J.O.

53%? Wow, that's a divided group and a much bigger headache for the union.

Lol, I should have known you'd be having fun with it! I understand your connection with the Malibu. When I was just about 5, our neighbour picked up a shiny new 66 Malibu SS in blue. I don't remember much from that time but I remember him bringing it to our farm to show it off. I also remember how he cared for it like a first born child, hand washing it every day when he got home from work. He was 15 years younger than my dad but still a close friend of his and kinda the big brother I never had. Dad and I had many rides in that Malibu to the local drive-in for foot longs and a shake on a Saturday night. I can still hear the tinny speaker calling out our order when it was time to pick it up. We always sat at a picnic table because eating in his car was verboten. John died of pancreatic cancer around the time I started flight instructing. Eventually his car went up for sale and it broke my heart that I didn't have the money to buy it because I most certainly would have. I regret not finding a way to make it happen. His sister came to Dad's funeral last year and we shared a fond memory of their friendship and John's car. I also found out that his car is still owned by the same guy who bought it in '82 and that she's neighbours with him in Kitchener. Part of me would love to look him up but I guess that would be a tad creepy. One very minor point, your flight with me was on a Skyservice A320 - was that to San Andres? Have a great day my friend. I'm not far from hitting the silk and moving back east. It would be a hoot to catch up someday over a cold one. I could listen to your flying stories for a week.

Belated happy birthday, old bean. From a slightly younger old bean. P.S., what kinda car are you treating yourself with? Corvette? Aston Martin?

VI must have been given a different quiz because I didn't see anything connected to Volvo. I couldn't get American Airlines. In all my years of seeing their livery I only ever noticed the tail and the name on the aft fuselage. Not once did i pick up in the eagle's head in the forward stripe.

Talk to anyone who worked in the air attack program at BCWS when the Mars was active and they will tell you a much different story regarding available lakes, especially on a typical hot day in the summer. But the biggest issue was reliability. It lost many available days due to maintenance issues - mostly with the engines.

There are thousands of tasks that AI can be trained to perform, but as Vs has astutely pointed out, the result is only as good as the training. Skin in the game is often used to describe when one's own best interests for survival drive decision making and tend to make us more conservative. How do you teach a computer to have a moral need to stay alive? A first attempt to train AI to detect skin cancers failed because the training was unintentionally biased due to the images chosen to train the system. The first trials resulted in the machine deciding that any image that included a measuring device to depict the size of the lesion was cancer, while any image that did not have a measuring device was marked as "not cancer". That error was corrected and now it's apparently doing an amazing job at diagnostics. My question would be how many iterations of training would it take to teach a machine to sense and feel all of the "seat of the pants" things that us pilots use to help keep us alive?

No, they didn't have a point. BCWS stopped using it because it was about as unreliable as an air asset could be while still being considered "airworthy". It also couldn't take water from most of the lakes in the province other than Okanagan and Kootenay because it needed the room to get out with a load on board.

What’s one hanger? There are plenty more where that came from.

Good! Hopefully now the Port Alberni mafia will stop whining that BC isn’t using a Model A era airplane to fight wildfires.

If it sounds too good to be true ...

Indeed. Before he worked with Japan, Deming tried to convince the American auto industry that they needed a similar strategy, but the industry told him to pound sand. The first real effect of his work was seen in Toyota's shift from being builders of crap that noone in North America wanted to making cars that were the envy of the Big Three.

The control tower shown in the pictures is not the one that is currently in use at Goose Bay airport. It looks like there's a Canadian flag on the side of it - maybe an old military tower?

That's what I get for believing social media.

There have been numerous cowl separations on the Boeing fleet too. This was a CFM engine, but cowls have separated from P & W's, IAE's and RR's too. The engine really has little to do with it. It's usually about failing to secure the latches properly.

That's a little funnier than the presidential candidate who said climate change is causing more and stronger eclipses.