Trivia Testers : P-56 again — Another Angle!

~ Jeff Pardo

Question: About what percent of violations of P-56 (the prohibited area over the White House, Capitol, Lincoln Memorial, etc., in downtown Washington DC) are GA aircraft?

  1. About half of all recent violations have involved corporate & air carriers.
  2. 99 percent of ’em are those gol-dang wild Indian puddle jumpers!
  3. The information is classified and has not been released to the public.
  4. 20%. Air America has a route over the Mall at 16,000 feet, which is technically below the top of it (which is FL 180). Whenever there’s a notice from the CIA, they look the other way.

The answer is number 1… maybe. (Actually it’s 1, definitely. My source was Bill Schumann, FAA Special Ops, Washington DC)

Subject: R-22 gear ratio. I promise–the last one on helicopters!

Question: What do a toilet and the gearbox of an R-22 have in common?

  1. The shape of the gearbox, viewed from the side, does tend to have a familiar silhouette…
  2. The gear ratio is 47:11, which coincidentally is the number of the famous perfumed water that Napoleon was said to have used: Koinisch Wasser 4711.
  3. They both use a hydraulic jump to aid fluid flow within their respective internal constrictions.
  4. You can see the contents of both. In the case of the gearbox, there’s actually a window to view the fluid level. Of course, in the other case, you might not want to discuss it.

It’s number 2: Or, maybe #2 and #4. (There really IS a window.)

Is the earth REALLY flat? Just a little bit?

Question: How ‘flat’ IS the earth?

  1. Actually, friction with the earth’s atmosphere over eons of time and the greater moisture at lower latitudes has caused more erosion — the end result of which is that the earth has actually gotten ‘skinnier’, (equatorial diameter less than that between the poles), not flatter and fatter!
  2. just one 13,000th: the distance between the poles is about 1600 feet less than the equatorial diameter.
  3. Flat as a pancake. Yessiree. All this orbit stuff’s a big hoax.
  4. Even solid rock has some give when 24 sextillion tons are being rotated around at a few hundred knots. The ‘flattening factor’ is one 297th. To a rough approximation, we are flying around over an oblate spheroid, not just a sphere! If you’re a REAL purist, it’s more like a pear, or even ‘the geoid’.

The answer, of course, is number 4.

 

Published by Jeff Pardo