By volume, the Everett assembly plant is the biggest in the world, said McCarty. Spread over a 415-hectare area, it has 20,000 parking stalls and enough room for 35,000 people at any given time. “That’s about the size of the crowd at a major sporting event,” he said. The hangars are about 40 hectares big, requiring a million bulbs to light up the interiors.
McCarty can fly a plane if he has to (all he lacks is a license), but he still finds it “mind-boggling how everything comes together.”
Imagine how I felt during the two sessions on the jet engine. James Mazeski of Pratt & Whitney customer training tried his darndest to generate interest, but he just couldn’t get my motor running.
I think my engine conked out soon after he introduced the subject with a quick refresher on Newton’s laws, on which the theory behind gas turbine operation is based. It’s a miracle I even remembered the part about the engine pressure being greatest at liftoff. (I suppose it’s because you don’t need a theory to understand that. Anyone who has ever taken a flight must have experienced it.)
Among the seminar participants, the aviation/transportation writers from the specialized publications were probably constantly on cruising altitude through most of the two-day, 16-hour seminar. But others like me who don’t exactly get a high from technojabber simply coasted along (drifted was more like it).
Talk about flying! My mind did take flight—and was up in the clouds most of the time—but my eyelids kept making touchdown.
The purpose of the seminar, said Rick Clements, Singapore Airlines vice president for public affairs, was to provide participants “a better understanding of (their) specific field of interest.”
End of the world
As though to make sure they had a captive audience, our hosts flew us, quite literally, to “the end of the world.” That, according to a traveler’s account, is what the locals affectionately call Teluk Bahang, the beachfront area almost on the tip of Penang on its northwestern side, where our hotel is located.
The Mutiara, (“pearl”), probably the plushest on the island, is a vacationer’s idea of getting away from it all. It is more than an hour’s drive from the airport, although on the night we arrived, the bus ride felt like three hours—at least long enough to lull us to sleep. There we also held “classes,” in a function room bearing the name of a mollusk, the irus.
Teluk Bahang is described as a quiet fishing village, where even from the white-sand beach, one can catch sight of native boats, or sampan. The novelty for me, however, was the hotel room closet, through which you could walk straight to the bathroom.
It was a pity that our itinerary did not include a tour of Penang, not even the capital, Georgetown. Outside the hotel, we saw only a modest shopping center not too far away, where we were bused on the eve of our departure.
Eager for some local color, some of us went on our own by taxi to Batu Ferringhi, the beach area famous for its night market.
The makeshift stalls propped along a long stretch of sidewalk sell imitation designer watches and shades, CDs and video CDs, along with batik, sarongs, kaftans, T-shirts, bags, local handicraft like miniature pewter figurines (Malaysia is the world’s largest tin producer), and baubles, bangles and beads.
Open from 7 p.m. until midnight, the night market has been experiencing a boom since the filming in 1999 of “Anna and the King,” said one Singaporean journalist.
The aviation seminar officially closed at the airline’s headquarters in Singapore with a press conference announcing the launch of its in-flight e-mail service.
Bernoulli Principle
Back home, I was all fired up to impress everyone with my newly acquired knowledge. But my initial attempt at a presentation didn’t get off the ground.
“Have you ever wondered how such a huge object like an airplane can rise and fly?” I asked my geologist daughter.
“The Bernoulli Principle,” she replied without looking up from the computer screen, which was then flashing her overseas chat mate’s response. “Every science student knows that.” (Daniel Bernoulli, for the benefit of science flunkies like me, was an 18th century Swiss mathematician and scientist.)
“Well, I’m no science major, and I heard it for the first time at the seminar when the speaker explained lift, the force that makes airplanes fly,” I retorted, determined to get her interested. “You know how he demonstrated it? He took a slip of paper and…”
Still engrossed in the computer, she finished the sentence: “Blew on its surface, and the paper rose.” She continued: “How does it go again? When air moves fast over a surface, the pressure it exerts is reduced, causing the bottom to go up.”
Snapping out of suspended animation, I asked how she knew.
“It’s the example they always use in physics class,” she said, amused. Then she got up and, walking toward a closet, added: “Where’s that physics book? Now you really got me interested.”
She can have my Airplanes 101 workbooks.
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