A large collection of old airline menus. The collection is poorly organized but worth poking through (check out Air France and Pan Am). Tracked this down after reading this short piece in the Times about a private menu collection, complete with a tiny image of some menus that's barely worth the effort of clicking the link.
The first plane crash
The first death of an airplane passenger occurred nearly 100 years ago.
It was Sept. 17, 1908. Orville Wright was showing off a new "aeroplane" at Fort Myer, Va., for about 2,000 people, including Army brass. He took up a 26-year-old lieutenant in the Army Signal Corps, Thomas E. Selfridge, "an aeroplanist himself," according to the report in this newspaper. Contemporary accounts vary, but the pair apparently made three and a half successful circuits at an altitude of about 75 feet, before a propeller split and hit other parts of the plane, causing it to crash. Orville was badly hurt.
From the NY Times account of the crash on Sept 18, 1908:
The aeroplane has made three complete circuits of the big parade ground and was dashing around a curve at the far end of the field on the final lap of its fourth when the propellor blade broke. It snapped short off close to the shaft and was hurled sixty feet away.
The aeroplane seemed to tip sharply for a fraction of a second, then it started up for about ten feet; this was followed by a short, sharp dive and a crash in the field. Instantly the dust rose in a yellow, choking cloud that spread a dull pall over the great white man-made bird that had dashed to its death.
Almost everything on David Owen's airline costs $50.
Laughing out loud at anything in any movie, whether it is playing on the cabin system or on your own DVD player, is fifty dollars per incident. Asking me to turn off my reading light so that you can see the screen better: also fifty dollars.
If you and your spouse are dressed almost identically, or if you are carrying your passport in a thing around your neck, or if you are wearing any form of footwear or pants that you clearly purchased specifically to wear on airplanes, or if you make it obvious (by repeatedly turning around and talking to passengers in seats not adjacent to yours) that you are travelling with a group, the charge is fifty dollars.
After the video of a Chinese farmer's homemade airplane started circulating around the web late last week, commenters on several sites cried hoax, and I received several emails and tweets questioning my mental health for believing such a thing exists.
But the video wasn't obviously fake; home-built airplanes aren't rare, I have no reason to doubt the ingenuity of the Chinese farmer, and I'd rather believe in the wonderfully improbably than be cynical about everything I see. A second video of the plane has been uploaded to YouTube which, in my mind, corroborates the existence of the flying contraption (it's actually an autogyro) beyond a reasonable doubt.
Video of a Chinese farmer flying his homemade airplane. Nice landing! According to a post at IfGoGo, the plane is referred to in Chinese as "shanzhai huaxiangji". The "shanzhai" part literally means "little mountain village" but has developed into a slang word that denotes something homemade or counterfeit.
Date back to 2007, due to an open (maybe leak?) source of MTK platfrom (a wireless communication development platform), there are millions of cell phone factories burst out in south China. These factories made lots of famous-brand cell-phone-copies in a short period of time. They just copied the outline and software design from Nokia, Apple iPhone etc. The manufacturing cost is very low so many people are involved. However, these cell phones are not all completely copied. They are even totally redesigned and added a lot of features. A brand called "NCIKA" even went very popular in China. People're even joking that the farmers in big mountains can develop and design a cell phone too. So many people call it "Shanzhai Ji" (Ji means machine in Chinese, here means cell phone) and then the name is widespread in China.
Since then, many funny/weird stuff from ordinary people are called "shanzhai" something, and that's why this plane is named "Shanzhai Huaxiangji" in Chinese :)
From an article on jet lag, the story of Sarah Krasnoff's fatal jet setting:
One day in 1971, a woman called Sarah Krasnoff made off with her 14-year-old grandson, who was caught up in an unseemly custody dispute, and took him into the sky. In a plane, she knew, they were subject to no laws, and if they never stopped moving, the law could never catch up with them. They flew from New York to Amsterdam. When they arrived, they turned around and flew from Amsterdam to New York. Then they flew from New York to Amsterdam again, and from Amsterdam to New York, again and again and again, month after month.
They took about 160 flights in all, one after the other, according to the stage piece "Jet Lag." They saw 22 movies an average of seven times each. They ate lunch again and again and turned their watches six hours forward, then six hours back. The whole fugitive enterprise ended when Krasnoff, 74, finally collapsed and died, the victim, doctors could only suppose, of terminal jet lag.
(via things magazine)
The "open-skies" agreement goes into effect at the end of this month, which means that airlines based in the US and Europe can fly into and out of any two airports in each area.
The new pact is expected to be game-changing for Europe-bound travel. More routes are expected to open, and prices could fall thanks to the new competition. The agreement is also likely to encourage European carriers to compete more aggressively with one another across the Continent. Lufthansa, the German airline, for example, could set up a hub in Paris; or Air France could set up a hub in Frankfurt.
The article also states that Ireland-based Ryanair wants to offer fares to/from secondary markets in the US and Europe as low as $16. !!!
Richard Mosse's Air Disaster, a series of photographs of air disaster simulations, on-the-ground training exercises for airport fire-fighting crews. BLDGBLOG has a short interview with the photographer.
The firemen have put out the fire in seconds. That's their job, after all. They do this with decisive brevity and great courage, sometimes walking right into flames -- but it doesn't make for an easy photograph. It's all a bit like the sexual act: the flames come up and men run in and spray everything with a high power water hose and then it's all over.
Everyone's pissed at the airlines, even their employees.
Why can we not get better quality snack items for our coach customers? One customer recently compared the generic pretzel nubs we serve to the fish food you buy in a .25 gumball machine at any zoo or park.
I like the openness policy of the US Airways CEO...the "employees are going to talk about it anyway" line is exactly right.
What will air travel in the US look like in ten years? Five industry insiders respond.
A Florida scientist has trained a brain consisting of cultured rat cells to fly a simulated F-22 fighter jet. [Insert "I, for one, welcome our new rat brain pilot overlords" joke here.]
To control the simulated aircraft, the neurons first receive information from the computer about flight conditions: whether the plane is flying straight and level or is tilted to the left or to the right. The neurons then analyze the data and respond by sending signals to the plane's controls. Those signals alter the flight path and new information is sent to the neurons, creating a feedback system.
FYI, this story is a couple of years old...if that matters to you.
A Delhi man is doing a booming business in virtual airplane flights. Indians who have never been on an airplane before come from miles around and, for a small fee, experience the interior of an Airbus 300 and meal service.
As on an ordinary aircraft, customers buckle themselves in and watch a safety demonstration. But when they look out of the windows, the landscape never changes. Even if "Captain" Gupta wanted to get off the ground, the plane would not go far: it only has one wing and a large part of the tail is missing.
(thx, catherine)
For your fun office lunchtime activity: a bunch of tips, folding instructions, and paper patterns for making sweet paper airplanes.
No matter how many times I see the photos, the proximity of the runway to the beach at the St. Maarten airport amazes me. (via gulfstream)
New evidence is bringing us closer to finding out what actually happened to Amelia Earhart. "In more than 50 nonfiction books and even a movie, writers embraced theories ranging from a crash at sea to abduction by aliens, from Earhart executed by the Japanese as a spy to living under another name in New Jersey."
David Pogue and Boing Boing have been ensnared by the airplane-on-a-treadmill problem we debated here last February. The airplane still takes off. :)
Air France, Continental, Delta, Emirates, KLM, and United are integrating the iPod into their airplanes, so that you can plug in to charge and view movies on the seatback video screens. How about some standard 120V AC power outlets instead?
Update: KLM and Air France say that there's no formal deal between them and Apple. (thx, maaike)
What an honest pre-flight announcement would sound like. "We might as well add that space helmets and anti-gravity belts should also be removed, since even to mention the use of the slides as rafts is to enter the realm of science fiction." Cutting through institutional rhetoric seems to be a reoccuring theme this week, see also honest advice to incoming college freshman and how design works.
"In aviation, the Big Sky Theory is that two randomly flying bodies will likely never collide, as the three dimensional space is so large relative to the bodies." (via rir)
The Onion provides a list of new guidelines from the Transportation Security Administration. "Vermont and New York cheddars can be brought on board, but not Wisconsin cheddar -- by far the sharpest cheese in the cheddar family".
