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Principia [prin-CIP-eah], plural. of principium; latin; first principles, fundamentals. We took the name from Isaac Newton’s exposition on gravity published in 1687.

In the Air flying

Act As If

Let’s suppose you are involved in a business that involved frequent trips to locations less than 1000 nm apart, typically by yourself, but sometimes with up to three colleagues. Let’s also say those destinations are often closer to smaller airports that do not have scheduled service.
You might benefit by setting up an air service for …

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes

I recommended that a client sell his airplane last week, but he has not taken that advice.
A green private pilot with an instrument rating that is barely wet, I had agreed to work with him on a transition into a single turboprop. He had already selected not only the model he wanted, but the exact …

Single-engine jets

Tim Slifkin hit a bird at 6000 feet, over the Hudson River. It was night, and he was on his way back to Morristown NJ from Nantucket MA in a Mooney cruising at about 140 knots, The windscreen cracked on the right side but held together. The first-time passenger sitting on the right was startled, …

To Dublin

Beginning May 25 and ending May 31, 1999, I transported a lovely old green and white Cessna 180 K, N180BB, with a big Continental O-520 engine from Hayward Air Terminal near Oakland California to Dublin, Ireland. Enjoyed it immensely, and managed to avoid ground looping. There are said to be two kinds of taildragger pilots: …

Emergency oxygen

Pilots of pressurized aircraft like the Piper Meridian practice switching smoothly to emergency oxygen in case cabin pressure is lost.
Captain Daniel (Boone) Gibson and his crew in the 79th Physiological Training Flight at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland do a bang-up job educating civilian pilots on this topic. Ordinarily, they work with military pilots. But …

SR20 engine failure

At 1405Z on February 2, 2007, a typically cold day in Goose Bay Labrador (CYYR), three pilots departed together in three new Cirrus SR20s carrying registration numbers N901SR, 806SR and 720SR. They filed for Reykjavik, Iceland (BIRK), 1350 nm east, on the first leg of a delivery flight to Phuket, Thailand. Each plane carried a …

SR22 turbo vs C400

Fly a turbocharged Cirrus SR22, as we did last month, and you will see Cessna now has real competition for the turbocharged 400, formerly the Columbia 400. The model dubbed G3 (third generation) is available with factory-installed Tornado Alley twin turbonormalizers with published critical altitudes of 25,000 feet. Sure enough we saw absolutely no drop …

On the Groundplantscapes

Garden Principia Mission

An approach to design that focuses key principles

Plant suitability to site in Mid Atlantic region
Organic and environmentally sound gardening
Full season interest
Use of variety of plants to enhance interest
Dense planting to encourage soil stability and reduce maintenance and water needs

And the broader concern of how horticulture can be used to solve some of our most important …

Garden Principia Position - The Lawn

Lawns - we love them.
Our Mid Atlantic region provides ideal water and temperature conditions to support for lawns. Lawns provide a neutral, usable surface that stands in contrast to herbaceous and shrubbery boarders. Lawns like all planted surfaces consume carbon, cool the environment and support good drainage.
The problem is not lawn per se, but rather …

Synergy Between Data Centers and Agriculture?

Can heat waste computers and data centers be used to heat and provide energy to the next generation of green house?
This link contains information about something done at Notre Dame: http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/2008/04/greenhouse-and.html
I also recommend this editorial from Dickson D. Despommier, Professor of Public Health in Environmental Health Sciences and Microbiology at Columbia University about vertical green …

Time for The Marriage of Organic and Genetically Modified Foods?

Genetically modified food has caused so much concern. Much of that concern is justified.
Organic producers have responded to this and gone out of their way to avoid it.
However in order to address an emerging and apparently urgent need to produce adequate food in environment of constrained resources such as water and arable and, and the …