Hasta La Gadget!

With the Paris Air Show scheduled to lift off in earnest on Monday, Airbus is hoping to steal a bit of the limelight. After being conceived in 2004, the A350 finally took the public skies today in France, showcasing a highly-efficient Rolls-Royce XWB engine all the while. The jet is arguably being launched to compete with Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner, and as you’d expect, it’s the magic inside of the shell that’s most impressive. The Trent XWB engine was built specifically for the A350, replete with titanium blades and a mixture of technologies that have led to it being deemed the “world’s most efficient” airplane engine… as said by Rolls-Royce, anyway. To date, over 600 orders for the A350 have been placed, but the outfit is hoping to land even more contracts in the days ahead. Ideally, each will ship with a power port in every seat, satellite internet connections and an allergy for mechanical failures. (A boy can dream, right?)

Filed under: Transportation

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Source: CNN, The New York Times, BBC

I don’t know about you, but when I travel, I always ask for a window seat. There’s just something about glancing out of the window and seeing the whole world (well, part of it anyway) extending in all directions. That’s the same feeling I get when I spend time with friends and family or when I see the photos that we took from our last get-together.

And what better frame to house those precious memories than with the Air Frame?

It obviously looks familiar, because it was made to look like an airplane window, only instead of being a window to the world, it’s a window to your best and most meaningful memories – assuming you’ve got them printed out in 8″x10″s.

Tuck prized shots and family portraits into the Air Frame and glance out into the world that surrounds your heart when you need a break from the real world.

The Air Frame was designed by James Kim and retails for $59(USD) for one, or $119 for a set of three over at Generate, both of which are a whole lot cheaper than most airfares these days.

The roar of a motorcycle is something we’re sure Tim Allen loves to hear on a regular basis, and this motorcycle which features a 150hp Rotec Radial R3600 airplane engine will probably make him grunt uncontrollably, to the point where he […]

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If you were walking down the street and a shady-looking person asked you if you were interested in buying the Air Force One, which you should know, is the plane the President of the United States uses, you would think […]

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Early this morning at Moffet Air Field in Mountain View, California, Solar Impulse finally took off on the first leg of its barnstorming tour across the US. Of course, this isn’t the first time the sun-powered plane and its pilots, Bertrand Piccard and Andre Borschberg, have flown long distance, but it is the first time it’s taken wing through American airspace. Why has it come across the pond? To raise pubilc and political awareness about the benefits of going green and increasing energy efficiency — and perhaps pick up an additional sponsor or two for its second-gen aircraft (currently in development) meant to fly around the world in 2015. “With the technologies we have onboard, we can divide by two the energy consumption of our world, and produce half of the rest [energy we need] with renewable sources” according to Piccard.

This first portion of the journey will end in Phoenix, and it’ll take around twenty hours to get there, as the plane’s meager output limits its average speed to around 40MPH. Should any of you want to join along with Piccard and Borschberg as they fly across the country, you can hit the Solar Impulse Across America website to see a livestream from the cockpit, along with real-time altitude, air speed and battery status of the aircraft. And, you can watch a video of Solar Impulse taking off on its North American journey and hear Borschberg talk about learning to fly it after the break.

Filed under: Transportation, Alt

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