Flying this holiday? I’m sorry. Here’s to hoping you don’t get stranded in East Nowheresville on the way. As for the rest of us, the Misery Map is a fantastic way to sit back and bask in the misfortune of others. Or, uh, give thanks that we’re not stuck at an airport. Yeah, that second one.
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Last month, a blog post by Sam Cookney captured the imagination of anyone who pays a little too much money for the convenience of living near work. He reasoned that, for the same price he paid for his one-bedroom London flat, he could live in a three-bedroom flat near the beach in Barcelona and fly to work in London four days a week. And he’d still have 387 Euros left over at the end of the month.
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With the East Coast on the verge of an ill-timed storm, worse than usual holiday delays seem inevitable, and there’s one question on everyone’s mind: How long am I going to be stuck in airort purgatory? Depends who you fly.
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Because they only have their main engines for propulsion, today’s massive modern jet liners can burn hundreds of pounds of fuel just taxiing from the boarding gate to the runway. That translates to multiple tons of wasted fuel every year and more than $1.1 billion in added operating expenses . But with this new electrical wheel drive, airliners will finally only need their engines for flying, not driving.
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Think Los Angeles at rush hour is bad? Try doing it half-blindfolded with nothing but a radio and a few blinking lights to show you the way. That’s how pilots navigate the invisible highways in the sky, and there’s a beautiful design that makes it all work. It only took about a hundred years to come up with it.
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It’s easy to get worked up about the ughs of air travel, especially on a week like this. But there are plenty of ways to make flying less terrible—and some of the best minds in design are currently working on them. We posed a simple question to a few of them: If you could do anything to improve the flying experience, what would it be?
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Griping about air travel is about as fresh as in-flight coffee, but there are a ton of ways to tweak the details and make flying genuinely enjoyable. If you could do anything to improve the flying experience, what would it be?
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It looks like the days of shampoo bottles striking fear into the hearts of airport security everywhere might be numbered. Thanks to Los Alamos scientists, a new type of detection technology could give airports the tools they need to finally tell if a liquid is a potential threat—all with one simple scan.
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In an interesting but somewhat obviously biased New Statesman article, the marketing team at audio-engineering firm Biamp have collected a few interesting examples of how architectural acoustics and urban-scale soundscape design affect mood. They mention, for example, the stressful effects of sustained noise on blood pressure, as well as a reported 15% drop in the crime rate in Lancaster, California, following the installation of a birdsong-based soundscape in the downtown area.
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The Wright Flyer took off in 1903 powered by a measly 12 horsepower straight-four. Little did Orville and Wilbur know that just 110 years later, their pokey engines would eventually lead to a power plant with more horsepower than The Titanic and Shepard’s Mercury-Redstone 3—combined.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
