There is a very popular phrase that has sprung from the bailouts of the New Depression: “They are too big to fail.”

That phrase has a naive, implicit vote of certainty that I find offensive.  For one thing, many of those bail beneficiaries have already decided to split up their businesses or exfoliate major divisions to save the main corpus.  If they are too big to fail, wouldn’t it be worse to go on such a diet and become smaller?  If nothing else, it lowers the chances of securing more bailout money.  Surely this might impact the CEOs bonus structure in a few years.

Taken to the other extreme, I guess very small businesses and startups are “Too small to succeed.”  Trouble is, the media and pundits have addressed this end of the business spectrum.  They think startups are all the rage, the panacea for unemployment.  You see, several amazingly successful tech companies were founded during recessions!  Just think of it.  Come up with the next great idea and you are certainly well on the way to prosperity.  In fact, you don’t really need an idea.  There are lots of businesses out there that will help you start a business.  In fact I think unemployed, homeless people in bankruptcy should go to the head of the line and start a business that helps other unemployed, homeless people start their new business.

Perhaps we are just hopeful when it comes to cute little startups or behemoth businesses that can’t get out of their own way.  Perhaps the current wisdom that unemployed people should start their own business because some great companies have emerged from hard time births, or huge multinational corporations are too big to fail is entirely accurate.  If the odds of success are best at the ends of the spectrum of size, then we really need to talk about a new bailout for losers.  We need a new phrase to illustrate where the pain is going to be when the bailout money is all passed out and all the unemployed people are operating successful apple stands on every street corner.

Those average businesses, the ones that have been around a while, why “they are just too mediocre to succeed.”  Serve them right if we tax them out of existence.

-- Walter Lounsbery, 2-19-2009

Web software developers and designers, more than any other creative people, often believe their mission is to rethink the conventional.  What is accepted as normal needs to be changed up, turned on its head, simplified, complexified, innovated and delivered with some cute and bizarre moniker right away.  The new thing becomes accepted and the cycle starts again.  This churn brought us successful ecommerce, online auctions, Twitter, blogs, social networking applications, online video, and so on.  The creative cycle is also the business cycle, with a few Web concepts becoming wildly successful and most others less than a footnote in Wikipedia.

In my experience, Web logs or blogs arrived and matured in no time.  And that time was about 2003.  As reported in Wikipedia, the term “Weblog” and “blog” originated in the early 1990s.  Tools, conventions, and some standards evolved well before I noticed what was going on.  In 2004, my wife and I attended the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas, mainly to understand how blogs and other “new” Web technologies were changing the face of the Web.  We also learned something of the impact of the Web on publishing in general and other forms of media.

Now practically all forms of social networks or media provide blogging capability.  Blogs are so pervasive that they have even become the universal hammer that makes every problem look like a nail.  For example, Telligent has a Content Management System (CMS) called Graffiti.  Oddly, this particular CMS is noted as “Blog Software” on its product page, and Graffiti actually is a bit of a re-thinking of blog software architecture.  Does that make it a content management system?  There are similar products out there.

The early blogs were online journals that provided timely updates from their authors.  The latest post appears on a main Web page, the others are available in order of posting.  Some blogs show posting hints on calendars for just this reason.  As blogs have become more sophisticated, they have incorporated category tags or open tag lists (sometimes shown as “tag clouds”).  These features, along with searching, provide a way to discover posts based on content, rather than posting sequence or date.  This blurs the line between an online journal and indexed articles.

I would argue that even modern blogs do not provide the kind of publishing that an article format provides.  On the Web, an article shares the characteristics of a printed article in a magazine or essay book (a book composed of independent articles).  An article can be longer than a blog, so long that scrolling in a single Web page is uncomfortable.  An article may need to appear in several linked Web pages.  An article may have a sidebar or supporting content (on the Web this may be video), which demands better, more flexible layout than most blogs.  In fact, since blogs should be laid out simply for consumption by blog reader software, layout and paging are the critical differences between the two formats.  A blog can be consumed in a browser or reader, a Web article is meant to be read on the Web.

The context for Web articles is also different from blogs.  Perhaps the time a Web article is published is of interest, but the sequence doesn’t matter at all.  A Web article may need the context of a table of contents, or several indexes (just as you would find a table of contents and an index in a book).  Some other method of discovery or linkage may also be worthwhile.

I think it’s time to stick a fork in blogs and declare the technology “done”.  It is super useful and a wonderful thing.  Perhaps something new and crazy great will happen for blogs, probably not any time soon.

I’ve been working on tools for easier Web article publishing at no great priority.  I admit I’m not a workaholic Thomas Edison, spending 20 hours a day to find the perfect solution.  But I think some creative and innovative Web developers or designers out there could really make an impact in this area.  Rethink the old magazine article format in a shiny new set of Web tools and standards.  Let writers write instead of hand-coding links for an online book framework, let people be creative writing on a Web without hard boundaries.  I’ll be watching from the sidelines, cheering you on, and waiting to see the world change again at SXSW.

-- Walter Lounsbery, 2-16-2009

The Continental Flight 3407 crash on approach to Buffalo Niagara International Airport (KBUF) on Thursday has been quite thoroughly overcovered by the media.  Even highly professional direct and regular briefings from the NTSB haven’t staunched the blabbering and misinformation as journalists seek to fill out their quota of column inches or TV minutes.  I’m sure that the Internet is also rife with uninformed and idle speculation.

These are not negative observations, that is just the nature of technical catastrophes.  Not very many people are even close in expertise to the NTSB accident investigators.  They have a rare kind of training, experience, and mindset that would put any of the fictional CSI characters to shame.  So as the rest of us try to cope with our thoughts about the tragedy, we will wonder why it happened and try to understand.  The NTSB personnel will painstakingly gather the evidence and compare various theories against the facts.  They will exercise the limits of technology to solve the puzzle.  We get to sift through the misquotes and oddball statements of the media.

In my previous career, I enjoyed free rein to work with a wide variety of aviation technology.  In my last position, I was lead for stability and control for development of the Gulfstream G-5 (now the G500).  Earlier, I worked on analysis of four aircraft incidents and accidents of KC-135 aircraft while at Boeing.  I realize that writing yet another non-official theory for the Flight 3407 accident may not benefit the investigation (I doubt they’ll hear about this blog post), I’ll feel better airing a couple of ideas and maybe you will find them somewhat insightful.

The initial NTSB reports on the flight are puzzling in several ways.  It is clear that conditions were ripe for icing and that is a concern.  However, it is said that no other pilots reported severe icing.  To me that is a kind of red herring, because the special conditions for icing can be somewhat localized and transitory.  Icing can even vary considerably with relatively small changes in altitude.  Accumulation can happen suddenly and fast.  I also wonder how much icing was reported, even if it was not severe.  Some articles said that the crew reported icing on Flight 3407.

Another odd aspect of this accident is the initial severe pitch up of the aircraft, prior to the pitch down and roll.  It takes a lot of pitch moment to disturb an aircraft that way, and most of the “common” failure modes result in an initial pitch down.  Another mode, stall/spin, is usually not associated with large pitch rates nose up, the entry to stall is more gradual.  I would really like to see control deflections during the event if that is available from the flight recorder.  That would clarify a lot of things.  Unfortunately, the NTSB briefing talked about listening for the pitch trim motor on the cockpit voice recorder.  I’m guessing that the flight recorder does not have data for control deflections or the trim deflections, or they wouldn’t have had to guess about use of pitch trim from the CVR.

Any aircraft that experiences a sudden pitch change, especially nose up, will do so because of an equally sudden change of configuration at the horizontal tail.  In this case, with suspected icing conditions, icing of the horizontal tail has to be considered.  The textbook case is a situation where ice builds up during cruise or descent, reducing the effectiveness of the horizontal tail.  The ice builds up on the leading edge of the horizontal tail, greatly reducing the ability to hold the nose of the aircraft up at the correct attitude.  The horizontal tail has to produce a downward force to properly balance other forces and moments on the aircraft, and greater nose up trim than normal is needed with ice on the tail.  As the aircraft approaches the airport to land, the crew slows down the aircraft and deploys flaps and landing gear.  The flaps and landing gear create nose down pitch moments that overcome the capability of the iced up horizontal tail.  The aircraft dives and impacts the ground before the crew can regain control.

Flight 3407 crashed soon after deployment of the flaps and landing gear, too low to recover from a textbook case of severe horizontal tail icing.  But it initially pitched up, not down.  This is inconsistent with the textbook scenario.

Even worse for any theories based on icing: the crew activated the anti-icing boots on the aircraft soon after departure and that system was on during the accident, according to the NTSB.

It is important to remember that each accident or incident can be unique.  There is always a cause, but it doesn’t have to come from a textbook.  Worse, a theory can fit all the facts you have, but if you can’t validate it against the facts (eliminate other good theories), it may always be just a possible cause.  If you haven’t seen this in action, watch a few episodes of Mythbusters on the Discovery Channel.

Given what I’ve heard about Flight 3407, here is a possible cause.  There was significant icing at some point in the flight, providing accumulation of ice on the horizontal tail despite the anti-icing system.  Since the boots are fed from bleed air on the engines, I have to wonder about the flow rates at the tail when the engines are spooled down for descent.  The autopilot system automatically compensated by adding nose up trim as the ice accumulated.  It is possible that ice also accumulated on the control surface balance areas of the horizontal tail, which are probably not protected by an anti-ice system.  Due to the boots and other factors, the leading edge ice on the horizontal tail was not stable.  Configuration changes prior to landing caused the leading edge ice to break off the horizontal tail soon after deployment of the flaps and landing gear.  The sudden additional downforce as the tail regained its effectiveness caused the aircraft to pitch up and subsequently stall violently.  If ice accumulated on the control surfaces of the horizontal tail, the situation would be worse as the control system could have been jammed.

-- Walter Lounsbery, 2-16-2009

Q-400 Flight Evaluation