Links

Links You Will like

Our Recommendation

Links

Search

Showing posts with label lounge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lounge. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

The boy who fell on the ground (lounge)

Ask the pilotPhoto magazine life since the 1970s to a 14 year old boy from a Japan Air Lines DC-8 seconds after take-off from Sydney, gear Bay in Australia.

Here in New England we follow strange and passenger aged 16 years Delvonte Tisdale sad history. On 14 November, at the airport in Charlotte, N.C., Tisdale succeeded in climbing detected on the left landing gear Bay a limit of Boston, US Airways 737.

Tisdale was later ejected in Milton, mass., with a height of approximately 2,000 feet aircraft prepares for landing on runway 7.7.2004 at Boston Logan Airport.

A striking incident to ensure, but as these things go you can always count on a politician or a government official to give him a few annoying spin:

"This is a terrible tragedy that he happened to this young man", said attorney William r. Keating. "But if it was a person who has a different reason... If it was a terrorist who could be a bomb was planted, detected." This is very serious.

May I ask why we are unable to discuss anything, especially when that nothing means aircraft, without running any first through the prism of terrorism? This is not a scandal of airport security. This is the story of a young child who have managed to foolishly kill himself.

Delvonte Tisdale infiltrated on the tarmac and himself in the bowels of an aircraft. Mr Keating and others find such unforgivable breach in this era of repression of the Transportation Security Administration. But likes it or not, uncomfortable is that anyone can take probably off such a stunt if he or she wants and attempts to fairly hard.

And remember, not everyone with tarmac access is analysed in the first place. Tisdale apparently bypasses Hall TSA controls on its path in the wheel of the 737 well. Furthermore, people that fed this plan, this plan, catering swept the aisles and loading bags. Except that it legally, through a policy TSA exempts normal security checks field workers. Only passengers, pilots and flight attendants were marched through the metal detectors and x-ray equipment.

It's a loophole media continue to ignore the inexplicably. But did you started me.

The phenomenon of clandestine passengers into the wheel well is nothing new. There were hundreds of cases over the years, usually involving flights from developing countries to the United States or Europe. What makes it so unique is that it was a U.S. domestic flight. According to the FAA, Tisdale was the first passenger wheel household wells in more than 40 years.

If you have never snooped around areas or an aircraft, including a one fuselage, you saw how spacious are gear bays and deceptively "spacious" how they may appear. 747 And 777 is a garage for two cars - size with plenty of corners to hide in a maze of tubes and cables and Struts and pipes. However, the arrays are neither pressure nor heated. There is little oxygen and temperatures at cruising altitudes hover somewhere around of 50 degrees below zero. That you can add total darkness, deafening noise and very good chance to crash to death by the mechanisms of the landing gear retraction. It's worse, even as the coach. Very few runners have survived there.

It is not known with certainty if Tisdale was dead before the doors swung open on Milton. Nevertheless it was not the first boy in tumultuous come of an airliner. There is a famous picture of Life magazine, taken in the 1970s by a named John Gilpin amateur photographer. It shows a year-Australian boy 14, Keith Sapsford, passing a Japan Air Lines DC - gear Bay 8 seconds after take-off from Sydney. Sapsford, who had either slipped, fear, fried or dislodged by a piece of mobile equipment, had hoped to reach the Japan. Gilpin aligned the aircraft fire and had no idea he had captured image after the development of his film.

Library for the preparation of Saint John in Danvers, Massachusetts, where I went to high school, had a collection of related difficult life where was this photo. Countless times I open this page, and stare at it. It's such a transfixing, awesome picture.

History has also shown us modes of Jockey on a safer and more creative plan. There are more famous Frank Abagnale, the notorious fraudster Fame "Catch Me if you CAN" who stole his path in the cockpits with pilot licence a fake. The less known or William Cohn, Florida, at the beginning of the 1980s, went to the world by posing as a Pan Am flight attendant store owner. (I originally wrote about Abagnale and Cohn in this 2007 column.) Cunning Cohn has not been found that the passengers and the co-workers had written several letters of commendation in his name.

Instead of arresting him, he ought to work.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Another story floating large aircraft is that the FAA had lost it is true that the way tens of thousands of aircraft private property records registered in the United States.

This is clearly an embarrassment for the FAA, but once again, same question: do we really need to see it is a scandal of national security?

A terrorist pourrait, I suppose, get hold of a four seats, this package with explosives and it fly in a building. And that he could do the same thing more or less with a truck or a car or a boat. In addition, keep the best follow-up paperwork property and registration, itself, keep an aircraft to be stolen and used for something nefarious.

As some of you may remember this story, I have no special love for noise and cramped cockpit Cessna and Pipers. But putting screws aircraft - private and private pilots flying-is not only logistically impossible, it would be downright a-American. It is a country with a long and rich heritage of what might be termed "personal aviation." It was Bush planes in the wilds of Alaska, float on mountain - lakes of thousands of them. Their existence is frankly a testament to our freedoms, as is the opportunity for their pilots to fly their - whenever they want, wherever they want - free of the kind of security rules that plague our commercial airports heaviness. Let's keep this way.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

You have any questions to an expert aviation show? Contact Patrick Smith by his website and look for answers in a future column.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Miscellaneous musings on airports, air travel and animal (lounge)

Error deserializing the body of the response message for operation "Translate". The maximum quota for the length of the string content overflow (8192) reading XML data. This quota can be increased by modifying the MaxStringContentLength property on the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas object used during the creation of the XML reader. Line 1, position 9047.
Miscellaneous musings on airports, air travel and animals The departure hall at Suvarnabhumi International Airport in Bangkok.

Back in October I made my second visit to the new Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, Thailand. It was just as I remembered it from my earlier visit in 2008 — which is to say, magnificent.

Suvarnabhumi might not have the amenities of Singapore's Changi or Seoul's Incheon airport, but its central terminal is the most visually spectacular airport building I have ever seen. At night, approaching by highway from downtown Bangkok, it looms out of the misty darkness like a goliath space station - a vision of glass and light and steel, its immense transoms bathed in blue spotlight.

The only thing is that name, Suvarnabhumi, which is pretty much unpronounceable by anybody who doesn't speak Thai.

I would love for the great Paul Goldberger, the Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture 1ND for the New Yorker, to do a series on airports. He could find worse places to start than Bangkok.

Nothing in the U.S. or Europe comes close, and by comparison our attempts are half-assed at best - JetBlue's wildly overrated new building at JFK, for example.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

What JFK Airport in lacks world-class architecture it makes up for in... wildlife?

I've written before about the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, a 9,000 - acre section of the Gateway National Recreation Area that abuts the airport's southern side. A few months ago, taxiing from Runway 22R, an osprey whizzed past our aircraft, just in front of the cockpit. It couldn't have been more than 20 feet away, with a fish clutched in its heels.

Slightly less exotic are the birds - namely starlings and sparrows, pigeons, that live inside JFK's terminals - most notably in Terminals 2 and 3. Not long ago I saw a pigeon sitting in a drinking fountain in Terminal 2.

One day this fall I was at the controls of a 757 on the final approach to Runway 22 L. We were at 50 feet or so, just over the threshold, only a few seconds from touchdown, when a gray rabbit cam dashing across the runway, right-to-left. It was only in view for a moment or two, but it was clearly a rabbit, and it was running like its life depended on it. And obviously it did.

I'm pretty sure it made it, but not by much.

Then there was this.

Speaking of rabbits, the airport in Brussels, Belgium, is infested with them. When I flew cargo planes for DHL, we would leave out of BRU late in the evening, and the taxi lights of our DC-8 would illuminate huge swarms of rabbits all along the taxiways and at the ends of Runways 25 L/R.

Not all of them were alive, having been crushed by airplane tires. I guess a few Turbo, too, had their taste of rabbit stew from time to time.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Have you ever taken a good look at a jet bridge - or "Jetway," to use the proprietary term – that strange umbilical that connects terminal to fuselage? There is nothing else in the world that looks like one, but what really strikes me is how ridiculously overbuilt they are. Do we really need all of that metal and cable and wire and hydraulics for what, at heart, is a simple gangway?

Of course, I am opposed to jet bridges on principle. I'll take the classic drive-up stairs any day. You'll still find the old-timey stairs at many airports overseas. I always get a thrill from them. There's something dramatic about stepping onto a plane that way: the ground-level approach along the tarmac followed by the step-by-step ascent. The effect is like the opening credits of a film. It's a brief, somewhat ceremonial introduction to the journey - and to the airplane itself. You don't get that from a windowless tube. With the jet bridge, the plane itself is almost irrelevant; you're merely in transit from one sterile interior space (terminal) to another (airplane cabin).

A number of gates at Amsterdam's Schiphol airport have unusual boarding bridges with access to both front and rear doors. The passageway actually extends over the aircraft's left wing and all the way to the aft-most door.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The New Yorker is arguably the country's best and most carefully fact-checked magazine, and is home to two of my favorite writers - the aforementioned Paul Goldberger journal film 1ND Anthony Lane. (I have at most a passing interest in either architecture or film, but I will read anything either of these two men bothers to produce.) But what's this, a mistake? In the Aug. 16 after, page 89, in a review of the book "Roadside America," we re told about an Atlanta area restaurant built from the recycled fuselage of a "DC-7 jet."

The DC - 7 had four propellers powered by reciprocating engines. It predated both jets and turboprops.

And now in the Dec. 6 after Gay Talese is trying to tell us that it takes 16 hours to fly from Madrid to Buenos Aires.

In truth it's about 12 hours.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Music: If it seems that I'm looking for excuses to pick on the New Yorker, maybe that's because I'm still irritée OU by Nick Paumgarten's giddy valentine to Elvis Costello that ran a few weeks ago.

Now, dissing Elvis Costello is in many ways the musical equivalent of dissing the Lockheed Constellation or the DC-3. "Serious" rock fans just won 't have. it But I can' t help. it for as long as I've been listening to music, the sound of even a single note from any one of Costello's songs instantly causes my toes to curl and my blood to boil. These were the songs heard at college dorm parties in 1986, their adenoidal choruses and pinched little couplets slobbered over by teenage girls who'd had a few too many wine coolers.

Moreover, I find it the way his songwriting skills are spoken of with such pompous bows, at the expense of other post-punk Brits whose nauseating lyrical could run circles around Costello's cleverness. Take the early and mid-career work of Billy Bragg, for example. (Bragg's proletarian garage-folk and prickly love songs Katherine can't just smarter, they had balls.) However, to the north a bit, try the sweet and sour poetry of Roddy Frame, of the long-forgotten Scottish band Aztec Camera.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Allow me to close with a sales pitch. I normally stay away from product endorsements and pitches, but today I'm making an exception for two reasons. First, the product is really cool. Second, the product is mine.

Christmas is coming, and the perfect gift for the frequent flier on your list is a stylish T-shirt or baseball cap from the Ask the pilot set of fine fashion. Shirts and caps are now only $15, including shipping (U.S. $20 for all international orders). More for the next week only, it's buy one, get one free. Order any t-shirt or cap, and get a second t-shirt or cap at no extra charge! Two shirts, caps, two or one of each... your choice.

(The order form will only process one item, so please include a note specifying which product and size you'd like for the freebie.)

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his website and look for answers in a future column.

Links You Will like