My car has a music control conveniently mounted on the steering wheel. It consists of a Source button and two pairs of controls: +/- for volume and ^/v for going to Next and Previous songs or playlists.

Or is that Previous and Next songs?

My first instinct was that the Up arrow would move up in a list, as it would on a computer screen. So Up would go to the Previous song.

But it doesn’t. It follows a more natural logical route: Up goes to the Next song.

Curse of iTunes. This may be the curse of iTunes, which has provided me with a visual model of a music player with playlists that go from first to last in top to bottom order.

If the arrows were rotated 90 degrees, I’d have no problem with which was Next and which was Previous because I wouldn’t map horizontal arrows to a playlist visual.

Which reminds me again of the first day I showed up at Baylands, when I was surprised to learn that I had to pull the right stick on the transmitter down to go up.

“You pull up and push down,” Crazy Ted told me. “Just like on a real airplane.”

Bumpy Ride. My experience controlling a real airplane is limited to squeezing the armrest very tight during rough weather and loosening my grip in smooth air. Neither technique seems to affect the plane’s ability to negotiate bumps in the air.

Back to my car, I’ve learned to repeat to myself “Up is Next. Up is Next. Up is Next…” whenever I want to skip to the Previous or Next piece of music, just as I repeat to myself “Up is Down. Up is Down. Up is Down…” when I’m flying inverted.

Every now and then, though, when I’m inverted I flash back to my initial confusion about the upside down elevator control on the transmitter, and I start to wonder if maybe, just maybe, Up is now Up.

Fast Crash. The literal answer is, yes, when you’re inverted you push Up and pull Down, but if I give that more than a millisecond of thought while I’m flying inverted, I’ll be ground-bound faster than I can say one more “Up is Down.”

I also can’t think about those arrows in my car while I’m flying, like the fact that they wouldn’t confuse me if I only changed tracks while the steering wheel was rotated +90 degrees for a right turn and that I should never try to adjust the music during a left turn.

Lately I’ve been grappling with another issue while I’m flying: orientation.

Coming or Going? It’s surprisingly easy to switch perspective on your plane and think that it’s flying in a different direction than it actually is.

Here’s an excellent article on the subject by Paul Johnson, a master builder and flyer who has one of the most interesting websites I’ve seen.

You can help yourself out by finishing the upper surfaces of your plane in light colors and using dark colors for the underside. Also, you can use brilliant accents such as strips or circles of mirrored Mylar from TAP Plastics or fluorescent orange tape.

A Flash of White. I remember when I was learning to fly when I turned the plane right I would watch for its left white wingtip to appear behind the darker fuselage. That would tell me that I was banking correctly and that it was time to straighten out from the turn.

One gotcha to keep in mind is that color disappears at a distance. Here’s what Dr. Robert Suding has to say in an informative article, “Color Me Gone”:

When flying at a distance of 500 feet or more (depending on the size of the model and lighting conditions) you can’t see colors, because the cones of your eyes that do the color perception are 2,000 times less sensitive than the rods, which perceive illumination. In these circumstances, your gray-scale vision (your perception of lightness and darkness in a black-and-white image) provides your orientation and depth perception, not color. Any series of adjacent colors on your aircraft that are intended to facilitate orientation should therefore be gray-scale opposites.

The best fix for disorientation is to fly close enough to see the plane, and adjust your flying distance for weather conditions.

And, as a friend of mine used to say, don’t think too much. Especially don’t think about the music control on your steering wheel.

Tags: Airplanes, Baylands, Flying, Life, Music, Radio Control.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 15th, 2007 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Baylands. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.