I had just arrived in Florida’s panhandle, after flying through moderately poor conditions. My friend was off to check on her sick mom and I needed to get back home before the weather got worse.

The interminable rain was pounding the airport, and I waited for about 10 minutes for it to relent, but it just kept coming. Not wanting to give the storm any more time to build, I filed my flight plan and took off in driving rain and IFR conditions (600 ceiling). Turbulence was mild, and the weather looked about the same as when I flew through it an hour ago. There was a solid wall of moderate to heavy rain stretching for hundreds of miles from Atlanta to far into the Gulf of Mexico. As I started out into the Gulf, to cut across Florida’s ‘armpit’ on my East-bound flight, I reported to Jacksonville Center that my flight conditions were mild to moderate turbulence and rain.

I was about 10 miles offshore when Mother Nature reminded me, in no uncertain terms, who’s boss. Two walls of thunderstorms converged, and rain and turbulence jumped from moderate to extreme. I slowed the plane to what’s called ‘maneuvering speed’. At this speed, so the saying goes, you can apply immediate and full control input without damaging the plane. Since the turbulence was extreme, this is exactly what I was doing to keep the plane level. I reported to Center to please forget about the ‘moderate’ conditions that I had reported earlier. The turbulence was so violent that if my flight instruments were the old style ‘steam gauges’, I wouldn’t be able to see them. My SR22 has a large LCD panel that gives you the plane’s attitude (wings level, ascending or descending) even when your head is being slammed against the ceiling or your door window.

Now when I say ‘extreme turbulence’, please keep in mind that I ride motocross bikes on a track that can get very hacked up. As the flight conditions continued to deteriorate, motocross started to seem very mild indeed. I think a professional bull rider might have even found it disconcerting. The rain was so intense that the sound of it hammering the windshield (even at my reduced speed) made it difficult to hear Jacksonville Center (with the radio cranked up). Then the rain got worse, to the point where droplets were hitting my face inside the cockpit – it was actually coming in through the air vents (which collect their air several feet out on the wings). That’s when the lightning started. Lots and lots of lightning. Beautiful to watch from the safety of distance; disconcerting when flashes are all around you, to include above and below. The lightning did relieve the eerie darkness in the cockpit, but I would have preferred a less dramatic light source.

By then I was about 20 miles offshore over the Gulf, and was becoming a little concerned. The way it works is this. Rain makes you wet, lightning is generally not a problem, but turbulence can kill you. So although intense rain tends to be associated with intense turbulence, it’s not always a one-to-one correlation, and rain is just an indicator, even when a little bit of it is making it into your cockpit. Turbulence – now that’s a problem, and it’s all about the trend. Turbulence starts small, builds to some maximum level, reaches a plateau, then eventually decreases. The trick is to make sure that the turbulence doesn’t get to the point where your wings come off. Unfortunately, as you caper about, like a suitcase in a wind tunnel, you know the turbulence is increasing; you just don’t know when it is going to plateau. Please, please, let me off this unmerry-go-round.

Since this storm was big, I had plenty of time to run through a couple of sobering scenarios. I know a couple of pilots who claim to have bent their wings in extreme turbulence. Since my plane is composite construction, my wings don’t really bend. Their failure modes are separation or breaking. However, even then I have an option few other planes have – a parachute integrated into my plane’s airframe. So if turbulence exceeds the structural capability of my plane, the best-case scenario plays out like this. Deploy the chute, 20 miles offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, in a raging thunderstorm. Suffice as to say that I won’t make it home in time for dinner, even if the Coast Guard finds my emergency locator beacon.

And then the turbulence and rain began to abate, and were soon all the way down to merely ‘alarming’. The trend continued, and I was left with a smooth ride over Orlando. There was a light misty rain south of Orlando, and Orlando Approach asked me if I wanted to deviate to avoid it. “No”, I said and laughed (I don’t think hysterically), “I will persevere”. As I flew home I thought a little about how Mother Nature had really clarified things for me. You know when you’re in a car, sometimes there’s a gnat buzzing against the windshield, trying to get out? And there you are, slapping your hand against the inside of the windshield trying to crush it? You’re playing the role of Mother Nature, and I was the gnat. I got away this time.

I landed at my home airport, taxied to my hanger. As I was putting my plane away, I hugged it and kissed it on the propeller. We bonded.

Led Zeppelin IV was released in November of 1971. A number of heavy metal standards comprise this album. Black Dog, Rock & Roll, Misty Mountain Hop and Stairway to Heaven are sovereign heavyweights in the lexicon of rock and roll. I first purchased this record in 1980. At the time, I wasn’t much of a Zeppelin fan though to be noted I wasn’t overly familiar with their catalog of work. However, shortly after I gave this album a listen I became a convert.

Percussion was my first instrument. I began playing snare drum in a marching drum corp named the Cavalets in 1974. From that experience, I learned a valuable lesson with metaphorical overtones: When marching in a parade, it is infinitely better to proceed a horsed cavalry than to follow. I subsequently went on to play drums in my junior high and high school bands. The experience of listening to John Bonham on Rock and Roll, for example, was influential on my musical life beyond estimation. The way everything in this song seems to come apart as Plant spirals the chorus back into verse, and Bonham lazily lags a beat behind the turn and then in an instant snatches back the time on the down beat of the next verse….exhilarating! From Zeppelin, I learned time is elastic as pertains to musical expression and this elasticity is paramount to creating groove.

Zeppelin IV shares a rare and notable attribute with a select few other recordings in the catalog I’ve amassed over the years: Its finale, When The Levee Breaks, is as strong a closing song as Black Dog is as an opener. From the early beginnings of album sales, bands have struggled to muster up 10 -12 songs of equal musical and lyrical strength. This difficulty is evident by the comparative strength of the first 3 or 4 songs of most albums when juxtaposed with the last 2 or 3. Fortunately, this tendency allows us the listeners to evaluate recordings quickly when deciding whether or not to purchase. For myself, if I don’t hear something compelling; some persistent hook in the first 3 or 4 songs, well….I’m not going to stay around for the floor sweepers.

It all began with a bit of graffiti on a bridge enclosure. From that point, every new discovery felt like it supplanted its antecedent. Schopenhauer led to Nietzsche who led to Husserl who led to Heidegger… Just like Led Zeppelin IV, that great album of epic scope where each song is integral to the collective effort fusing monolithic hard rock with a mystical, rustic English sensibility, each of these thinkers are essential and deeply influential to the next. When The Levee Breaks majestically brings closure to LZ4; Heidegger’s phenomenolgy fitly closes a German movement begun with Schopenhauer’s negation of the world. And for a wee freshman at the U of M circa 1984, Schopenhauer was merely a point of introduction on an otherwise long, linear line stretching on past the horizon in both directions. That bit of graffiti shook me from my remedial slumber, and onward and forward I stumbled.

To be continued…

	LISTEN NOW: [audio:http://ourundiscovereduniverse.com/podcast/OUUpodcast_08012008.mp3]
	DOWNLOAD MP3 NOW: OUU Podcast #1: Cosmology – The Application of Null Theory to the Universe.

Welcome to the first in a series of podcasts that explore Null Physics as presented in the book, “Our Undiscovered Universe” written by Scientist and Engineer, Terence Witt.

Topics for discussion include Null Physics as applied in Cosmology including the centerpiece of Null Cosmology, the Cosmic Fusion Cycle.

Also in Episode 1:

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Most of the time, my struggles with Mother Nature occur on a purely theoretical level of foundational physics. On rare occasions, however, the struggle becomes far more personal and visceral .

I started flying a few years ago as a result of two related circumstances. First, we were routinely driving 4 or 5 hours to the Florida Keys to go scuba diving, which required transiting the Miami area. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, it’s probably safer to fly over Miami in a poorly maintained gyrocopter than to actually drive through it. The second data point was a good friend who became a pilot. Since he is the most accident prone person imaginable, I didn’t think his becoming a pilot was a good idea. Yet he was still alive after several years of flying. The only reasonable conclusion was that flying wasn’t as dangerous as it seemed.

Since I tend to do things in reverse of their customary order (you know, like releasing a new theory in book form and then publishing scientific papers), I started my flying experience by purchasing a new high-performance airplane (310 HP) prior to receiving even a hint of flight instruction. In my defense, the Cirrus salesperson had a great pitch and an incredible product. Go up, let the customer with zero flight time do a few turns at altitude, impress them with all of the cool, state-of-the-art technology, and then close the deal shortly after landing. I was hooked, and fell in love with the plane at first flight. On the drive home, however, it slowly dawned on me that I really would have to get a license to fly this thing. Oh, that. I flew about three times a week and got my license about two weeks before I picked up my plane in Duluth, Minnesota.

Florida is a strangely shaped state, and although its road system is superb, we have a lot of swamp here, and its highways take circuitous routes around many regions that, if you were unlucky enough to drive off the road, would never be found again. I’m not talking quicksand, exactly, but you get my meaning. So, for instance, if you wanted to drive from south central Florida to its panhandle, it might take 10 or 12 hours, depending on where you need to go. Or about an hour or so in my plane, regardless of where you need to go. So, as a result of Florida’s tortured and steaming geography, I have become somewhat of an air taxi for friends and family as the need arises.

The need arose last week when Lauren’s (not her real name) mother, who lives far out in Florida’s panhandle, found herself in the hospital with a sudden illness. I have made this trip before for similar reasons, and Lauren is a fairly nervous passenger, where ‘fairly nervous’ is defined as ‘afraid of one’s own shadow’. Because of this, I only fly Lauren when the weather is picture perfect. Unfortunately, on the day in question, the weather didn’t even come close to perfect. I told her there would be some ‘rough patches’ and received repeated confirmation that she needed to go and would deal with it.

The beginning of the 90 minute west-bound flight was uneventful. I had filed a flight plan and was discussing the deteriorating weather conditions with Jacksonville Center, trying to find the smoothest way through so as to minimize Lauren’s trauma. My first hint that Lauren was going to have a life-altering experience was when we hit some barely perceptible turbulence and she grabbed the overhead support handle. Hmm. The storm was big, dark, and we were about 25 miles offshore over the Gulf of Mexico, cutting across Florida’s ‘armpit’. Unfortunately for Lauren, there was an occasional break in the clouds, and she could see the roiling sea below us. There was a solid wall of moderate rain from Atlanta to well into the Gulf, and I was looking for the quickest, smoothest way through it. My plane is equipped with satellite weather, so I can see almost everything that the ground controllers can see. Unfortunately, nothing either of us saw looked calm.

Soon enough, we were ‘in it’. The plane started bucking, the rain drummed on the windshield, and it got very dark in the cockpit. I kept trying to reassure Lauren, talking her through it, and I thought I was doing ok until I noticed that one of her pant legs was ‘fluttering’. I thought this was caused by flow from her air vent, but then noticed that the vent was off and she was literally quaking in her seat. Poor lady. Moments later we broke out into the blue, and were on our way to our destination. Sadly, Lauren’s trauma wasn’t quite over yet, because the storm was waiting for us.

I was watching it come in as we approached our destination airport, and I knew it was going to be close. I had managed to calm Lauren somewhat at this point, but alas, there was a flight ahead of us, and this delayed our landing just enough so that the storm arrived at the same time. I was about two feet off the runway, already flared for landing, when a 20 knot wind shear hit and literally ‘pulled the air out from under my wings’, causing, in spite of my immediate countermeasures, the plane to drop onto the runway and bounce (at 90 mph). Actually, it was more of a splash-bounce, since there was at least two inches of standing water on the runway.

This of course, was the last thing Lauren needed, and she was preternaturally silent as I taxied through torrential rain to the terminal. We talked in the terminal for a while, and she was surprised when I told her that she was probably the bravest passenger that I’ve ever had. “No way”, she exclaimed, “I was terrified the whole time!”. Yes, and that’s the point. Getting in a small plane and flying through bad weather to check on your sick mom isn’t brave if you aren’t afraid of flying. But she did it anyway, and she’s afraid of almost everything . That’s bravery.

Tune in next week for my report on my return flight. After I dropped Lauren off and headed back to my home base, the weather got bad .