Solar-powered plane starts cross-country journey
NBCNews: A Swiss-made, solar-powered airplane called Solar Impulse took off Friday morning on the first leg of an aerial odyssey across America, beginning what’s expected to be the slowest flight from San Francisco to Phoenix with nary a drop of fuel.
Adventurer Bertrand Piccard piloted the craft, which has the wingspan of a jumbo jet but the weight of a typical passenger car, from Moffett Field into the Bay Area’s skies at 6:12 a.m. ET (9:12 a.m. ET) and headed south toward Arizona.
“Everything looking fine down here,” Mission Control told Piccard after takeoff.
More from NBCNews here.
Considering international flights use five gallons of fuel per mile, this seems like a possible long-term solution to solving the high energy usage of airplanes.
Harlem Shake on a plane might be craziest yet, FAA investigating potential safety violations
The Harlem Shake is a global phenomenon that needs no introduction — the YouTube dance craze has practically been done to death — but a Colorado ultimate frisbee team’s high-flying hijinks have propelled the meme into the news yet again. On February 15th, Colorado College students on Frontier Airlines Flight 157 donned a banana suit and Abraham Lincoln mask, and shook their way to fame somewhere over the Grand Canyon.
“This is your captain speaking … we’re experiencing a little turbulence on this portion of the flight, and the stewartess tells me that it’s coming from inside the plane. WTF?”
This will make a big, big difference in my next ticket purchasing decision.
Wonderful. Now when head office sends us overseas on investigative assignments, we won’t even be able to relax during the plane ride. Just kidding, we don’t have a head office. Or any kind of office. Or enough money to buy plane tickets.
Drunk Icelandair Passenger Strapped to Seat With Tape & Zip Ties
I recently traveled to Iceland, and I gotta say … I’m so glad this didn’t happen on my flight.
EDIT: Corrected direction of the flight — which was headed FROM Rio De Janeiro to Paris.
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» Quick thought on the matter: Anyone see shades of AT&T and Verizon in this whole mess, in that (like AA) both companies sold unlimited service for something — in this case, mobile data access — only to change their minds after they decided it was costing too much, in the process treating their customers like jerks? The lesson: Unlimited has limits, apparently.
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One of the few newspapers in the world to be at the scene of the Wright Brothers’ first human flight, Dr. Julius Zwee, as Zweibel liked to be called, nearly prevented the flying machine from getting airborne as he drowned Orville and Wilbur Wright in questions regarding security regulations. He specifically questioned the lack of bureaucracy that followed the work of the early entrepreneurs. In his article on the phenomenon, Dr. Zwee correctly predicted that we’d all have to take off our shoes before taking flight on such contraptions in the future.
Editor’s note: This is a story from the illustrated Facebook timeline of our site’s 113-year history. Haven’t read it yet? You should!
New startup idea you should follow: SurfAir. Basically, sorta like an airplane version of Uber — that is, an attempt to disrupt a mode of transportation. Pay $1,000 a month, fly first-class up and down the California coast, between Palo Alto and Los Angeles at will. Imagine this being tough to scale, but this would prove popular on the East Coast, where an inter-city Amtrak commute isn’t unheard of. (On a side note, when is someone going to disrupt the passenger train system already?) Anyway, this sounds slightly more realistic than Taco Copter. (ht Hacker News)
More tests are needed, but Terrafugia is on the right track: It’s not quite ready yet, but engineers have been hard at work perfecting the world’s first flying car. The “Transition Street-Legal Airplane” is expected to be released in 2013. ”With this flight, the team demonstrated an ability to accomplish what had been called an impossible dream,” said Terrafugia CEO and CTO Carl Dietrich. According to Computer World, the “Transition’s first flight reached an altitude of 1,400 feet above the ground and lasted eight minutes.” source
Hillary Clinton digs into mystery of Amelia Earhart’s disappearance: Clinton will meet today with a group that’s launching a new effort to try to find Earhart’s plane wreckage. Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan went missing in 1937 off the remote island of Nikumaroro, in what’s now the nation of Kiribati. source
Watch: PCB gets a visual shout out on GMA’s Yahoo/Tumblr...
Wrote a thing.
Hat tip to this headline writer.
Congrats Tumblr!
Don’t screw this up Yahoo.
In 2007, I was...
I started tumblr when I was at one of the lowest points of...
» But there’s a major downside: Because the FAA is so entwined with the kind of red tape only a complicated government organization could invent, if things are decided a certain way, it could force some crazy rules before an airline could allow such devices. For example — just for the right to allow the iPad on their plane, the current standards would force each airline to test each version of a device in a plane by itself (i.e. no passengers) to make sure everything was OK. If that sounds like an insane waste of money, that’s basically how the airlines feel.
Pictured above is an earlier version of the current cover of Bloomberg Businessweek. Richard Turley, the publication’s Creative Director (who is also on Tumblr), explains why his favorite version was scrapped:
We tried two versions of our planes screwing cover. This was the other option which I really want to show people. I love it - probably more than I love the cover we went for. Love the woman covering her child’s eyes and the people going crazy in the control tower. But we thought (i think rightly) that the simplicity of the clouds cover made for a more direct, impactful cover.
You can also see that we were messing around with the livery on the front of the planes, trying to carve out some mouth shapes.. which didnt really work.
And this was before we added ‘romantic light’ to the scene…
Illustration by Justin Metz
(NB - The idea holds a debt of inspiration to this classic Economist cover)
Fans of plane porn, today is your lucky day.
ohheybill asks: Well, anyone who's been on a plane will know that flight attendants don't make the pilot turn the whole plane around at the first sign of tweeting. They tell you to turn it off. Baldwin escalated it rather than comply. I disagree with the policy too, but not to the point where I'm willing to make a complete ass of myself and inconvenience a whole planefull of people. If you or I were to do this, we'd be seen as a crazy a-hole. Alec Baldwin is practically getting endorsement deals out of it.
» SFB says: Sometimes you just have to laugh at things like this, rather than getting offended. Clearly, this doesn’t happen often. But you have to admit, there’s something funny about Alec Baldwin getting kicked off a plane for playing Words With Friends. The absurd nature of it is why it’s great to make jokes about it. That’s the path we’ve chosen. — Ernie @ SFB
They were the only major airline to avoid bankruptcy in the past decade: In 2003, American Airlines parent AMR, which also operates the American Eagle airline, managed to stave off bankruptcy by scoring an agreement from its unions. The country’s third-largest airline, however, wasn’t able to get past it this time around. With the company’s stocks in freefall (down 45 percent since September) and a recent wave of pilot retirements playing harbinger, it seemed like signs were pointing towards bankruptcy. Here’s what their financials look like, according to their Chapter 11 filing, which they submitted to a New York court today:
» What this means for consumers: The company says it plans to honor its reservations, keep its normal schedules, continue its frequent-flyer program, maintain its Admirals Club lounges and pay employees their normal wages and health benefits. So outwardly, there should be no obvious signs that the company is trying to reorganize itself. (photo by Clara S. on Flickr)
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