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Have you ever seen a plane being washed? It’s just like washing a car, except it takes a bigger crew with rain gear and fire hoses. Here you see a plane getting spruced up before an inspection. -via the Presurfer
What happens when a top-secret government project is canceled? The details are not quite clear, but it’s hard to keep a secret when prototype parts are sold for scrap and end up on eBay.
Anyone interested in top secret aircraft will know of the A-12 Avenger II, which was cancelled in 1991 and remains at the centre of ongoing litigation to this day. The stealth attack aircraft, developed by General Dynamics and McDonnell Douglas, was terminated before the first airframe had been assembled. But the latest twist in this still-shadowy tale comes in the form of an A-12 canopy appearing on eBay – and it looks like the real thing.
See more pictures at Urban Ghosts Media. Link
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Flying
home for the holidays? Did you, perchance, sit near two bawling, crying
babies? Well, comedian Simon Rich did. And he recorded the in-flight "conversation"
between the infants for all of your (quiet) reading enjoyment:
-Wow, that was some nap.
-Tell me about it. It's almost like I was drugged or something. Hey ... what is this place?
-I'll look out the window. ... Oh my God. I think we have a situation.
-What is it? Are we at the doctor's office?
-No. We're in the sky.
-What?
-We're just, like, flying through the sky.
-Do Mom and Dad know?
-Clearly not. They're just reading like everything's normal. (Looking around) Everybody's reading.
-How do we warn them?
-With screams.
-Which kind? Soft and whiny or piercing and crazy?
-Let's go with piercing and crazy.
Previously on Neatorama: A Real Life Airplane Seating Chart | Read more kids and baby stuff over at NeatoBambino
The Dole Air Race of August 16, 1927 was from Oakland, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii, for a prize of $35,000. Fifteen planes were registered. Eleven qualified to start. Two crashed on the way to the starting point, and another crashed during a test flight before the race. Things only got worse once the race began.
On the morning of August 16, the eight remaining planes queued up for their opportunity. They drew lots for flight order and took off one by one. As people cheered, things went bad in a hurry.
One plane, the El Encanto, simply shot off the edge of the runway, and tumbled over her wing. Another the Pabco Flyer got into the air… until she didn’t, landing some 7000 feet away in a marsh. Three more planes took off only to promptly return with technical difficulties.
Of the fifteen planes that had entered the race, only four planes, the Golden Eagle, Aloha, Woolaroc, and Miss Doran, were actually able to attempt the journey. The results of the ill fated race would soon be known.
The carnage didn’t stop there. Nor did it stop once the race was over. Read more about the deadly Dole Air Race at Atlas Obscura blog. This story is part of a regular feature they call Morbid Monday. Link
Traveling
with babies this Thanksgiving? You may end up in the "baby ghetto"
section of the airplane.
Scott McCartney of The Wall Street Journal's The Middle Seat travel column explains:
Parents are complaining of airline seating policies that create "baby ghettos" in the back of planes. Even worse, families are increasingly split up, leaving small children in middle seats in the company of strangers unless passengers arrange seat swaps on board.
Michael Lyon booked seats together for his family for a trip from Washington, D.C., to Bangkok on United Airlines in July and checked his reservation frequently to make sure the seat assignments didn't change. But when he checked in, all three had been split up, and his 6-year-old son was moved to the back of the wide-body plane by himself for the 13-hour trip.
A United gate agent told Mr. Lyon there were no seats and nothing could be done. He protested, ultimately getting a supervisor who found two seats together so he could sit with his son. "Not only did the United gate staff not seem to understand the importance of having him next to us, they were hostile," Mr. Lyon said.
Los Angeles architect David Hertz built a house so stylish that it almost looks like it could fly. Almost, but not for the lack of wings.
You see, he built the house using parts from an old 747 airplane:
The 4,000-square-foot Wing House, as it has become known, is made from an old plane that was 230 feet long, 195 feet wide and 63 feet tall, but cost David barely nothing. The plane had enough raw materials — 4.5 million of them — to help build most of the entire home. And it seems as though Hertz knew exactly which parts of the plane to keep intact as architectural features. The main residence uses the wings and tail section as roofing elements. There’s also an art studio, guest house, and animal barn all made from the fuselage. A meditation pavilion was also created from the cockpit.
Check out more at Design Milk: Link
Photo: D. Byron Darby
D. Bryon Darby's new home in Arizona, is directly within the flight path of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, so what's a photographer to do? He made an art project out of it, of course:
I photographed Seventy Flights in Ninety Minutes from the top of Hayden Butte in Tempe, Arizona. The publicly accessible volcanic butte is just beyond the airport and is straddled by Sky Harbor’s two busiest flight paths. For 90 minutes, I photographed every airplane that flew overhead, and then I digitally stitched together the many individual photographs. I hoped to re-create the experience of living in a flight path by compressing an hour and a half into one apparently single moment.
It happens every once in a while, and over time we end up with a list like this. Air stewards have more power than ever to keep people from getting where they need to go. And some people just seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like the passenger who was tossed for taking a photograph.
Remember the glory days when air stewardesses were pretty much angelic creatures? Okay so it might have been swayed by the fact that we were young and more angelic ourselves then. But after a passenger decided to photograph the name tag of a particularly rude employee, she was confronted and told to delete the photo. Even after she obliged, she was still considered a security risk and thrown off.
Read the other stories at ShortList. Link
The last time I had an actual meal on an airplane, it was almost certainly a frozen Banquet turkey and dressing dinner in a different package. That doesn’t mean the novelty of eating inside an airplane has worn off, though. I’m currently planning a trip to Zurich just to eat an “in-flight” meal at Runway 34, a restaurant inside an a 1950s-era Soviet Ilyushin IL-14 airliner! See more pictures at Dvice.
Link – via Born Rich | Image: Runway 34
Miniatur Wunderland Hamburg, which has the world’s largest model railroad, has yet captured another superlative to its name: it has recently opened Airport Knuffingen, the world’s largest model airport.
Over an area of 150m², there will be almost 40 different aircrafts taking off and landing, up to 360 times, daily. Since 2011, more than 150.000 working hours, and round-about 3.5 million Euros have been invested in this spectacular project.
Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
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If you’ve ever tried to buy a plane ticket online, then you’d know that prices can vary greatly from one day to the next. But is there a secret to finding the best fares online?
According to Wall Street Journal travel editor Scott McCartney, who writes the weekly The Middle Seat column, the answer depends on when you buy:
So a ticket can be $199 certain days and $499 other days even months ahead of a flight. "There’s a lot of method behind the madness, a lot of rationality behind the moves for airlines," said Ike Anand, Expedia’s director of airline strategy. "But for consumers, it does seem crazy."
Rick Seaney, chief executive of FareCompare.com, studied three years worth of airline prices and concluded that 3 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday was the best time to buy. "That’s when the maximum number of cheapest seats are in the marketplace," he said.
A daily check of fares in 10 different markets for the past two weeks showed that the average of the lowest prices offered in those markets was often mid-week, while weekends were higher priced. In the days studied, there were no "mistake fares" at ridiculously low prices that could skew results.
This one is quite neat. Here’s a YouTube clip showing all of the air traffic in the world in a single day, condensed to a little over a minute:
The yellow dots are airplanes in the sky during a 24 hour period. Stay with the picture. You will see the light of the day moving from the east to the west, as the Earth spins on its axis.
Also you will see the aircraft flow of traffic leaving the North American continent and traveling at night to arrive in the UK in the morning. Then you will see the flow changing, leaving the UK in the morning and flying to the American continent in daylight.
So sit back, relax, and make sure the tray table is in its upright position, then go watch all those planes fly all over the planet: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube]
The biggest rooms in the world are those built to store aircraft. Not only are they huge, but some have interesting stories to go with them. For example, the Arium hangar in Germany was built for the production and operation of a new aircraft called the CL160. However, the aircraft project was abandoned, leaving one of the biggest buildings on earth unused. It was reopened in 2004 with a tropical resort inside! Link
Bringing much needed levity to the stressed out airplane passenger is this website, Fun with TSA. The website suggests a few things that you, the downtrodden traveler, can do to stick it to the man and have a bit of fun. For example:
Be the person on your flight to suddenly shout out “Marco!” during that last hour when others are looking for things to do. It might take a few tries, but eventually someone somewhere on the plane will respond with a “Polo!” if for no other reason than to shut you up. Entertainment achieved.
But if you get into trouble, we don’t know each other, mmmkay? Link
Why can’t you user your cell phone on commercial flights (hint: it has nothing to do with technical limitation, you can use your mobile phones in flights in Europe) or why your seat has to be in their original and upright position a full 20 minutes before landing?
Willy Stern of The Weekly Standard has the REAL reasons:
Mike Munger, a political science professor at Duke University, says the FAA’s silly rules are, in fact, a form of what psychologists and zoologists refer to as “costly signals.” What’s the term mean? Costly signal theory explains actions that might seem crazy, but have a purpose. For instance, a gazelle espies a lion across the veldt and, instead of hiding, expends much energy by leaping high into the air, calling attention to herself. At the same time, she’s telling the lion, “Hey, I’m no simple catch so look elsewhere for your dinner.” Similarly, the FAA wastes a lot of energy and resources with its pages and pages of
inane rules, but is somehow trying to convey the message that planes are safe. Most of us would rather skip the message and finish our naps in full recline.
Airplane! — the 1980 Zucker brothers comedy about a midair jetliner disaster — is a remake of the 1957 thriller Zero Hour! Simon Hollington and Kypros Kyprianou ripped all of the jokes and gags out of Airplane! and turned it back into a drama.
via Ace of Spades HQ | Editors’ Website
BrickExpo 2010 will be held in Cincinnati the weekend of September 11-12. One of the displays will be a recreation of the 2009 plane crash in New York in which an airliner safely landed in the middle of the Hudson River, which became known as “the Miracle on the Hudson” as all passengers and crew were rescued from the water. Ken Osbon of Goshen Township, Ohio created the Lego version of the incident. Osbon, one of the event’s organizers, said other Lego displays will depict a farm, a city with a train running through it, a pirate tableau, and even one recreating a scene from the TV show The Deadliest Catch. Link -via Fark
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New York illustrator Christoph Niemann took a flight from New York to Berlin and documented the absurdities of airline travel in pictures in his blog at The New York Times. I honestly love the idea of a “delete neighbor” button. Link
What time is it? Why, let me consult MB&F‘s Horological Machines (don’t you dare call it a watch) HM4 Thunderbolt:
The sleek aerodynamic form of the Thunderbolt’s titanium and sapphire envelope has its roots in Maximilian Büsser’s childhood passion for assembling model plane kits. Every component and form has a technical purpose; nothing is superfluous and every line and curve is in poetic harmony. Articulated lugs ensure supreme comfort. Highly legible time is a fringe benefit.
The two pods resemble the turbines of the A-10 Thunderbolt (AKA Warthog airplanes). How much? Yours for a mere $158,000.
NotCot has all the photos: Link
The Solar Impulse (previously at Neatorama), an experimental electric plane with rechargeable solar batteries, has completed a 24-hour continuous flight, with no fuel. The flight proves that the plane’s solar collectors can store enough energy through the day to last through the night.
Pilot Andre Borschberg eased the Solar Impulse onto the runway at Payerne airfield about 30 miles southwest of the Swiss capital Bern at exactly 9 a.m. (3 a.m. EDT) Thursday.
Helpers rushed to stabilize the pioneering plane as it touched down, ensuring that its massive 207-foot wingspan didn’t scrape the ground and topple the craft.
The record feat completes seven years of planning and brings the Swiss-led project one step closer to its goal of circling the globe using only energy from the sun.
“We achieved more than we wanted. Everybody is extremely happy,” Borschberg told reporters after landing.
The flight proves that, theoretically, the plane could stay in flight indefinitely. The next goal: crossing the Atlantic. Link -via reddit
Today is the 30th anniversary of the release of the film Airplane! Surely, we can’t let that go by without some kind of celebration, like, hmm, …a quiz. How well do you know the jokes in the classic 1980 movie? Find out in today’s Lunchtime Quiz at mental_floss. I scored 64%, despite not having seen the movie in at least twenty years. Link
See also: Airplane! is a Remake of an Old Fifties Flick
If you’ve ever wondered where Jim Abrahams and David Zucker came up with those hilarious jokes in Airplane!, the answer isn’t strictly their warped minds. Many of the scenes set up for the gags were directly cribbed from 1957′s Zero Hour! It’s a movie about an ex fighter pilot named Stryker, who… well, see for yourself.
And I’d always thought it was a spoof of the Airport movies. Of course, the writers did have warped minds, and saw this classic movie, replete with so many unfunny-yet- ripe-for-the-funny lines, as a perfect structure for the brilliant comedy it ultimately became.
Watch as Boeing builds a 737-700 for Southwest airlines in only 2.5 minutes in this time-lapse video. This particular plane is named the Florida One, for its artwork featuring the state flag. The catchy music is a bonus! Link (embedded YouTube clip)
Last year, Chesley Sullenberger saved the day when he landed a crippled passenger jet on the frigid Hudson River. This year we have Frank Vogt, a traffic reporter’s pilot whose Cessna lost oil pressure 1200 feet off the ground. In the early dawn darkness, that ground looked like one big mass of black void… except the turnpike.
“I knew it was wide enough, I knew it was straight enough. There wasn’t any wires, and I didn’t see many overpasses,” Vogt tells Asylum. He reasoned that since the traffic was still light, there would be enough space between the cars that they could slow down and let him in.
His hastily concocted plan worked perfectly. He even managed to pull his Cessna to the side of the road, although the inevitable rubbernecking — completely justified in this case — still blocked traffic a mile-and-a-half in both directions.
Link with video from CBS (which is also responsible for the photo.)
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It’s a terrifying scenario you may have dreamed about: falling to earth from a high altitude. A very few people have survived such an event. Popular Mechanics has a survival guide that will take you longer to read than the six mile fall would take.
Things are bad. But now’s the time to focus on the good news. (Yes, it goes beyond surviving the destruction of your aircraft.) Although gravity is against you, another force is working in your favor: time. Believe it or not, you’re better off up here than if you’d slipped from the balcony of your high-rise hotel room after one too many drinks last night.
Or at least you will be. Oxygen is scarce at these heights. By now, hypoxia is starting to set in. You’ll be unconscious soon, and you’ll cannonball at least a mile before waking up again. When that happens, remember what you are about to read. The ground, after all, is your next destination.
This post is not for the faint of heart. Link -via Metafilter
Bernard H. Pietenpol had a dream. He wanted to make an airplane accessible to the masses. So in 1928, with only an eighth-grade education, he set out to design and build a simple, inexpensive plane. The result was the Pietenpol AirCamper, and his family is still selling the plans for it, just in case you’re in the mood for a weekend project.
Hobbyist Chuck Gantzer was in such a mood, and at the link, you can see in-process photos of the construction of an AirCamper, as well as of the completed airplane in flight.
Link via Make | Pietenpol AirCamper Website | Photo: Wikimedia Commons
The US Airways Airbus 320 that landed in the Hudson River just a year ago is for sale. In the story known as “Miracle on the Hudson”, Captain Sully Sullenberger brought the plane down with no loss of life only 23 minutes into the flight when a flock of geese jammed the engines. Now the insurance company is selling what’s left of the plane.
The auction — “As Is/Where Is (New Jersey),” Chartis Insurance Group is compelled to disclose — does not include the airliner’s engines or avionics, and the lot is somewhat in pieces. But apart from that it seems to be surprisingly intact for a craft that hit the water at a normal touchdown speed with ad hoc landing gear comprising the entire fuselage and wings — which, by the way supported all 155 people aboard as they safely deplaned and awaited rescue craft on the frigid Hudson.
The offering page is remarkably bland, not even considering the high drama surrounding the most famous water landing ever. Under the formal description of the accident, it says: “Aircraft suffered severe bird strike event resulting in water emergency landing.” The description of the damage is simple: “Severe water damage throughout airframe. Impact damage to underside of aircraft.”
The craft itself is described as “1999 AIRBUS A320-214? and nowhere on the page is even the most oblique mention of the significance of this particular piece of aviation salvage.
Bids are being accepted through March 27. Link
(image credit: Janis Krum)
Did a bear tear your airplane to bits in a remote part of Alaska? No problem – we can fix that with a little duct tape. Army Paratrooper forum user Iz_NorthPole explains:
During a private "fly-in" fishing excursion in the Alaskan wilderness, the chartered pilot and fishermen left a cooler and bait in the plane. And a bear smelled it. This is what he did to the plane.
The pilot used his radio and had another pilot bring him 2 new tires, 3 cases of duct tape, and a supply of sheet plastic. He patched the plane together, and FLEW IT HOME!
Photo: Tim Bullen Photography
Environmental Graffiti has a beautiful set of photographs depicting various shots of planes and rainbows. Starting things off is Tim Bullen‘s amazing picture of the aerial display group, The Red Arrows.
The Red Arrows are the crème de la crème when it comes to aerial displays, but as they tear through a rainbow, coloured smoke trails resplendent, is it a case of man outshining mother nature’s best efforts – or is the opposite true?
Also at the EG post, learn about glories – rainbows formed from a plane’s silhouette and viewed from the aircraft on the top layer of cloud cover.
(Photo: George F. Lee, Honolulu Star-Bulletin)
Retired dentist Young C. Park used aluminum to create incredibly detailed, realistic models of a Corsair and a P-51 Mustang. His airframes incorporate rods and pulley action, just like the real thing.
Using a tweezers, the controls can be moved. All cables and linkages are in place to work the wing control surfaces as well. Young Park has since carved a pilot’s face and hands from solid aluminum and built an articulated pilot to sit in the cockpit.
