My butt gets numb after 3-4 hours of flight in my TR182. 64 days? Yeesh! I do admire these guys but have no interest in trying to break their record!

(Written on 2021年 10月 29日)(Permalink)

at DNev noted, this has been in place at KATL for quite a few years on international flights. Not sure why it's news now. That being said, it works fine. It's an easier technical problem than general facial recognition because it's working from a fixed set of people, those that are booked on the flight. As for privacy, they already have your picture from your passport. And that's what they're matching against. So it doesn't create any new sources of PII in their database. Whether it's faster or more efficient, I don't know. It does avoid any contact, which might help with Covid concerns.

(Written on 2021年 10月 29日)(Permalink)

Absolutely. Every organization needs an "offboarding" check list when an employee leaves. Too easy to miss things.

(Written on 2021年 10月 15日)(Permalink)

Paywall.

(Written on 2021年 06月 19日)(Permalink)

While the aerodynamics might work (everything is simulated before it flies), I also worry about the fuel in the fuselage. In a crash, the fuel is going to just fill or coat the plane.

(Written on 2021年 05月 21日)(Permalink)

The Navy has done pretty well. The Ford class carriers seem to have come in pretty close to forecast.

(Written on 2021年 03月 20日)(Permalink)

I don't disagree that our military spending is too high. However, I think, though, that the 50% number is of "discretionary" funding, which makes up 1/3 of the US budget. The latest numbers that I saw were $0.7 billion to the military ("national defense") and $4.8 billion total US budget, which is just under 15%. (sorry that I posted this twice .... replied to the wrong posting above)

(Written on 2021年 03月 19日)(Permalink)

I don't disagree that our military spending is too high. However, I think, though, that the 50% number is of "discretionary" funding, which makes up 1/3 of the US budget. The latest numbers that I saw were $0.7 billion to the military ("national defense") and $4.8 billion total US budget, which is just under 15%.

(Written on 2021年 03月 19日)(Permalink)

KRFD has had a difficult time since the recession in the 1980's. Janesville (WI), Beloit (WI) and Rockford (IL) and that whole region go hit hard. With the recession, businesses closed, schools were closed, and the downtown had many empty buildings and storefronts. Only recently has there been a partial and slow recovering, with an attempt to make the Rock River riverfront more attractive. Chrysler came to Rockford in the 1960s and this whole region supported American car manufacturing. (You can still see one of the reactivated car plants on the north side of I-80 as you drive towards Chicago.) The recession killed many of these plants. The airport tried to rebrand itself as Rockford Chicago International, as reliever airport for KORD, but that had limited success. Now, the majority of commercial flight activity is due to the UPS hub. And now, we're seeing more Amazon Air flights as well. These folks are good for airport use because most of the activity is in the wee hours

(Written on 2021年 03月 19日)(Permalink)

This plane has had more than it's share of design issues from the very start. Personally, I find that Lockheed Martin's oversight as prime contractor has been deficient. 15 years ago, when the plane was brand new and not yet in regular production, it was discovered the the avionics and control systems, coming from more than a dozen different vendors, couldn't talk to each other. Technically speaking, they had designed a communication bus (more like a local network), but didn't define a synchronization protocol that would keep the various boxes from interfering with each other's communication. Each vendor defined its own mechanism, which weren't interoperable or compatible. The prime (LM) had clearly failed to establish such a protocol early on. DoD asked ONR (the Office of Naval Research) to get a few academic folks like me on series of long conference calls between LM and the vendors to try to sort this out. Weeks of marathon conversations got things moving in the right directio

(Written on 2021年 03月 19日)(Permalink)