Late this morning people in Sydney were treated to the sound and then sight of a largish four engine aircraft flying a somewhat unusual and fairly low flightpath on its way across the Northern Beaches on approach into Sydney. What made it a bit more interesting was:

1. the thing was painted gray
2. it had a fighter flying in close formation off its tail

Huh. Certainly a bit unusual to see on its way into SYD, but the fact that it was obviously a military aircraft, with a fighter escort, was more than reassuring. Mostly we figured it was a head of state or senior officer from some allied nation on the way in, getting a nice escort. I will admit that Katrina and I are both a little jumpy when it comes to very loud engines close overhead; the scream from the fighter’s jet engine mixed in did give it an unusual timbre. (Which most people aren’t used to; if you haven’t experienced fighters up close and personal, it’s not a roar but more a thin penetrating shriek. Hollywood never gets these things even remotely close). So, {shrug}. Residual jumpiness aside, what I learned from the last time a large jet flew down my street is that if you are hearing the engines firewalled, at least it is already past you.

Anyway, it all turns out to be quite innocent. The Royal Australian Air Force is retiring it’s last Boeing 707, and they did a photo shoot over Sydney. How nice.

Even though I only got a brief glance, I should have recognized the airframe. Bah. The US military still fly a number of C135 derivatives; that it might have been one did flash through my mind, but I they’re kinda getting on in years and I didn’t expect to see one hereabouts. A 707 isn’t that large, but sometimes scale is hard to tell from afar. Alas

I wouldn’t have ever given it a moment’s thought again except that a glance this evening at a local paper’s website showed it headlining an article about it, much to my surprise. Somewhat less of a surprise was them using the occasion to be all alarmist about low flying planes over cities.

After we get past the quotes of office workers who were terrified and who ran screaming from their buildings, we get to the mention that the plane was “trailing smoke”. That’s awesome. Uh, in case you didn’t know, that’s what turbofan engines do at low speed. Airplanes are made to be efficient at high altitude cruise. Pouring out power to keep a plane going at low speed is, unfortunately, somewhat inefficient. Kinda like your car starting after a red light. Jet engine manufacturers work hard on this sort of thing, but older planes are (surprise) less efficient. Which is why aircraft manufactured in the 1960s are somewhat less than ideal from an operations cost standpoint. Not to mention noise, and, yes, the black gunk pouring out the back.

The principal complaint is that people seem to feel they should have been told about this. While I’m sure the press will be full of scary headlines in the morning, and no doubt the politicians will hang the Air Force out to dry, the air navigation regulations for the Sydney terminal airspace clearly allow for aircraft doing photo op orbits over Sydney harbour and explicitly detail the procedures to be used. Gotta get that bridge and concert hall in or it just doesn’t count, right? So, quite sensibly, ATC around Sydney allows for pilots requesting permission to do so.

Now, admittedly, the average photo op by a circling Cessna doesn’t attract much attention; a largish jet is a bit more ostentatious. Neglecting for a moment that most of the approach paths bring low flying aircraft right over Sydney and its suburbs anyway, should the populace be given advanced notice of plans to orbit planes a bit lower? Hm.

Apparently at least one local radio station did know about this ahead of time, so I’d say the RAAF did its part¹ (and that’s assuming that it had an obligation to do so, which frankly, I’m not convinced of). If the journos didn’t think it newsworthy to mention in their broadcasts, that’s not the Air Force’s fault. And there in lies the problem. So long as the media is busy reporting on the latest antics of Britney Spears and how the 6 year long US presidential election campaign is getting on, I doubt there will ever be much time for public service announcements, even if we did decide that such things were topical.

AfC

¹ Update: Here’s the Department of Defence press release, released last week.

The town I live in held a family evening of Christmas carols at the local cricket oval last night. At first it had promise of being more than the usual amateurish affair that seems to be the lot of small communities, with a large choir and a proper orchestra.

But as the second half opened, instead of playing carols, they played the theme to Star Wars. Star Wars?!? And then Santa Claus appeared. At first I was a bit annoyed at the lack of musical taste, but then a broader truth became apparent:

Santa Claus is a Sith Lord

Suddenly, everything that drives you nuts about the excesses of the Christmas season makes sense. The endless shopping, tacky decorations, and worst of all the fact that the stores start playing Christmas music in October — it’s all an evil plot. Not to mention the whole flying through the air and visiting several million people an hour thing. Only a master of the Dark Side could manage these feats. Darth Claus, Lord of the Sith.

Image from a blog post a few years ago by Nikolai Ormazablev writing a review (in Spanish) of Revenge of the Sith. How did he know?

:)

AfC

Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating commenting on Sydney residents who are complaining about the inconvenience some will suffer as a result of Australia hosting this year’s APEC summit:

Grow up. Count yourselves lucky. Here you have leaders representing 60 per cent of the world GDP, a massive power grouping, coming to your city to discuss world affairs, and we think it’s a bother?

What’s really smart is that they made Friday a stat holiday for everyone who works in the city in order to alleviate the bulk of the inconvenience that would have otherwise been caused to people dealing with disruption to their commutes that day. Sweet! What more could you ask for?

AfC

There was a “tsunami warning” here this morning. This was initiated after an 8.1ish earthquake caused a tsunami wave to spank the Solomon Islands. Here in Sydney [which is a) a long way away, and b) around the corner from the Coral Sea and sheltered, by, well, Queensland], they closed the beaches, cancelled the ferry services, and sent large ships out to sea. My goodness. You’d think that the emergency services would have had sirens and alarms going to evacuate everyone up to high ground and safety.

Nope.

I was able to sleep right through the sirens and alarms. Because there weren’t any. Yup. Good job, there.

As it happens the disturbance that finally reached us here was 15 cm high. Get your surfboards, dudes, we’re gonna go catch some waves.

They cancelled the ferry for this?

It turns out that despite its ominous name, tsunami warning actually means “oh, there might possibly be something that you might need to know about sometime later today.” Of course, by the time anyone found that out, the media were in a feeding frenzy. Apparently, tsunami warnings get issued several times a week in various places whenever there is a rumble somewhere in the hemisphere. It is supposedly followed on the danger scale by tsunami alert and then tsunami alarm. (How anyone is expected to tell the difference between these three is beyond me. It’s right up there with the American terrorism threat levels: “Oh no! We’ve switched from orange to amber to sodium-yellow! The evil-doers are coming! Quick, Martha, get out the shotgun!”)

There are a number of places in the Pacific that do have tsunami alarms, like, as in, real alarm sirens. They practice it every month on (for example) Tuesday morning at 10:00. The point is, and everyone there gets this, that if the alarm goes off at anytime other than 1st Tuesday at 10:00, you need to be running like hell up the mountain.

Meanwhile, back in our little corner of the industrialized world, the only alarm we have here is the shark alarm. And indeed, when you hear that, it’s generally considered a good time to get out of the water. I can only hope that someone clues in that if you expect people to respond to an emergency alarm of slightly greater gravity, you need to tell people what it is first, and maybe even rehearse it once in a while so people recognize it. Otherwise, the never-cry-wolf factor will kick in and some day when there really is cause for alarm, it will be ignored — and that sorta defeats the purpose of having ocean warning systems.

AfC