Prof. Ronald Slingerland

Initially I thought of putting this post in my personal blog, but then I realized that wouldn’t be fair to this great teacher of TU Delft. Oh, but I definitely had to write something about Prof. Slingerland because I will remember him as one of the best teachers that I had my entire life.

Prof. Slingerland died Friday, October 19, 2007 along with TU Delft’s Prof. Poppe de Lange, involved in a tragic accident when their plane crashed into another small aircraft in Lelystad. He was (only) 46 years old when it happened.

During this week I have spoken to the friend of mine João that gave me more details about the accident. He told me that the Lelystad is an uncontrolled aerodrome so that explains in part how could the two aircrafts collide. He also told me that from the collision one of the aircrafts lost part of its tail and crashed. This was the aircraft were the two teachers were. The other one had damage in the landing gear but it could perform an emergency landing and thus the occupants survived the accident. I don’t know how to put this, but why didn’t faith spare also those two great men?

I didn’t know Professor Lange so I’ll keep writing only about Prof. Slingerland. It’s fair to say that he will be sadly missed by his family, his friends and even by his colleagues of TU Delft. And even the aerospace industry loses because he was one of the few people that were considered a reference on Preliminary and Conceptual Design of Aircrafts. I want to take this opportunity to express my sympathy to those you knew him well and lived closely with him.

From the few times that I had the opportunity to spend with him, I can say that he was my favorite teacher of TU Delft and he was the person that I went talk first when I needed some opinion or advice about the faculty or even about aerospace in general. He always tried to be available and have patience to listen to me every time. He was also an enthusiastic of all matters related to aeronautics and thus that was reflected on his way of living and on the way he taught.

It’s still strange to me that he’s gone forever since I had a meeting with him in the week in which he died, so I can still see his face and imagine him in his office. It’s very sad that this has happened.

At last, I just want to add that I’ll do my best in my thesis (he would have been one of my thesis’ coordinators) so that he would be proud to be my teacher and coordinator.

This is my homage to a great man that was Ronald Slingerland…

Dutch language

One of these days I was wondering about languages since I am learning some words and expressions in Dutch during my internship and due to the fact that everyone at the company where I’m doing the internship is constantly speaking Dutch and I feel kind of apart because I can’t follow the conversations.

Well, the “challenge” that I want to put in the blog this week is very simple: what do you think about the Dutch language compared with other ones? Is it more difficult or easier to learn? …

The opinions that I’ve heard so far are for all kinds… I’ve heard Dutch people saying that Dutch is more difficult than German, for example, because of the innumerous exceptions of rules, as well people who doesn’t speak Dutch as native language saying that it is a not so difficult language.

I’m learning Dutch and only know a tiny bit of the language but I don’t consider it as strange and hard as I initially thought it was. Until now I’ve learnt the days of the week, the months, the numbering system, the time and some other general expressions as, for example, saying goodbye to someone. The hardest part of the language is the way some letters are said, like the sound of ‘g’ is ‘rrr’ or ‘ch’ is ‘rrxx’…

On the numbers the major difference is that they say one and twenty instead of twenty one. On the days and months there are only small differences, as well on saying the time, although they say half to six instead of half past five, but that is easy to remember.

Now, let’s see if this time my appeal is heard and someone gives his/her opinion…

Politicians…

A week ago, more or less, I received an e-mail with a link to a video on “YouTube” that showed a recent reaction of a known Portuguese politician. Well, the video was about Santana Lopes, a politician from the right wing that is known for his night life and appearances in tabloid magazines. He was president of a soccer club, he was mayor of the Portuguese city “Figueira da Foz” and he was also Prime-minister of Portugal for some months. He was demitted from Prime-minister by the President of the Republic because of the way he was conducting the Government and leading the country (Portugal). From all that I’ve said you can now imagine what kind of person he is and his ideals and principles.

The content of the video showed that he was giving an interview to talk about what was happening in the party that he is member and then the journalist that was conducting the interview interrupted him to give special news. Well, the news was the arrival of the Portuguese coach José Mourinho and saying that he just wanted that the journalists left him alone. This news took more or less three minutes.

When the broadcast returned to the main studio, Santana Lopes expressed his thoughts about what happened. He said that it was a shame that a television preferred to interrupt an interview where political problems were being discussed to film a soccer coach. He also decided to end the interview, and he did it in a calm but decided way. I think his reaction was correct and that make him be a little more credible to me.

However, this was a feeling that lasted only some days because I heard that his reaction on that day was not in accordance with his reactions in the past. Apparently, he was the cause for interruptions in the television’s broadcast in the past, when he was for example president of a soccer club and he was happy to be the center of the attentions at those times. Well, he can’t blame now for the attitude of the television since he agreed with that attitude in the past.

And now he’s being criticized because of his reaction on that day because that put him on the center of stage like he likes and liked in the past. He should have been coherent with his past…


PS: As a comment for my post of the “Portuguese Airshow 2007”, one of these days a friend of mine João, who is starting the course to become a pilot and thus is a reliable source, told me that the two pilots on the aircraft that supposedly almost let one of the wings of an Airbus A310 touched the ground were two very experienced pilots from TAP that spent many hours in a flight simulator practicing for that maneuver. In other words, this answer the post: it was planned and therefore an “awesome maneuver”.

PS2: Here's the video on "YouTube" that I watched.

Motorcycling

The topic for this post is a comment about one of the news that I read another day. The news was in Portuguese but I’ll translate it to English:

“Ridding motorcycle (in Portugal) is the easiest way to die on the road, while walking is the second dangerous way of motion. 440 motorcyclists out of 100 million die doing a trip of one hour.”

The data was given by a Portuguese Institute related to the roads but I consider that they only tried to give a bad impression of motorcycling. I’ll explain better...

In one of the courses that I attended in Aerospace taught me that there are several ways of measuring the safety of an aircraft, especially when referring to commercial airliners. It can be number of crashes per number of flights, it can be number of passengers injured or killed per total of passengers carried, it can be number of crashes per hour of flight, etc. There are many ways of doing that and whatever the one we choose than the airplane can be the safest mean of transportation or not. The same applies to the news I transcribed.

As anyone can easily see, the motorcycle is a faster mean of transportation than, for example, a car because it can easily reach higher speeds and can pass between the cars when there is a traffic jam. And also everyone knows that for bigger trips the risk of having an accident gets bigger. So, in each hour of trip, in general a bike does a bigger trip than a car and therefore there is a higher risk of having a crash. Also when a motorcyclist has a crash, usually it is severe injury if not death.

In the end, that news was only to scare people about motorcycling but I think they are being non-sense by doing that. I think that, for example, inside the cities a good mean of transportation is the scooter because it is economic, fast, low pollutant and easy to park since it fits in every corner. But if people are scared with bikes, this idea can never be put to practice.

I am not trying to say motorcycles are safer than other transports, but I think they aren’t as dangerous as news like this make believe.