airports & planes category
The days of wild
Pan American World Airways, commonly known as Pan Am, was the principal international airline of the United States from the 1930s until its collapse on December 4, 1991.
The airline was respected for the experience and professionalism of its crews; cabin staff were multilingual and usually college graduates, frequently with nursing training. During this period Pan Am’s onboard service and cuisine, inspired by Maxim’s de Paris, were delivered “with a personal flair that has rarely been equaled.”
Pan Am was also one of the first three airlines to sign options for the Concorde, but like other airlines that took out options — with the exception of British Overseas Airways Corporation and Air France — it did not actually purchase the supersonic jet. It was also a potential customer for the abandoned Boeing 2707, the American supersonic project that never saw service.
Pan Am was forced to declare bankruptcy on January 8, 1991. Delta Air Lines purchased the remaining profitable assets of Pan Am, including its remaining European routes and the Pan Am Worldport at JFK Airport.
So yes, it’s somewhat heavy on cloud
Can a cloud weigh as much as a 747?
The maximum takeoff gross weight of a 747 is 875,000 pounds. Did you know this includes six million parts? Three million of which are fasteners? One and a half million of which are rivets? The people at Boeing are full of fascinating facts like this.
Anyway, let’s be scientific and say a 747 weighs 400,000 kilograms. The amount of water vapor in clouds varies widely depending on temperature, pressure, etc., but five grams per cubic meter is about average. We feel confident in stating this number because it was confirmed for us by the meteorological office at the airport at the Isle of Man, off the coast of England.
A good sized cumulonimbus cloud, or thunderhead, might be ten kilometers tall, with a base ten kilometers in diameter. Noodling a bit, we come up with a volume of 785 billion cubic meters per cloud (you can see this is not looking good). This gives us a mass of roughly four billion kilograms per cloud, or the equivalent of not one but 10,000 747s.
To put it another way, a modest-size cloud, one kilometer in diameter and 100 meters thick, has a mass equivalent to one 747.
image { panther house | 9/11/747 }
Egotistics are humbled, life is beautiful
Ever noticed how people speak louder when using a mobile phone, even if they usually mumble on a landline or in person? It’s a well-documented phenomenon. Communications experts put it down to mobiles having inadequate “side-tone”—the feedback from microphone to earphone that helps speakers subconsciously modulate their voice level.
Over the years, traditional-handset makers have learned to build side-tone into landline equipment, so users can subconsciously hear how loud they are speaking—and therefore don’t feel the need to yell.
That’s difficult with mobile phones because of their more compact design. The earphone and microphone are much closer together; failing to suppress the side-tones could easily induce that high-pitched screeching form of audio resonance (known to engineers as the “Larsen effect”).
Also, because the signal is more compressed, the voice heard over a mobile sounds slightly alien. That requires the listener to do more mental processing. As a result, people tend to listen more intently and speak more forcefully.
Add 60 decibels or more of background noise from a couple of large turbo-fan engines droning away outside and the air passenger behind you could soon be shouting loud enough for even the pilot to hear. Starting this summer, that’s the fate ahead for folks flying around Europe.
Earlier this week, the European Commission gave the nod for airlines to allow in-flight mobile calls while in European airspace. Passengers will still have to turn their phones off for take-off and landing, but once above 10,000 feet, they will be free to use them as annoyingly as ever.
But aren’t mobile phones supposed to interfere with an aircraft’s sensitive navigation gear, especially its delicate GPS receivers? That’s the official reason we’re not allowed to use them once the cabin door has been shut.
In isolated instances, air-to-ground wireless connections work perfectly—as the victims of the 9/11 flights demonstrated in the tragic moments before their horrific deaths. But used widely, such connections could be problematic.
Cancer Lounge
{ Camel and Winston smoking areas at Zürich airport, Switzerland | photos: SDP/nswd }
{ related: dead men (alleged world cigarette smoking record) }
‘If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.’ — Arthur McAuliff
In November 1971, a man identifying himself as Dan Cooper - later mistakenly but enduringly identified as D.B. Cooper - hijacked a Northwest Orient flight from Portland, Ore., to Seattle, claiming he had a bomb.
When the plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, he released the passengers in exchange for $200,000 and asked to be flown to Mexico. On the flight to Mexico City, he apparently took the cash and parachuted from the plane’s back stairs somewhere near the Oregon border. (…)
Hoping to solve at least part of a 36-year-old mystery, the FBI is analyzing a torn, tangled parachute found in southwest Washington to determine if it belonged to famed plane hijacker D.B. Cooper.
related { Parachuter has wind problems }
(ehh… oh yeah, there’s something about you…)
new york craigslist > manhattan > missed connections
NJH PLBNYC - m4m - 45 (Midtown West)
Date: 2008-02-27, 1:43AM ESTHBD!!!
ILYM
R-T
Now baby we can do it, take the time, do it right, we can do it baby, do it tonight
It was called the longest window in the world when its red, sapphire and purple panels were unveiled to airport travelers in 1960. Artists called the window – longer than a football field and more than 20 feet high – one of the most important stained-glass works in the U.S.
But American Airlines quietly began dismantling the window’s 900 panels last week at its old John F. Kennedy International Airport terminal, after years of debate and pleas by employees and artists to find a way to keep the abstract, multicolored piece intact.
Many museums asked to display the window – over 300 feet long and 23 feet high – said it was too large. And the airline said that removing it in one piece, moving it and storing it would cost many millions.
Smith said that small pieces of the window would become floor displays at Kennedy Airport, at the airline’s Fort Worth, Texas, headquarters, and at a Long Island museum. The rest is being given to an antique salvage company that is taking down the glass for free.
An artist who said he studied with the window’s designer said the airline was too cheap to properly restore a priceless work of art.
“That was American Airlines’ visual identity at Kennedy for 50 years. To just throw it in a trash heap is incredibly disrespectful,'’ said Kenneth vonRoenn, an architect and glass artist in Louisville, Ky. “To intentionally destroy it because it was more cost effective … it’s regrettable.'’
Artist Robert Sowers created the modern glass facade for American’s terminal when it opened in 1960 at Kennedy, then known as Idlewild Airport. It was believed to be the world’s largest stained-glass window at the time, and the first to be featured so prominently in a U.S. building.
image { American Airlines ad, 1968 }
