Check out the F-22 thrust vectoring at the end...

To be or not to be

Usually I have to get burned before I learn, so Bill McKenna's Car Restoration Site is a little sobering. It's easy to dream about tearing an old car apart, cleaning and polishing everything, and then putting it back together again, but it's much harder to appreciate the sweat equity that goes along with all that. Well, a couple hundred photos over ten years of restoration (of a 1959 Cadillac and a 1963 XKE) helps with that.

Or you could just lean into the punch and drop the price of a house (admittedly, a house in fly-over country - how appropriate) on this mini-Spitfire kit.

BA Flight 009

I am not a, um... aviophobe, but this story of near crash of BA Flight 009 [link fixed] is very cool.

With unbelievable restraint, Captain Eric Moody addressed British Airways flight 009 as his Boeing 747 drifted inexorably down towards the Indian Ocean.

Displaying the stiff-upper-lip spirit that built an empire, he uttered the words that are every air passenger's worst nightmare: 'Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are doing our damnedest to get it under control. I trust you are not in too much distress.'

Minutes before, while cruising at ten kilometres above the sea, Captain Moody had instructed his first officer to send a Mayday call to ground control in nearby Indonesia. The date was June 24, 1982, and this extraordinary flight has since gone down in aviation history.

As a new TV documentary investigating the socalled 'Jakarta Incident' makes clear, nothing was quite as one might expect that terrible night.

Incredibly, passengers and crew reacted to the captain's cataclysmic announcement not with screams and hysteria, but with an extraordinary calm as the realisation that they were almost certainly sinking to their deaths hit home.

Looking out of the aircraft windows, they could see that their plane was coated in an eerie white light and that the engines were on fire, with great jets of flame trailing into the sky.

Like I said, the rest is very cool. And as I usually must, I cannot help but relate the story to myself.

I have had a few close calls with car accidents or near-brushes with severe accidents that have just occurred. It is a very strange feeling. I had gone on a long drive with some friends on a quest to find some authentic Mexican food near Rochester, NY. In town there is nothing really good, but the surrounding farm land away from the city is mainly plied with apple orchards, and with them come migrant workers and likewise a good Tinga Con Pollo.

We were driving back along a small country road back to the main highway. It had rained only recently, and the road surface turned out to be especially slippery. Coming down a slight incline towards the highway, my friend applied the brakes only to have the car go into a slide. Meanwhile, traffic was zipping by, and I could see out the left the oncoming cars that would slam into us if we slid out into the road. There was this 2-3 second period were we realized what was going on and how likely an accident was. Of course, the car did stop before the highway, and the driver anxiously explained that the brakes had locked up. It just takes a moment to realize our own mortality.

Low-bid

Okay, follow me here: I fly from DC to Seattle once or twice a year. A modern airliner takes 3.5 liters of fuel per 100 passenger-kilometers. The planes are full (200-250 passengers). The trip is 4500 km long. Ignoring many things, including the jet stream, my share of the fuel works out to ~135 liters each way. A quick Google suggests jet fuel currently runs $1.65/gallon, which implies a fuel cost, round trip, of ~$120. A round-trip ticket (one stop) can usually be found for less than $300, and I've seen $250. And so as I sit in my bargain basement seat, I've occasionally wondered about maintenance.

Chinese Aircraft Maintenance.
Malaysia Airlines 777 on takeoff.

The Great Leap Forward

Finally, a solution to free ourselves from gridlock and long commutes to anti-social cookie-cutter suburban McMansion enclaves: Personal trains for everyone. All we need to do is put in railways to all homes and businesses.

Skydiving into another airplane is actually pretty hard

I mean think about it. All that empty space and you have to manage to coincide exactly. I'd curse too if I just missed.

Finally, a practical use for SUVs

Touareg V10 TDI tows a 747. Note bene, they added nearly 8 tons of ballast for traction.

Also, just for fun, I looked up the mileage of a jet plane (~3.5 liters per 100 passenger kilometers according to the redoubtable internet). If you and three friends tool around in a car getting 20 mpg, then you are swigging about 3 liters per 100 passenger kilometers. I suspect this gets worse if you try to drive across the Pacific.

Design is expensive, Copying isn't 2

Paper Airplane Coffee Table

Veritas Airlines

The Economist grows a sense of humor:

GOOD morning, ladies and gentlemen. We are delighted to welcome you aboard Veritas Airways, the airline that tells it like it is. Please ensure that your seat belt is fastened, your seat back is upright and your tray-table is stowed. At Veritas Airways, your safety is our first priority. Actually, that is not quite true: if it were, our seats would be rear-facing, like those in military aircraft, since they are safer in the event of an emergency landing. But then hardly anybody would buy our tickets and we would go bust. More

If this follows the NY Times/GM protocol, we should hear a response from the FAA about something called Veritas Magazine...

Wings

The explanation is a little handwavey, but apparently sound waves can be used to break up laminar flow on airplane wings and thereby increase lift by as much as 20%. That said, airline travel already sucks enough without turning the whole airframe into a sonicator, but you'd think the military would be interested. On the other hand, wing deicing isn't an issue anymore.

I wonder if this would work for sails and propellers as well? By adding small resonators (whistles is the technical term, I think) on a foil, the surface could vibrate itself, which could make windmills more efficient. Thus enabling Holland to pump itself dry faster.