dvdp:
you will never hear a pilot saying “I hate my job”
A whole flight day in 8 minutes (mute it)
You can listen to the sound if you want, but it’s kind of a Muzak-orchestral version of the Rocky soundtrack.
(via bullot42)
Gratuitous Hugo-on-a-plane photo to ring in the weekend.
(No, he’s not eating animal crackers at this point, though he does love the way the bag crinkles)!
Airplane Lavatory Self-Portraits in the Flemish Style
“To pass the time during long flights, artist Nina Katchadourian goes to the lavatory, adorns herself in tissue paper costume, and creates self-portrait photos in the style of Flemish Renaissance paintings.”
She’s obviously never heard about how fun and easy it is to use dental floss cutters to shape barf bags into entertaining 19th century Javanese shadow puppetry.
I guess everyone needs a hobby.
Thoroughly enjoying inflight wifi
…along with the playlist I built on this Virgin America cross-country flight. LAX, and family Christmas part II, coming right up!
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The first Salon de locomotion aerienne, 1909, Grand Palais, Paris
Air shows just aren’t what they used to be…
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You will recall, early last September, my resolution to abandon air-travel. It is a work in progress, given how often I have to leave home. I took my first step last week, taking a nine hour train ride to Pittsburgh instead of the one hour flight. The common calculation holds that the flight—even with delays, boarding, and the TSA—would have saved time. I think that’s true in terms in terms of quantity, but less so in terms of quality.
More often than not, my flights end with stressed-out call to my wife, and me re-enacting some beef over cramped legs, or ridiculous delays. These are minor annoyances that don’t really register in my mind on a moral scale. More disturbing is the security theater, the virtual, and actual, rifling through luggage, and the rather outrageous abuses which all too regularly reach our ears. The result is that I spend way too much time thinking about the perils of flying (not crashing) and the time I save is effectively experienced as “negative time.”
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Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Time Machine (via alexbaca)
Thought-provoking…
(via alexbaca)
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Ryanair Flight Aborted After Tape On Window Comes Loose
(HuffPost) — The latest of European budget airline Ryanair’s failures falls under the “oh dear God” category.
A Ryanair flight from London’s Stansted airport to Riga, Latvia was aborted 20 minutes after takeoff after a tape on a window came loose and started making “alarming noises.”
The tape was fastened around the edges of a windscreen in the cockpit, which had been put on by ground crew before take off, the Telegraph reports.
Anthony Neal, a passenger from Kent, told The Sun: “We were kept in the dark, and were terrified. I could see guys taping in the windscreen with what looked like duct tape or gaffer tape. We were in the sky, then the pilot said due to damage on the windscreen, we were going to have to turn back.”
I’ve never flown RyanAir, but hearing from people who did during study abroad trips, this headline is terrifying, if not entirely unexpected.
Another early morning in DCA’s terminal A. So far, a much smoother Frontier experience than last time.
It’s been a great trip. But I’m looking forward to getting through this last leg of the trip, and to home sweet home!
Not a banner day for Frontier Airlines: 4+ hour delay in DCA, 2 hours sitting in Kansas City, and they still couldn’t get our luggage to arrive in SFO.
ARRRRGGGGHHH!!!!!!!
Good news: we made it to Kansas City.
Bad news: all of the flights out of KCI are running 5-8 hours late.
Good news: that means we’ll make our connecting flight to SFO (originally scheduled for 8:30 am, leaving at 2:30).
Three and a half hours later, this flight delay is so much less amusing, though still educational.
Apparently, Republic Airlines, which operates this Frontier flight, had their entire computer system crash this morning, which, as it takes this long to hand-process all of the necessary data for our flight to receive clearance to leave the ground, gives me a newfound awareness of just how technology-dependent we as a society have become.
