Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw

Simple Flying reports that Delta Air Lines Retires Its Oldest Widebody After Nearly 36 Years & 150,000 Flight Hours.

The plane’s a Boeing 767-300ER, tail number N171DN, which entered service in June 1990. It had been flying since then, with a brief break in storage during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic. Its last revenue flight was from SFO to ATL on April 9th. It had passed 150,000 hours of flight hours in 2026. Its flying days were done. Its last flight, a ferry flight, from ATL to BHM (an airport in Chicago) was on April 10th, where it will be scrapped.

I did a bit of back-of-the-envelope calculations. Commercial jetliners at cruising altitude do between 500 and 600 mph. This varies depending on the altitude (faster at higher altitudes due to lower air density), the prevailing wind (tail winds help increase the ground speed, head winds lower it.) But their average speed over a flight has to be lower because during both ascent and descent it flies much slower than during cruise.

Assuming that the average cruising speed to be around 550 mph at altitude, I estimate that the average speed would be around 10% lower for the entire duration of the flight — or 500 mph. Going with that conservative speed, during its 150,000 flight hours, the 767 covered around 75 million miles.

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The earth’s circumference is 25,000 miles. So the distance it flew is equivalent to 3,000 trips around the earth. The moon is approximately 240,000 miles. So one could say that the plane covered the distance equivalent to 150 round trips to the moon. I hope that like me, you are impressed.

Next, since the plane has been doing a mix of transatlantic flights (around 9 hours long) and domestic flights (around 5 hours long), let’s assume that an average flight for it was 7.5 hours. Therefore I estimate that it has done about 20,000 flight cycles. Meaning it has landed 20,000 times. Only landings count, not takeoffs. Why? For most planes, the two numbers match; for a few planes, the number of landings is (at most) one fewer than takeoffs. But those are extremely rare obviously.

The Boeing 767-300ER has a passenger capacity of 210 to 290, depending on whether it was configured as 1, 2 or 3 class. Let’s say this one could carry 250 people. But the load factor is rarely 100%. Let’s reduce that by 20% and say that on average it carried 200 passengers over the 20,000 flights it did. Therefore, it ferried approximately 4 million passengers during its nearly 36 years of service.

I am always impressed by the build quality of these airplanes and how amazing they are in service. These are modern marvels. Actually, even the older propeller-driven planes were pretty impressive too. Consider the DC-3. It went into production in 1936 and ended in 1950. A few DC-3s continue to fly even after 75 years. Some have racked up over 80,000 flight cycles (over four times that of our Boeing 767.)

They don’t make ‘em like that any more!

No, actually that’s not true.

The DC-3s were not pressurized airplanes; modern jetliners are. Modern jetliners bodies balloon up (slightly) when they are in flight and then the body relaxes after landing. Therefore modern jetliners end up being stressed with every flight cycle because of the pressurization and depressurization. That leads to metal fatigue and the planes have to be retired (scrapped) at the end of their service life of a specified number of flying hours and number of flight cycles.

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You might wonder why I’m going on about the retirement of a silly plane. The fact is that I love planes. I have probably taken over 800 flights, around half of them over 10 hours long, and the other half around 4 hours long. I estimate I have therefore spent around 56,000 hours in commercial jetliners. That means I have spent 8 months of my life traveling at 35,000 feet at 500 miles an hour.

And yet — and yet I get myself a window seat and look out of the plane and take pictures and videos of takeoff and landings. If you saw me on flight, you’d think that it was the first time I was on a flight.

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Time to say goodbye to dear old N171DN. May parts of you get recycled and may they fly again.

Which reminds me of a song about a river boat.

I know I will remember,
when I cannot hear that horn,
that would roll up by the mountains,
as she took us through the storm.
I know they’ve got to take her,
but I can’t say I approve,
’cause she’s won so many battles
that I hate to see her lose.

Thank you, good night and may your god go with you.

The Bengali calendar is a solar calendar, the first month of which is Boishakh. Pohela or poila means first. Therefore, the Bengali year starts on Poila Boishakh.

Shubho Noboborsho greetings to all.

We Bengalis are obsessed with food, particularly fish. I will have some special fish today. I feel for the vegetarians or people who don’t like fish. Anyway, that just means that we get to have more of the good stuff. 🙂

Let’s listen to a Hemanta-da song. As a homeless person, I relate to this song about a river. At one point the song asks, “is it because you have no ties that you are homeless?” Lovely song.

Cheers and have a wonderful day.

This is the story of how Sri Krishna took on the role of Arjuna’s charioteer.

Sri Krishna is an incarnation, an avatar, of Vishnu. Therefore, he is an aspect of Brahman the ultimate reality.

Brahman incarnates from time to time. The aspect of Brahman who incarnates is Vishnu. Vishnu has ten avatars. Why ten? Because decimal.

The first avatar was Matsya, the Fish, who came to save the universe from a great deluge and preserve life. Then came Kurma, the Tortoise, to help the gods and the demons obtain the nectar of immortality. That was a real adventure. They churned the ocean and all kinds of stuff emerged from that. Fascinating story.

Next, in avatar #3 place, we have Varaha, the Boar, to rescue the earth from a demon, lifting it from the cosmic ocean. In fourth place we have Narasimha avatar: part-man, part-lion. Some kind of superhero.

Number five is Vamana, the dwarf, who subdued a demon king. He was followed by Parashurama, sixth in line, the warrior with an axe, who restored justice and dharma. Continue reading “Why Sri Krishna is Parthasarthy”

Scumbag politicians and clueless citizens are a matched pair. You cannot have one without the other. The criminality of the one is enabled by the cluelessness of the other—and the two are entwined in a dance macabre which is the continued destitution of India.

The interesting question then is what gives rise to this situation? Indians are fairly unremarkable in that they are not genetically programmed to be stupid. They are only as flawed as any other large segment of humanity.

India is not spectacularly gifted natural resource wise (to put it mildly) but neither is it entirely devoid of them. India has not been repeatedly visited by natural catastrophes that periodically send it back to square one. Over the centuries, India has had a fairly stable existence — barring the occasional Islamic invasions murdering a few tens of million infidels. All things considered, India had all the material and human resources to make a go of it. What went wrong? Continue reading “The Rules Rule”

I am saddened to learn of the passing of Asha Bhosle in Mumbai Sunday morning. She was 92.

Asha-ji, I thought, was the most versatile of the three sisters, though Lata was the more famous and prolific. Asha had a fan-following even among non-Indians. I got to know that from a roommate at UC Berkeley.

It was in the mid-1990s. One evening at dinner, I mentioned to my housemate, W, that I was in touch with the daughter of a very famous playback singer in India. W, a mid-Western American, was doing his mathematics PhD. He is arguably the smartest mathematician I have ever met. I had to explain to him what a playback singer was and so on. I said that the two sisters Asha and Lata were really awesome singers. Continue reading “Goodbye, Asha-ji”

“When We Cease to Understand the World” is a historical fiction work by Chilean author Benjamín Labatut. It explores the human drive to comprehend the universe, the costs of intellectual obsession, and the ethical dilemmas inherent in scientific progress.

The book was originally published in Spanish in 2020 and in English in 2021. It blends historical fact with fiction, presenting the lives of scientists and mathematicians whose groundbreaking discoveries reshaped human understanding but also carried profound ethical and existential consequences.

It is composed of five interlinked essay-style chapters, each focusing on a different historical figure or scientific concept. Labatut employs a poetic style that combines concision, cruelty, and dark humor to illustrate the human and philosophical dimensions of scientific discovery. The narrative oscillates between historical events and imaginative reconstructions, creating a hybrid of fiction and nonfiction that emphasizes the personal costs of genius. Continue reading “When We Cease to Understand the World”

Thanks to our bounded rationality and imperfect knowledge, it is certain that we are more likely to be wrong than right about many important issues. Fortunately we have the capacity and the motive to learn. Moreover we have an inexhaustible and nearly costless source of information for us to learn from. Therefore if we are willing to put in the effort, we can be less wrong about important matters.

I know that I am less wrong now than I was a few decades ago. I used to think that the world was in deep trouble because of the population problem: there were simply too many people and since resources were limited, it stood to reason that poverty was likely to persist—and indeed increase—as humanity due to its fecundity exhausted those limited resources.

I found India’s poverty in the 1980s and ’90s particularly distressing since I had seen it firsthand. I believed that India’s deep and persistent poverty was primarily because of its unsustainably large population. It was clear to me that poverty was an arithmetic problem: per capita resource availability. Only by reducing the denominator would the ratio improve since (it seemed to me) there was no way to dramatically increase the numerator which was by definition fixed. Continue reading “Learning to be Less Wrong”

I find some things quite weird. For instance, I was quite intrigued to realize that one time decades ago my mother carried me in her arms and then she put me down, and then never ever picked me up again.

Picking me up and putting me down was an unremarkable action up to that time—she’d done that hundreds of times before—but she did not realize that that was the last time she would ever do so. She put me down that one last time and never picked me up in her arms again.

That’s something that must certainly have happened to you as well: that last time when your mother fed you, or bathed you, or dressed you. And then she never did it again.

But of course, we didn’t know at that time when it happened or precisely when it happened. Simple logic forces us to conclude that it did happen someday but now we don’t know when.

I have had ancestors, as we all must have had. That’s an unremarkable fact. What astounds me is that my ancestors were around for all of the history of the universe. Let me take small steps to express my astonishment. Continue reading “My Ancestors”

It’s hard to find any humor in wars in general but pointless wars are particularly depressing. I avoid as much as I can news about the wars around the world. But it’s impossible to entirely avoid it in these days of social media. Thankfully there are stupid people who unintentionally do their bit to lighten the mood.

(Source: On X by @Nocapongod_)

Today also happens to be April Fool’s day. A couple of famous April fool’s pranks. Courtesy: Grok. Continue reading “Straights of Hormuz”

Reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) are predictable offerings in the smorgasbord of sensational bullshit the mainstream and social media dish out ad nauseum. Sadly some of the publicly funded agencies of the US government have also been in that game for decades.

The government’s actions are understandable because most of the population is easily distracted, being stupid and gullible beyond belief. Couple that with the other fact that the US government has to distract the public from paying attention to all the terrorism that it engages in around the world (such as the recent war against Iran) to keep the military-industrial complex humming along.

There are lots of stories the US government uses to keep the people alarmed. The Epstein files were a good distraction. Then the war in the Persian Gulf is another distraction from the Epstein files. The show must go on.

In this post I claim that (1) UFOs are real, (2) reports of extraterrestrial objects are total hogwash, (3) reports of non-human intelligence (NHI) visitors are bullshit piled high and dry, and (4) alien abduction stories are made up by the severely mentally disturbed. Continue reading “UFOs”