Saturday, April 3, 2010

Last Stretch of Junior Year Day 3 - Vectors to the Airport and AP Physics Test

I can safely say that I haven't bothered to think about any of the work I'm supposed to do during the break.  This is evidenced by the 3+ hours I've spent on flight simulation today.  Of course, this is not entirely true since I've done some academic stuff.

According to College Board, music is theoretically an academic study, as evidenced by its AP Music Theory test.  Therefore my piano lesson today is an academic endeavor.  Basically I was working on the B-flat minor scale for today.  There are of course other pieces I was working on, but I'm too lazy to write them out.

After my piano lesson, I reviewed some kinematics for physics.  Here's where the lame blog post title comes into play.  In basic projectile motion, every physics student in the right mind will remember to break up the force of a person throwing  a ball into its horizontal and vertical components to solve annoying maximum height and time to hit the ground problems.  Likewise, I reviewed that Work = (Force)(distance)(cos θ).  After studying the calculus way about how this works (the dot product of force and displacement (vectors) resulting in a scalar), it really makes sense how I got this formula in the first place.  This is probably why Physics B and high school physics in general must be so hard for teachers to teach.

As for the other part of my title, vectoring an aircraft is interesting.  Especially when the Air Traffic Control in Microsoft Flight Simulator X gives me so many instructions to turn in xyz direction before I can even respond.  Yeah, obviously a bug I've only experienced a few times:
  • Southwest 420, turn right heading zero niner five. [1 second] 
  • Southwest 420, turn right heading one zero zero. [1 second]  
  • Southwest 420, turn left heading zero eight zero. [1 second]  
  • Southwest 420, turn right heading zero niner zero.  Airport is at your 1 o'clock, one five miles.  Report runway in sight.  [1 second]
  • Southwest 420, turn left heading zero eight five. [1 second]
  • Southwest 420, turn right heading zero niner five. [1 second]
Fortunately there was no such thing today when I was flying a Vietnam Airlines Airbus A321 to Ho Chi Minh.  In another flight, I was flying a Ryanair Boeing 737-800 from Liverpool to Dublin.  Interesting thing is that their cheapest fair available for this flight is £6.00, without additional fees.  Adding one checked bag would cost £15.00, which is more than your own fare.  No wonder Southwest is boasting that bags fly free.

And these two flights only took up about two hours.  I used the other hour reading about how ILS works in the Learning Center tab in FSX.  All I know is that there are some  vectors I should follow for an ILS landing, according to the Jeppesen chart for xyz airport.  And no, I have not been able to successfully do a full instrument landing after flying around for so long now.  All I've really done are visual landings with a little help looking at the moving map on the Garmin GPS. So er...I guess that if I wanted to get bored, I could do this:


Say I have this runway 9 (which I got off of Flightsim.com obviously).  I'll pretend it's 3000 meters long.  So if I wanted to express this runway as a vector.  I'll say it is <3000, 0, 0> or perhaps 3000i + 0j.  That's obviously something you'd never do if you were actually seriously doing physics, calculus or aeronautical navigation.

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