"Sandwich" is a misnomer - it's just two chicken breasts with some cheese and bacon.  Most people would consider that an entree or two were it on a plate, but KFC calls it a "sandwich" and suddenly people are ecstatic or apoplectic.  I digress...

First, it's hefty.  You'd expect that from two chicken breasts with cheese and bacon, but really - this is 4 servings of chicken, 2 servings of bacon, 2 servings of cheese, plus whatever sauce they throw in there.  By my count, that's 930 calories and a whopping 3240 mg of sodium, while the RDA for calories and sodium is 2000 and 2400mg, respectively.  (The four servings of chicken come from the USDA definition of half a chicken breast as a serving.)  The sodium really comes through - I was having a bit of difficulty finishing the beast until I downed half my drink - and I didn't even touch the home fries that KFC gives you as part of the Double Down Meal.

The taste itself wasn't terrible, although the chicken was a bit overcooked.  You can't really taste the cheese or the bacon, but they do come through as texture when you bite into the "sandwich."  Mostly what you taste is salt, either in the breading or the sodium solution that they seemingly soak the chicken breasts in.  It definitely cured me of hunger but made me more thirsty than I can recall in recent memory - so going to the upsize or mega size or whatever it takes to get a large drink will definitely help you out if you'd like to try one yourself.

In the end, I don't think I'll get this ever again - it's just too damn salty.  KFC, for the love of god, try and bring the sodium down.  Use MSG if you have to.

Machinehead

Too Much Noise

As It Were (with Jensen on bass)

Yeahhhhh....

Overtorques are a very notable exception.  You see, we have a very capable engine that gives us about 420 shaft horsepower, but a transmission that is only rated to 317 shaft horsepower.

What a TH-57 may look like.

We also have a "droop compensation system" that responds at a rate commensurate with the rate at which you move the collective.  (The collective controls the pitch on the blades - more pitch = more thrust = needs more engine power.)  All of these things along with student jitters combine to create the overtorque.  We're normally allowed to go to 100% torque, with a 10-second allowance up to 110%.  Above that, you have to land the aircraft to get trucked back due to the fact that you may have damaged the drive train - and the aircraft doesn't fly for very long when disconnected from the engine.

Overtorques happen for many reasons - an improper pedal turn, bringing the engine online from idle while still applying pitch to the rotors, or, in my case the other day, a very quick increase in collective.  Instructors are given guidance to defensively posture themselves to avoid overtorques, to include advising you to place your hand over the collective to limit its travel when you think the student is about to increase it for whatever reason.  In my case, my student looked to end an approach early due to being in a bad place to make a safe landing.   He began to increase collective quickly and I wasn't in a good position to stop its travel and DING!  We hit 118%.  My first overtorque.

(for those wondering what "ringing the bell" is, it refers to the quickness with which the torquemeter's needle moves - and when it gets to 110% or more, the digital display flashes at you.  DING DING DING DING DING)

I was a bit nervous, as this was my first flight with students and I was the first guy from my squadron to launch and go fly BIs, which have a different set of weather requirements than all our other flights.  After going through checklists that seemed to take twice as long as usual we got out to the working area - weather was juuuuust good enough to complete all our maneuvers.  Not bad for a first flight. To top it off, the lineman gave us a ride back to the hangar!

I wish I was kidding.

I assert that the majority of men do know a lot about doing chores but that their internal concepts of "how to do a chore" differ from their significant others'.  This isn't a problem until you leap into a situation where a chore is already started - you don't know the progress of what's going on, or what's next - all you see is a basket of rumpled clothes by the washer.  Wanting to show your wife how much you want to help out, you throw them in the washer, add detergent, and voilà: instant helpful husband!  Had you asked your s/o "hey, is this laundry in the basket clean?" you still get brownie points and the laundry isn't done twice.

What it boils down to is active, persistent communication.  When you come across a situation that you don't know about, ask!  We're ostensibly a team, right?

I'm part of the world's greatest team sport - naval aviation - and we still sometimes struggle with communication.  A large part of that is the need to consistently and reliably process large amounts of critical information in order to make a decision, which can and does result in stereotyping.  Word gets around about the guy who shuts down under pressure or the gal who is a mess on the radios and that reputation is tough to shake.  Even if you've worked extremely hard on that issue and now have it under control, the people you're flying with will operate on the assumption that you're just this close to reverting back to your earlier behavior.  Part of this is due to the primacy effect - if you've got that habit, it's going to be exceedingly hard to shake and odds are good that you'll revert back to it once you stop actively flying and start autonomously flying, such as what happens under stress.

In the training command, we stress that every flight is a new chance for success and with few exceptions it is.  A big emphasis is placed on letting students make mistakes and then learn from them - but the communication aspect is critical if the correct behavior is to be imparted.  Just doing it once won't help near as much as doing it a few times - once immediately after the mistake, once on the ground while reviewing the overall flight, and then once again on their grade sheet.

Where does this leave us with gender and stereotypes?  Communication between both parties has to be emphasized and practiced, over and over again.  It won't be second nature until you're that old couple that knows each other inside and out, but it will help everything along.

(Also, I thought that NYT article was a pretty standard overview of a relatively new phenomenon with a rather incendiary headline.)

We met on the back porch, looked at the ADB, walked to the aircraft, started up and got going.  It was a bit weird to be running the checklist vice actually doing it, but that's what the skipper wants, so that's what he gets!  The weather was GORGEOUS - a few clouds way, way, up there, good winds of 8-10 knots, sunshine and about 65 degrees.  You can't ask for a better day to go flying.

We got out to the working area and began to go through simulated emergencies at altitude, including engine failures.  I demo'd the first engine failure, talking all the way through it and then the skipper took the controls and acted like he was a typical dumb student flying the engine failure.  (We simulate those by reducing the engine throttle control to flight idle and then using the kinetic energy stored in the rotating blades to autorotate downward.)  I rolled off the twist grip (throttle) and he started going through the procedures, acting like a student and making typical student errors.  I corrected him, took the controls and waved off the approach, and we set up to head into Pace (an outlying field or OLF).

At Pace we started easily with a normal approach to a a hover and a vertical landing with me talking my way all the way around the pattern and onto the deck, just as if I was with a student.  The skipper then did the same thing, acting as a student and gauging my responses.  I suppose I should add that this flight was my first time acting as an instructor, even though I was flying with the CO, so I don't really have my techniques locked down just yet, but I'm told that this will come with time.  Skipper did nothing terribly crazy - just some shady ball control and confusion over the appropriate altitudes, but with some prompting from me it ended up okay.

After that we did some maneuvers for my proficiency, then steep approaches to a no-hover landing for both me and the skipper-acting-as-student.  That was a bit more squirrely, since the procedures are just different enough to confuse students - and when you don't know what's going on, you usually revert back to a previously learned yet similar behavior - in this case, a normal approach.  But other than that and getting caught up in a low hover vice a no-hover landing, everything was reasonably good.

From there we went to power-off maneuvers.  These are cut guns, taxi cut guns, and autos.  Cut guns happen when the instructor (me) rolls the twist grip off while in a hover.  I did one in order to gain proficiency for me and additionally to see how the aircraft is going to respond to the power off maneuver.  After completing one, I transferred control to the skipper, who did one for his proficiency.  We didn't go "fight's on" (skipper simulating a student) for cut guns and taxi cut guns due to their unforgiving nature, but did so for the autos. We finished up with some taxi cut guns, which are cut guns while taxiing forward, and proceeded to the auto pattern.  After completing a couple of 90- and 180-degree autos, we went "fight's on" and the skipper started simulating a student again, forgetting to roll off the twist grip for one auto and getting sloppy with ball and Nr control on the second.  The second also saw him neglecting to bring the twist grip back to full open at the appropriate altitude, resulting in me taking the controls and rolling it on while executing a waveoff.  Not quite a low Nr recovery, but kinda close to it.

After that I did one more 180 auto for my proficiency and NAILED it - it was probably the best auto I've shot in a Charlie - and then we departed and headed home via course rules.  After the flight and post-flight the skipper walked me through TIMS (our flight recording and grading system) and simultaneously debriefed me on the flight.  Everything went well and he especially liked my verbal procedures and explanations of all the maneuvers and encouraged me to keep up the effort.  After turning in our radios I went to talk to another instructor about something while he said that he'd "see me around campus" and headed back to the squadron.

The evening after New Years we went to Sharon's going away party in Yokohama.  Sharon is Kendra's coworker and has the good fortune to be leaving Japan shortly, so her friends threw her said party.  Kendra and I were the first to arrive and discover that the place she had planned for, The Green Sheep, was closed until the 4th.  (Later we would discover that many, many more places were closed until the 4th, but I digress...)  Kendra was bummed for a bit but the whole group met up in rather short order and after wandering for a couple blocks found a different British-style pub to hold the festivities.  We all had a great time and even met some of the locals including some flamboyant ones that were extremely friendly with Sharon's husband.

We took the 3rd easy and then on the 4th boarded the bullet train from Yokohama to Kyoto, traveling 288 miles in two hours - not bad, a lot less cramped than planes and we just walked up to the station to board the train.  In our three days in Kyoto we saw the Golden Pavilion, Nijo Castle, Fushimi Inari Shrine, Yasaka Shrine, Gion, Kiyomizu Temple, and got to know the bus and subway system rather well, as well as braving some intensely cold weather.

More to come later - especially pictures.