Brian Micklethwait

Weirdness blogger deputy dog doesn’t do capital letters, but on the plus side collects strange structures and circumstances.  His latest weirdness is Funchal Airport, in Madeira, which is mostly not on the ground, but up in the air on pillars.  Lots of pillars.  It was on the ground, but was too short for comfort, and this was how they made it longer, apparently.  Underneath, there’s a big car park, which makes sense.

DD has photos of this, but the best photo of it that I found was this, on Flickr:

Whenever you find an interesting object, it’s worth looking for it on Flickr, I find.

This elaborate contraption - which looks rather like an aircraft carrier, I think – illustrates what an economic impact aviation can have on a region.  This is the trouble they are prepared to go to just to have airplanes serving them satisfactorily.  See also: Heathrow.

Brian Micklethwait

Oh dear.  Foreigners are pretty good at devising their own versions of English and good for them, but it seems they’ll never really master English English:

Go here for the story.  Which is pretty obvious really, except that the airline in question is Turkish despite sounding rather South East Asian.

Brian Micklethwait

Yes!  Soon the person sitting next to you on that interminable flight from Greece to London will be able to make continuous phone calls!  “Hello, I’m just a quarter of an hour out from Heathrow, so I should be in Croydon in about seven to nine hours!  How are the kids?  Let me talk to them!” etc.  Presumably it will cost a lot, and will be how airlines of the future make any money.

Via engadget to whom thanks.  I tried copying and pasting from the story they linked to but all I got was idiot adverts for mobile phones.

Brian Micklethwait

David Thompson links to stuff about scramjets:

Recent breakthroughs in scramjet engines could mean two-hour flights from New York to Tokyo.

And it looks like a Dan Dare Spaceship:

Cool.  Well, not really.  It has to work inside a fire, which is what happens when something travels at Mach 6, and they test it by firing a big blowtorch at it to simulate this.

I love this from one of DT’s commenters, even if it is off the transport topic:

I notice Ted Taylor gets a mention. He worked on the early atmospheric tests in Nevada and famously used a parabolic mirror to focus the glare of a 14 kiloton explosion and light his cigarette. Which, I guess, makes him a real hombre and the coolest guy on Earth.

I suppose people playing with fire have to be ultra-cool, so it doesn’t set fire to them.

Brian Micklethwait

From time to time I buy The Week, and via the latest edition I came across a piece by Kit Malthouse, saying that Heathrow should be moved.  This makes a lot of sense to me.  This was published ten days ago, but far better to link to this late rather than never.

You need two vital ingredients for a successful international airport: the right wind and loads of space. Heathrow has neither. The prevailing wind in London is westerly. Aircraft have to land into wind; so all those massive beasts (and they are getting bigger every year) have to turn in right over Central London. The noise they cause means only a limited number of flights can land before 6am or after 11.30pm. But as the residents of Wandsworth or Ealing will tell you, it only takes one plane coming over at 4am to wake you up and ruin your day.

Heathrow is also trapped. Hemmed in by the M4, M25 and the A30, surrounded by thousands of residents, our premier airport has nowhere to go and can only cram more and more into what little space is available.

Add to this some truly idiotic planning decisions from the 1950s (Who decided to put the terminals in the middle of the airfield, so the main access had to be through a tiny tunnel?) and you have what is commonly regarded as one of Britain’s greatest planning disasters.

Adding Terminal 5 and also a third runway and a sixth terminal, as the Government wants in its proposals published yesterday, will only make the airport even more of a mess and nuisance. So let’s move it.

The Thames Estuary, he reckons, is where London’s main airport should be.

The Thames estuary is only four metres deep in parts and it would be relatively simple and cheap to construct an artificial island with a beautiful modern airport on it. All the planes would come in to land over the North Sea, which would mean a 24-hour operation, with no disturbance while expanding capacity, at a stroke. In fact, the airport could easily accommodate all the flights from Gatwick as well, meaning we could probably close it too.

A bullet train on stilts or in a tunnel could link the airport to Central London in 20 minutes or so, and a branch line from the new high-speed Eurostar link nearby could connect the airport with the Continent.

Malthouse reckons that the receipts from selling Heathrow off to housing developers might even cover the immense cost of all this.

Rob Fisher

767 Virtual Cockpit

”Airline pilot” is the answer you would have received on asking me, many years ago, what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Myopia and a talent for computer programming meant I never pursued that ambition, but lately I’ve been discovering just how thoroughly it is possible to play at being an airline pilot at home on a PC.

There are two versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator currently of interest.  FSX is the brand new version with extra prettiness and extra behind-the-scenes realism, but it requires a fairly beefy PC, so there is the previous version, FS2004, to fall back on.  Being an incurable computer geek, I naturally have a machine NASA are jealous of and that generates so much heat that I suspect it has a carbon footprint about the size of real airliner’s.  Having a powerful computer helps if you want the latest and best of everything, but isn’t essential.

It turns out that Microsoft Flight simulator falls short in various areas, and this is where the wonderful world of flight sim add-ons comes in.  For a start, if you want to simulate an airliner with enough fidelity that it can be flown just as it would be in real life, you need to buy an add-on aircraft.  The best are PMDG’s 747 and Level-D’s 767.  These are meticulously researched using data from the manufacturers and input from real airline pilots, many of whom use these products themselves.

The three dimensional representation of a Boeing cockpit makes for an immersive experience, but when every knob and switch does exactly what it does on the real thing, you may just wonder which to turn or press first.  Mike Ray is a retired pilot who writes informal guides for real pilots to use to revise for their regular “check-rides”.  These are great for reference, but Mike has also written a more introductory tome especially for flight simmers.  Another company makes step-by-step DVDs that take you through the whole process of a flight from planning to arrival at the gate.  If you still have questions, there is an active community ready to help who treat their flight simming as a serious hobby; no mere computer game.

For flight planning there is a plethora of tools available.  You can download up-to-date charts, including standard departure and arrival routes for every airport.  You can look up the routes taken by real planes in the last few hours (or even track planes on a map in real time), and there are tools that let you calculate the correct amount of fuel and other parameters needed to set up the aircraft correctly.

An extra touch of realism comes from air traffic control, which Flight Simulator is by default notoriously bad at.  One product simulates air traffic control with recorded voices, while another allows you to talk to real people who will watch your progress on a simulated radar display and give you instructions by voice over IP.

Finally, there are products that add realistic traffic and real-time weather to the experience.

Playing with all these toys has provided me with hours of entertainment.  I now feel like I have well and truly got inside the mind of an airline pilot, and should have all kinds of added insight into what’s going on next time I fly.

Brian Micklethwait

This is amazing:

British Airways has removed a shot of Virgin Atlantic boss Sir Richard Branson from the in-flight version of the James Bond movie Casino Royale.

Sir Richard was seen briefly in the original film, passing through an airport security scanner, but can only be seen from behind in the new edit.

“Many films are edited in some way on board,” said a BA spokesman.

Daniel Craig’s debut last year as 007 became the most successful Bond movie at the worldwide box office.

Sir Richard was given a cameo after supplying a plane for use in the film.

The British Airways edit also obscures the tail fin of a Virgin plane that was seen in the original.

As I like to remind the universe every year or two, because it is one of the most interesting things about me, I was at the same Prep School as Richard Branson, and the guy was a force of nature.  He used to run straight through bigger boys on the rugger pitch, on account of being willing to die rather than yield.  And that was just silly rugger games.

So imagine what it has been like for British Airways, whom Branson took against some years ago, when he started quarreling with them about something or other that I can’t remember.  Landing slots at Heathrow, was it?  I don’t known.  Anyway, they thought they were big and Branson was too small to hurt them, and I remember at the time thinking that these people had no fucking idea what was about to hit them.  Sure enough, ever since then Branson has made the lives of the upper management of British Airways a living hell, and they hate him with an intensity that makes perfect sense to me, given that he has been trampling all over them and totally humiliating them for the last decade or more, but which most other people don’t understand.  That’s because most other people didn’t go to school with Branson, and they just don’t know what it’s like to have him on the opposite team against you.  Every time British Airways tries to take a swipe at Branson, they end up stabbing themselves, and each time this happens they get that bit more insane in their hatred of the man.

The above goes some way to explaining the truly cretinoid insanity of this latest self-administered BA stab wound, about which Branson must be grinning even more widely than usual.

Brian Micklethwait

Jackie D goes for Virgin Atlantic:

I just booked a flight on Virgin Atlantic, and every step of the booking process was full of overtures to book an upgrade to Premium Economy, because now you get your own dedicated cabin, better seat, etc. Except you don’t, not necessarily: They’re only just rolling out the new, improved Premium Economy service, and it is only available on a few flights. “Read the fine print,” you grumble. Actually, there is no fine print involved. Virgin Atlantic is flat-out lying to people . . .

It would all be a total scam were it not for the fact that Virgin’s basic non-Preimium service is pretty good.  Maybe they are losing money on that, which is why they want people to pay quite a lot more for very little more.

All of which makes no sense whatever to me.  RyanAir to France is my limit these days.  Sit in a flying armpit for three hours, pay RyanAir about ten quid, and various governments another thirty, for RyanAir Cattletruck Class.  That’s air travel for me.  Actually, I quite like RyanAir, provided I can sit by a window and take stupid photos of the engines, and slightly more sensible ones of Channel Islands, the Millau Viaduct etc.

Anyway, on this Virgin thing, Adriana is apparently the source on this, and she must blog about it Very Soon, according to Jackie.

Brian Micklethwait

I remember a great bit of graffiti on a poster for British Airways.  The poster said something like: “Breakfast in New York - Lunch in London”.  And someone else had spray-written at the bottom: “Baggage in Bermuda”.  I’m guessing that this was in the days of Concorde, but only guessing.

Anyway, it seems the graffitist was right:

British Airways lost more than one million pieces of luggage in 2006, making the national carrier the worst baggage handler in Europe.

A report by the Air Transport Users Council (AUC) revealed that BA mishandled 23 bags for every 1,000 passengers, losing about 3,000 bags every day. Overall, that meant the “world’s favourite airline” lost 1,047,750 bags last year.

Hundreds of thousands of BA’s 45 million passengers began their trips without clothes, toiletries, presents, valuables or climbing or skiing equipment. Many have never been reunited with their belongings.

BA, whose problems led to 28,000 suitcases piling up at Heathrow in January, described its performance as “unacceptable”. “We fully apologise to customers who have been affected by delayed baggage in the past year,” a spokesman said.

“Fully apologise” sounds like they do other less fulsome apologies.  Like: “We apologise a bit, but not really.” “We partially apologise.” “We apologise but only if the government apologises as well.” Etc.

Brian Micklethwait

Here at Transport Blog we have a tradition of featuring food that looks like transport.  We have, that is to say, had postings about food that looks like transport.  One anyway.

So, news of a cake mold that cranks out cakes in the shapes of a railway train:

This is one little locomotive no one will want to miss! Our ingeniously designed cake pan bakes a complete nine-car train that’s ready to decorate and eat. From engine to caboose, there’s no limit to the colors and decorative details imaginative young bakers can add to each train car. Made of durable cast aluminum by NordicWare, the pan bakes each little cake to perfection every time. The premium nonstick interior turns out cakes with beautiful detail and is easy to clean. Hand-wash. 6-cup cap.; 15 1/2” x 9 3/4” x 1 3/4” high. A Williams-Sonoma exclusive.

Cake tin

I stumbled upon this by a route so random that it does not signify, but once I found it, how could I not pass it on to TB readers?

On a more serious note, I now have a special category at my person blog for Bridges,and have dug up and thus categorised as many earlier bridge postings that I could find.

I’ve had a Transport category for some while now.  In my opinion, this quite recent transport related posting, about a dirty-looking vapour trail, is actually quite profound.

Brian Micklethwait

Unmanned Everest rescue helicopter from a New Zealand company working with this organisation, both enterprises having been started by Trevor and Glenda Rogers.

Why an unmanned rescue vehicle? For high altitude rescues a pilot actually gets in the way. The pilot is not acclimated for the altitude or prepared for the extreme cold so they must stay inside the aircraft and cannot help in the rescue efforts. Also, the elimination of the pilot-support equipment leaves room for more rescue gear.

Thank you engadget.

Brian Micklethwait

Inevitably the YouTube promo for this gizmo concentrates on its public service abilities.  It can rescue people (but only one at a time) from burning skyscrapers.  It can be an aerial ambulance, even if there are traffic jams.  It can catch criminals.  There’s no mention of air jams.  But that last bit got me thinking.  What this really is is the perfect getaway car.

Thank you Gizmodo.

Basically, this is a couple of small person pods attached to about seven fan heaters without heating of various sizes, and pointing in various directions.  A helicopter for dummies, you might say.  It reminds me a bit of a lawnmower, of the sort that has a big fan for chucking the grass cuttings into a big bin, or just elsewhere.

Brian Micklethwait

Here‘s an interesting site.  It tracks all the passenger airplanes in the air in the USA at any one time.  Quite what you can learn from this, aside from what planes are in the air in the USA at any one time, I’m not sure, but it surely has its uses, for more than planespotting.

It’s useful, for instance, if you are hoping to meet a plane, I guess.  Or blow one up.  I can’t quite work it out, but I think it tells you if a plane is running late, while it is still airborne.

I tried to find similar info for Europe, but all I could get to was cheap flight offers.

I got to this site via this guy, who I got to thanks to an email from Michael Jennings, pointing out this, but that’s another story.  (In my opinion the iPod toilet roll holder, which I had already viewed before Michael clocked it for me, is not tasteless enough.)

Brian Micklethwait

e-Cargonews Asia reports on a switch back from air freight to shipping.  Key explanatory quote:

Imbriani pointed to a combination of factors that have made shipping lines a viable alternative to air freight. Sailing schedules have become more reliable, capacity is up, and the use of special equipment and containers, such as temperature and humidity control devices, have made it possible to move electronics in ocean containers, he said.

And of course, this will help too.

Brian Micklethwait

I can’t remember how I found my way to this transport related controversy, but I did.

Taipei - A giant wooden sculpture of a penis on display at Taipei’s international airport has stirred up controversy among some foreign visitors and flight crew, who have demanded its removal, media reported Tuesday.

The one-metre-long sculpture in the Number 2 Terminal is part of an exhibition of artifacts of the Thou tribe, one of Taiwan’s ten tribes. But some foreign visitors and crew find it offensive and have demanded its removal, according to the Liberty Times.

Sadly, I am unable to locate a picture of this masterpiece.  The nearest I got was this picture, of a Taiwanese citizen who, in 2003, deployed a giant penis on the coast of Taiwan, in response to five hundred mainland Chinese missiles.

Perhaps one day someone will design a train that looks like a penis.  Imagine that going into a tunnel.

Brian Micklethwait

Yes, yesterday afternoon, an airship flew over London, and many other British landmarks.

It has very good fuel economy, apparently:

The Spirit of Dubai is the world’s largest commercial airship and is managed by Airship Management Services, Inc (AMS). The Spirit of Dubai will operate at around 1,500 to 3,000 feet with a cruising speed of around 30 to 50 mph - the airship can reach speeds of up to 70 mph (or faster, with a tailwind!). While cruising at 30 knots The Spirit of Dubai airship consumes 8 gallons (48 lbs) of fuel per hour. During a week of operations The Spirit of Dubai will consume less fuel than a 767 uses to simply move away from its gate to a runway!

It was only when I read this posting today that I was reminded that I had also photoed this beast.

Brian Micklethwait

Time to kill off the A-380? - asks the New York Times blog.

Floyd Norris briefly lays out the pros and cons of this “overpriced white elephant”, i.e. he’s con.

Personally I like flying but hate all the hideous delays before and after.  So anything that minimises the number of airports you go through – the Boeing Dreamliner goes from anywhere to anywhere and always cuts it to two – is good.  Plus, delays are less horrendous at small airports than at big ones.  The Deamliner connects all small airports to all other small airports.  No days wasted at “hubs”.

Or, as Norris puts it:

How would you like to line up at customs having just gotten off the back of the second or third A-380 to arrive? Would passport control take longer than the flight?

Incidentally, the NYT calls it the A-380, but in the picture they show, it’s A380, minus the hyphen.  Odd.

Being anti-EU, I want the A380 to be a disaster, because if an air of disaster settles upon “Europe”, my country is more likely to free itself from “Europe”, which I would like.

Ooh, Instapundit links to a Popular Mechanics report on the same topic.  They call it the A380.

On the other hand, these two media organs are both American, and as such the hired lackeys of Boeing.  I wish I was a hired lackey of Boeing.

Final thought: I have long noticed that whenever a company is trying to interest actual people in a piece of electronic gadgetry, as opposed to merely trying to interest other companies, they stop calling it the PQ9132X(2) and instead call it the Zippopod, or some such.  That Airbus call their bus the A380, while Boeing calls theirs the “Dreamliner”, says to me that Airbus reckons that other companies will decide this thing, while Boeing reckons it will be people who ultimately settle it.  Speaking as a person, I hope that Boeing is right.

Final final thought: Maybe they’ll change the A380’s name to “While Elephant”.

Emirates first to offer in-flight calls. They've beaten Ryanair to the punch, apparently. Engadget have their links in a twist, but one of them is to this BBC report.

The rules are being relaxed, but they're still silly:

The anti-terror ban on carrying liquids onto flights is to be relaxed from next week - but will lead to more confusion and delays at airports, security experts have warned.

Jackie D (to whom thanks for the link) is also not happy.

Gloomy transport ruminations from Julian's great uncle.

Sir Geoffrey Ingram Taylor may, says Julian, have been the first man ever to have jumped out of an airplane in a parachute.

Brian Micklethwait

Dave Barry has a rather alarming Atlanta Airport Update today:

So I'm waiting to get on the plane, and the pilots arrive at the gate, and as they walk past, one of them says to the other - this is a direct quote - "Hey, it flew in, it'll fly out."

That's it. That's his entire posting. As I say, rather alarming.

I was a bit surprised that the RyanAir plane that took me home from Brest to Luton a few weeks back had just been taking a load of people from Luton to Brest. If the Luton to Brest bit was delayed, so was Brest back to Luton. No maintenance, and hardly any cleaning. I suppose they do enough maintenance for about five trips, at night.

That A380 image

When I was a kid, passenger airplanes were called "liners". Now an entire major airplane making enterprise comes straight out with it: they're buses. Here's an Airbus snap I took recently in Brittany, through the grubby window of a travel agency. And I've another Brittany transport picture here, along with a London duck, which is also for transport.