating health. They think fats are the problem, Atkins thinks fats are a necessary part of the solution, both for weight loss and for general health, and he showed plenty of research, his own and others that demonstrated that. They think you have to get rid of red meat, he thinks not. They think you have to have plenty of carbs, he thinks not, and he's proved it both in research citations and client testimonials.

That standard wisdom touts whole grain carbs, as in the illustration to the left, while Atkins treats even whole grains, the "good" carbs, as something to be minimized, in some cases not really much better than the "simple" carbs if you want to lose weight and need to watch your blood sugar. Diabetes organizations are still following the old way pretty much, restricting fats and proteins and allowing way too many carbs, and the "food pyramid" that reflects the establishment position still has grains at the bottom and de-emphasizes meats, which is the exact opposite of Atkins.






The Atkins food pyramid puts proteins at the bottom as the foods to dominate in a healthy diet, and grains at the very top, to be severely limited. The standard plan has vegetables and fruits about equal while Atkins emphasizes vegetables and puts fruits higher up the pyramid, to be moderately limited. On a diabetic diet they may have to be extremely limited.

Most of the new diet plans I've run across do mostly follow the same kind of thinking as Atkins, interestingly enough, without giving him the credit. The emphasis is on protein, not restricting natural fats, but avoiding sugar and other bad carbs like the plague they are, and keeping ALL carbs to an absolute minimum.

Most of these diets reject artificial sweeteners -- with the exception of stevia -- and soy, while Atkins accepts them, and I certainly agree with them about soy. (I had a horrible experience on a packaged diet plan based on soy protein and can hardly think of it without gagging). But these differences are minor while the basic understanding of body chemistry is what's important and the trend seems to be toward Atkins style eating to judge by the newer diet plans I find advertised on the web.

I'm still not quite ready to abandon my rough-and-ready approach for Atkins, it's just so much easier for me than following any program, and it's working after all, and it's very much in tune with Atkins anyway. But I'm still reading up on him and more and more appreciating his thinking and incorporating ideas as I go.

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One thing I would like to add is that the Atkins diet is clearly what's needed particularly by AMERICANS with our intensely high-sugar, high-carb standard unhealthy diet and lack of exercise. It did always bother me about the Atkins plan that grains clearly dominate the diets of most of the world, which seems to put him out of touch with normal eating -- the Bible even refers to the staple food as "bread." And we know some peoples live mostly, sometimes almost exclusively, on carbs such as rice, and that meat is usually a very small part of their diet, really a luxury.

This is of course the diet of poverty and our problem in America is our diet based on wealth -- it's the cause of our obesity problem and our diabetes problem. Wealth produces a great variety of foods strictly for self-indulgence rather than nutrition, and it also minimizes physical activity with all kinds of transportation options and labor-saving devices. High-powered athletes can afford to indulge in thousands of calories packed with carbs, but most of us can't. Poverty also of course guarantees plenty of physical activity, often having to walk everywhere, or maybe ride a bicycle, as well as a great deal of physical labor just in the activities of daily work and living that Americans no longer have to experience. It's probably one of the few things one can appreciate about poverty -- certainly in general it's not something to wish on anyone, but it has to be acknowledged that the high carb diet is well used by such active bodies, while the sedentary low-activity lifestyle is what makes a high carb diet bad for us in America and to some extent the West in general.

However, we also have worse carbs than they do overall anyway, all the processed foods that are part of being a wealthy nation, all the sugar in everything to cater to taste, the processed cereals, the packaged meals, the cookies and candies, the soda drinks, the french fries, the white breads.