darryl ramm’s blog

I love it when companies do creative “in your face” marketing, particuarly when it is creative enough to spread by word of mouth and hey if you can also have fun tweaking the competition then all the better. Having done my share of things like this I really found the following move by Alexander Schleicher against DG Flugzeugbau, two of the leading German sailplane manufactures, pretty funny.

Schleicher make the ASH-26E motorglider I fly, DG make the nice DG-1000S two seat glider I’ve enjoyed flying as a member of BASA (Bay Area Soaring Associates) and they designed the DG-303 sailplane I used to own. Hugh Milne a fellow Californian ASH-26E pilot returns from visiting friends in Germany and forwarded the photos here and this story.

In Spring 2007 DG delivered a new DG-1000S sailplane to HVL (Hamburger Verein für Luftfahrt), one of the largest Hamburg soaring clubs. With new sailplanes this normally involves a long wait, eager anticipation and exchange of lots of money. But the club members do not like the brown trim stripes on this glider. I’m not sure who specified brown, it’s a pretty unusual color for glider trim, anyhow the club members did not like the color. Since the club really wants their sailplane, they accept it, but have contacts at Alexander Schleicher and so drive it across Germany to the Schleicher factory in Poppenhausen so they can replace the trim on their competitor’s brand new sailplane.

Schleicher replaced the standard DG trim stripes with the latest style of their own distinctive “swoosh” underneath the canopies and added a little sign on the tail, which I am told means “With the best friendly greetings from Poppenhausen”. I think the Schleicher swoosh looks a lot better and more modern than the usual plain DG trim strips. Schleicher apparently charged about 300 Euros to cover the cost of materials. I bet the Schleicher factory had fun doing this.

I have heard from a HVL club member who flies the DG-1000S in contests etc. that it often takes other pilots quite a while to realize what is different with this glider.

There are photos of this DG-1000S online on the HVL club website.

The DG-1000S is a good glider, and by the way if you are a glider pilot and live in the San Francisco Bay Area, BASA have both a DG-1000S and DG-505 in their club fleet.

[This post has been corrected, only the trim was repainted, the base white paint on the DG-1000S was fine, and there was only one DG-1000S delivered. Photo credits. Copyright Hugh Milne, DG-1000S with new paint trim. Eckbert Andresen DG-1000S with brown trim. Used with Permission.]

The Palm Foleo has to be one of the most lame-brained product ideas in decades. Foleo is supposed to be a simple “companion” for a smart phone, essentially providing a keyboard and larger screen and ability to browse the Web, check email etc. Palm is claiming the Foleo will be the start of a whole new product family. Good luck trying to convince anybody of that. And I know that “the market” often does not recognize the need for new products until they have established themselves—but the Palm Foleo does not pass even the simplest sniff test for a reasonable product.

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Sorry TiVO. I have two older Hughes HR10-250 DirecTV HD TiVO recorders and both of them are running over 1,000 days without dialing into TiVo. These were the state of the art when they came out, I grabbed them off the very first shipments to BestBuy. Except for their really slow menu system they work great.

I just refuse to play TiVO games and give TiVO my viewing information and since I don’t purchase any pay for view events there is just no need to connect. And especially post Rupert Murdoch’s aquisiton of DirecTV there is no way I see the TiVO hating DirecTV folks ever following up on pursing requirements to connect the TiVO units to a land line so they can do their daily calls. Sure they’d love to have the pay per view business but if you are no using that anyhow…

Besides being painfilly slow at times the TiVO user interface on these boxes is better than any other DVR/set top box I’ve used. So I’m not looking forward to what happens if one of these boxes dies.

TiVO was an impressive company with great products and technology but suffered the same problem as companies like Healthion that come into established (and technology backwards) marketplaces and try to shake things up against entenched players. You just know with ad skipping fears and copyright concerns and the past laggard behavior of media companies they were going to have a tough ride. Then companies like DirecTV did not want TiVO in the middle of their food chain. I’d like to see TiVO survive and they are clearly playing around with business models trying to work but since the little TV watched in our house is all DirecTV there is no TiVO in my future.

I was cleaning out stuff and found an old cookie from the VMware third birthday party. I certainly was not going to eat it and so as a social experiment I have put it up for auction on EBay. Is there a market for edible promotional and marketing items?

Interestingly this was from the VMware “brown period” where the logo featured the words VMware in brown and brown and blue were used thoughout collateral and other marketing material. This was planned independent of UPS starting to promote their brown color but that did lead to questions of wether VMware was trying to copy UPS with their promotion of their brown color including the “What can BROWN do for you?” advertisments. We were definitely not trying to copy UPS.

Brown is a difficult color to reproduce well so it looks good and not just a muddy mess, and so that it has consistent color across different media. I think the color brown fairly quickly proved a bad idea but the thought and design effort that went into all the marketing collateral look and feel was a step in the right direction.

I did a self launch endorsement this week with Rolf Peterson. Flying out of Byron airport in Rolf’s Grob 109B. We also flew over to Tracy and shot some touch and go landings there.

Besides covering motor glider specific things, the training was a great general early season warm up and Rolf really helped me brush up my skills. The endorsement is required by the FAA and by my insurance company but since motor gliders vary so much I need more than a generic motorglider endorsement in a Grob 109 for handling a retracting engine motorglider like my ASH-26E. I’ll be working with the team at Williams Soaring on that ASH-26E specific training and sign off.

Since the Grob 109 is a three wheel taildragger with break away castering tail wheel it handles similar to Citabrias, Piper Cubs or other taildragger powered aircraft. I went and read The Compleat Taildragger Pilot (Amazon or PilotMall) which seems to be the training book prefered by many taildragger instructors, including Rolf. I also picked up a copy of Taildragger Tactics by Spark Imeson (know for writing The Mountain Flying Bible). Taildragger Tactics covers more than just tail dragger handling, from cold weather operation to tie-downs. Both books seem really good. I’ll be even more respectful next time I see tow pilots kissing the ground with a wheel landing in a Pawnee.

The Grob 109, it is a relatively low performance glider but it is a sweet toy. Since it is a touring style motorglider, transitions between powered and glider flight are easy and the Grob 109 is capable of higher speed cruise flight than motor gliders with a retractable pylons.

An added bonus was that Rolf’s hangar is next to one that houses Airshows America. So we popped our heads in there and admired their L-39s, MIG-17s, Pitts Special, and other toys.

My ASH-26E was delivered to the port in Germany and should be on the ship by now. Uli Kremmer of Alexander Schleicher personally delivered it to the port, now that’s service. The instrument panel looks great, I was worried whether everything would fit or not. The only problem I can see was the paint swoosh on the fuselage was supposed to be curved and ended up straight.

I’m curious about the high tech looking tail lights on the Cobra trailer. All Cobra trailers I’ve seen used old style incandescent tail lights and I’ve had problems with water leaking into the trailer through the old style lights, casuing me to replace the lights on my current trailer with LED truck tail lights. I’m hoping these new tail lights mean I don’t need to do that with the new trailer.

I try to prune back on how much junk mail I get and what I do get goes into a shredder (Fellowes OD1500C, great shredder) without a second glance. Exceeeeept this one which caught my attention, for well marketing reasons :-). Now while I’m thinking about whether I need to spend $12 on a years for a subscription to Playboy I’m more curious where Playboy got my address from and which lists would Playboy correlate with high marketing responses. I don’t think Lexus or Porsche would sell my address. Maybe from my Flying, Fine Woodworking, Stereophile, Widescreen Review, Car & Driver, Road & Track , Excellence (Porsche) magazine subscriptions? Maybe Playboy trolls the FAA pilots database? My Health club/gym membership? Mmmm.

I was crusing the aisles at Whole PayCheck the other day and noticed these Kettle brand Organic Chipolte Chili Barbeque potato chips. Junk food nowdays comes low sugar, reduced fat, trans-fat free and yes, sigh, organic. I mean you’d hate to be eating any non-organic bad things with those oh so good for you deep fried chips.

The trouble is being a chilie head I had to try them. The worse problem is they taste great. Net weight five oz. Five servings per container — who are they kidding? Once opened that packet is mine. At one serving per container thats 38% of daily calories, 70% of daily total fat, 25% daily saturated fat… but 10g of protein, 40% of daily fibre, 70% of daily vitamin C, and Organic to boot. Hey, almost good for you. Ugh now I’ve really got to go work out at the gym.

It is pretty embarrassing when the premier news publication in Silicon Valley can’t get basic email to their readers right. Like not a clue.

I used to get one useful news summary email each morning from the Mercury News. I found it useful and I was more than happy to put up with the advertisements. Over the last few weeks I’ve been getting spammed a few times by the Mercury News with sponsored email from them on behalf of advertisers but the worst is that they seem to be doing insane experiments on their readers with poorly formatted html email. So badly formatted I will not read it. I’m using Yahoo!Mail Beta, but this stuff looks awful under Microsoft Outlook. It looks better under gmail but that’ s because gmail strips the background image, the text formatting and column layout is still awful.

I mean why would anybody with even the slightest clue about html portability try to stick background images in html emails? The screen shots show yesterday’s email rendered in Yahoo!Mail (Beta) and in Microsoft Outlook 2003.

There is just no need for attempting the overly complicated html formatting they are trying to do, and even if the design changes were justified there is no need to be slamming experiments out to all their reader base until have the formatting stable. Oh and you would think that they had email preferences for receiving plain text emails instead of mis-formatted html. Think again (or good luck finding them if they exist). That link at the top “If you cannot see this newsletter correctly, please see out online version here” needs the “If” replaced with a “Since”. Sigh.

It is just about the start of another soaring season so I’ve had my glider annual inspection performed and getting other things ready including having my emergency parachute repacked. While doing that I also dropped of some of BASA’s (my gliding club) parachutes for a repack.

Emergency parachutes have to be repacked every 120 days. This allows an inspection of the condition of the parachute and case, and internal items such a the rubber bands that hold the parachute lines in place. I have my parachute repacked by Allen Silver at Silver Parachute. Allen is a FAA master parachute rigger, an aerobatic pilot and specializes in repacks of parachutes for glider and aerobatic pilots. He has several thousand parachute jumps under his belt, I have none and will be happy to keep it that way.

Anybody who uses an emergency parachute should attend one of Allen’s talks on care and use of emergency parachutes, get your parachute harness adjusted properly by Allen and do an ‘executive repack’ where he walks through doing a repack on your chute while you are there. That way you’ll learn a lot about the parachute and whats inside the pack.

One thing that Allen encourages before a repack, and I always do, is to put your parachute on go though the steps of a simulated bail out (protect your face/head, eject canopy, release harness, fight your way out of the cockpit, head first over the side if possible, look for and grab the ripcord, keep your legs together if you can, pull the ripcord, throw away the ripcord handle, look up and grab the steering handles, etc…). You can see me pulling the ripcord in the top photo on the left. The coil spring loaded pilot chute is flying out of the pack. The other photos show Allen holding the pilot chute, the parachute steering handles (gold colored in this case), and the rubber bands holding the parachute risers in place in the pack.

Allen has several articles on emergency parachute use and care available here.

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