Are there really former military pilots at Southwest? I’d have imagined military pilots would put a higher value on the airline actually performing mandatory maintenance.

(Written on 2021/06/11)(Permalink)

Says the European Commission, which found that even in Poland, which has the most polluting power grid in the EU, the lifetime emissions of producing and operating an electric vehicle, including battery production, is 1/3 that of an internal combustion vehicle. Anywhere with a cleaner power grid than Poland will do better still.

(Written on 2021/04/09)(Permalink)

It’s funny, my kid and I were just talking about sampling biases the other day; the best example we came up with was an online survey asking if the participant had internet access, but asking people in an airport if they feel it’s safe to be in an airport comes damn close.

(Written on 2021/01/08)(Permalink)

I used to do airport advisory at an airport with a provincial forestry service base, and every year, they stationed an Aero Commander spotter and Electra air tanker there. They didn’t spend much time parked and in three years I don’t remember them ever going mechanical. What a machine that was!

(Written on 2020/08/21)(Permalink)

Nice try Boeing, but you’ve got a lot of work to get as good at post-disaster rebranding as Morton-Thiokol-ATK-Orbital or whatever they’re named this week.

(Written on 2020/08/21)(Permalink)

You and I have very different ideas of “better.”

(Written on 2020/07/24)(Permalink)

The missing piece of the decision is that these organizations need to start doing things NOW, things that involve spending a large portion of their budget, that will destroy the organization if the event doesn’t bring ticket revenues to pay it back months later.

(Written on 2020/05/08)(Permalink)

As a Canadian who moved to MN, yeah.

(Written on 2020/02/07)(Permalink)

It could be worse. If you were from the Province of Quebec, you are not only part of the national corporate gift, but an additional billion spread over a fraction of the citizens.

(Written on 2020/02/07)(Permalink)

I have similar concerns - look up the UK’s mythical TV detector vans. But unlike the stories of hunting TV receivers, hunting transmitters is actually plausible. Canadian flight service stations have VHF-DF. Coast guard stations triangulate a position at sea in about three seconds. Ham radio operators do direction finding as a sport. If you know what frequency the controller is sending, I imagine two or three stations, each costing under a thousand dollars, made from equipment available to hobbyists, would do the job.

(Written on 2020/01/17)(Permalink)