Please do Miami International first. they have more payphones than water bottle filling stations. They seem proud to have a kiosk to recharge your phone while the modern airports have charging at almost every seat. Nice they rolled this out right when they're done upgrading Laguardia. Laguardia's new slogan is literally "It's no longer a hellscape".

(Written on 03/04/2023)(Permalink)

Up in the SF Bay Area, cities that don't want GA airfields that can't fight the FAA have gone around the federal government by banning leaded aviation fuel. If GA aircraft owners want to keep their planes parked nearby, that's fine but you better park it with a half tank of fuel so you can fly to the central valley to fill up. I don't know what ratio of GA planes require leaded gas but this purposefully overburdensome government regulation is having an effect. Some airfields have half as many planes parked as they used to.

(Written on 02/17/2023)(Permalink)

Time for a little Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. Some dude in China was inflating his weather balloon and instead of filling it to 6 feet in diameter, he only went to 5 feet in diameter. When you go to 6 feet, the balloon climbs to 100,000 ft elevation where P1V1=P2V2 tells us that the balloon expands to about 20 feet in diameter. At that size, the latex is stretched to the point of failure and the weather guy can go retrieve his device after the balloon has popped. Since this guy only filled the balloon to 5 feet in diameter, the balloon was only able to climb to 80,000 feet in elevation where the balloon only expands to 16 feet in diameter. Since the latex is not stressed to the point of failure, it just flows along with the currents for thousands of miles but the weather guy in China has one less weather balloon device in his inventory. https://www.weather.gov/bmx/kidscorner_weatherballoons#:~:text=Twice%20a%20day%2C%20every%20day,up%20to%20

(Written on 02/03/2023)(Permalink)

I'm not in the air industry but I read somewhere that if some of these newer planes do not get the regularly scheduled software updates, the planes quit running. Also, the seized planes are certainly not getting their spare parts from proper channels so their service history is nearly worthless. It kind of makes their value on the trade market nearly zero. I'd like to know what the FlightAware community thinks.

(Written on 07/08/2022)(Permalink)

Last week while waiting for my connector at a bar at DFW, I got to talking to an electrical engineer who works on cell phones. The subject of 5G and the people who think 5G frequencies are harmful to humans came up (a little off topic for this thread). He said that when a person goes through a full body scanner at the TSA checkpoint, they are exposed to about a 1000 times dose of 5G radio waves. According to him, the scanners all use the 5G wavelength. If this is correct, I wonder if these scanners at the airport are leaking radio emissions and interfering with flight communications.

(Written on 11/12/2021)(Permalink)

Just for context, Mythbusters did a episode in 2004 and found that it would take around 3500 helium balloons to lift a 44 pound child. https://mythbusters.fandom.com/wiki/Carried_Away_Myth

(Written on 08/27/2021)(Permalink)

Belief in the missile theory depends on ignorance of how forensic investigations of downed aircraft work. A missile probably wasn't mentioned as a cause in the final report because there was no evidence to support a missile. Missiles leave loads of evidence. AA missiles don't just get close to aircraft and blow up, they release projectiles and shrapnel to shred the target. Investigators didn't see any of that. Nor did they see any evidence of any traces of explosives from the missile. Missiles don't use jet fuel in their their explosive package because it's heavy and burns too slowly. Investigators would have found the high explosive traces from the missile but there wasn't any.

(Written on 07/23/2021)(Permalink)

It would have been cool if they chose fathoms to measure altitude. According to wiki, fathoms have never been recognized as an International Standard unit. Debate rages (as if) as to whether a fathom was equal to the height of the average man or the length of a mans outstretched hands. Length varied as did the size of humans. People didn't have access to the nutrition we have today and thus they were smaller hundreds of years ago. Another possibility is to define a fathom as a thousandth of a nautical mile. Now we are getting somewhere.

(Written on 03/29/2021)(Permalink)

As I got to the end of the article, something popped out at me. FAA Administrator Steve Dickson wondered why Boeing didn't simply ask the FAA for a waiver similar to the situation between the flight characteristics between the 757 and 767. The article said that with those two planes, one handles like an "overpowered hotrod" and the other handles like a "whale". My thought was that Boeing would first have to spell out in detail the handling differences between the 737 NG and the MAX with the result being the possible denial of the waiver. Boeing never wanted to take that chance, and decided to move forward with the secretive MCAS. Then, the FAA weighed in after the article's publication and stated that the handling characteristics of the non-MCAS MAX would not have been compliant. My question is this: Is the handling difference between the 737 NG and the MCAS disabled 373 MAX more pronounced than the handling characteristic differences between the 757 and 767? Is the FAA throwing a

(Written on 01/15/2021)(Permalink)

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong but I have heard that on military aircraft, the pilot, or Captain of the vessel, becomes the single highest authority on the aircraft even if he or she is out-ranked by passengers on the plane. For instance, If a passenger on the plane holding the rank of General is on a C-130 and tells the pilot holding the rank of Major to fly 600 feet over his kid's high school football game, the Major is well within his rights to refuse. These kinds of rules flow through to the civilian aircraft world too, do they not?

(Written on 01/15/2021)(Permalink)