Aviation
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Please, United: Don’t Do It.
I’ve flown 1,500,242 miles with United Airlines. My wife has flown at least a million more. Both of us currently enjoy Premier status, though we’ve spent much of our time with United at the fancier 1K level. We are also both lifetime United Club members and have been so for thirty-three years. Unlike many passengers… Continue reading
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From Hollywood Park Racetrack to SoFi Stadium
Hollywood Park Racetrack is gone. In its place is SoFi Stadium, the 77,000-seat home of Los Angeles’ two pro football teams and much else, including the 6,000-seat YouTube Theater. There’s also more to come in the surrounding vastness of Hollywood Park, named after the racetrack. Wikipedia says the park— consists of over 8.5 million square feet (790,000 m2)… Continue reading
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On windowseat photography
A visitor to aerial photos on my Flickr site asked me where one should sit on a passenger plane to shoot pictures like mine. This post expands on what I wrote back to him. Here’s the main thing: you want a window seat on the side of the plane shaded from the Sun, and away… Continue reading
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Making useful photographs
What does it mean when perhaps hundreds of thousands of one’s photos appear in articles, essays and posts all over the Web? It means they’re useful. That’s why I posted the originals in the first place, and licensed them to require only attribution. Because of that, I can at least guess at how many have… Continue reading
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When a thunderstorm appears right on top of an airport
This is the situation at Newark Airport right now: Those blobs are thunderstorms. The little racetrack in upstate New York is an inbound flight from Lisbon in a holding pattern. Follow the link under that screen shot. Interesting to see, in close to real time, how flights on approach and departure dodge heavy weather. I’ll… Continue reading
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A miracle of flight
That was the view to the south from 31,000 feet above the center of Greenland a few hours ago: a late afternoon aurora over a blue dusk. According to my little hand-held GPS, we were around here: “11/10/17, 11:48:32 AM” “2.4 mi” “0:00:16” “538 mph” “30072 ft” “283° true” “N70° 56′ 10.4″ W38° 52′ 59.1″”. That’s about four… Continue reading
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A dark review for United’s Boeing 787
I have been wanting to fly on the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” ever since I missed a chance to go on an inaugural junket aboard one before Boeing began delivery to the airlines. And I finally got my chance, three days ago, aboard United Flight 935 from London to Los Angeles. Some background before I visit that experience: United is… Continue reading
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Heavy (but brief) weather
Here’s what flying in and out of Newark looks like right now: That storm is very heavy, but narrow. It’s going to wash over New York like a big wave. Hat tip to Flightaware. Continue reading
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Daily Tab for 2016_06_07
For today’s entries, I’m noting which linked pieces require you to turn off tracking protection, meaning tracking is required by those publishers. I’m also annotating entries with hashtags and organizing sections into bulleted lists. #AdBlocking and #Advertising Jack Trout died. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind (co-written with Al Ries) did for advertising what The Elements of Style… Continue reading
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Desert warfare training in live ghost towns, seen from the sky
I’ve been fascinated for years by what comes and goes at the Fort Irwin National Training Center— —in the Mojave Desert, amidst the dark and colorful Calico Mountains of California, situated in the forbidding nowhere that stretches between Barstow and Death Valley. Here and there, amidst the webwork of trails in the dirt left by… Continue reading
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Oil and Water on California’s South Coast
Oil in the water is one of the strange graces of life on Califonia’s South Coast. What we see here is a long slick of oil in the Pacific, drifting across Platform Holly, which taps into the Elwood Oil Field, which is of a piece with the Coal Oil Point Seep Field, all a stone’s throw off… Continue reading
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This is why you want a window seat
I’ve seen auroras on red-eyes between the U.S. and Europe before. This one over Lake Superior, for example, on a July night in 2007. And this one over Greenland in September 2012. But both of those were fairly dim. Sunday night’s red-eye was different. This one was a real show. And I almost missed it. First, my window seat… Continue reading
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FlightAware’s Amazing MiseryMap
That’s FlightAware‘s MiseryMap. Go there now, click on the blue “play” button and watch what happens. If you’re close to now (8:56pm EST), you’ll see what weather does directly to major airports in Chicago, New York and Atlanta, and indirectly (by delayed flights due to unavailable airplanes, mostly) to Houston, Dallas, Los Angeles, Miami, etc.… Continue reading
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The Most Spectacular Place You’ll Never See
Unless you look out the window. When I did that on 4 November 2007, halfway between London and Denver, I saw this: Best I could tell at the time, this was Greenland. That’s how I labeled it in this album on Flickr. For years after that, I kept looking at Greenland maps, trying to find… Continue reading
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Weather vs. Flying
Here in the temperate zones, summer is beaches and picnics and biking and dinner on the deck outside. It is also thunderstorms and airport delays. Right now a line of thunderheads is sliding northeastward across New Jersey. Here is how it looks to FlightAware‘s map of aviation and weather activity for Newark Liberty Airport: Notice… Continue reading
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The long run
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And… Continue reading
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Wanted: Just-the-Facts Maps
In Google sets out future for Maps — Lays down gauntlet to Nokia with plans for personalized, context-aware and ’emotional’ maps in future, in Rethink Wireless, Caroline Gabriel begins this way: Google may be feeling the heat from an unlikely source, Nokia, at least in its critical Maps business. The search giant has put location awareness… Continue reading
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Loving the Alps of Los Angeles
I orient by landmarks. When I was growing up in New Jersey, the skyline of New York raked the eastern sky. To the west were the Watchung “Mountains“: hills roughly half the height of Manhattan’s ranking skyscrapers. But they gave me practice for my favorite indulgence here in Los Angeles: multi-angulating my ass in respect to… Continue reading
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Plantings in pictures
It’s interesting to see where photos end up (or start out, or re-start out) when one puts them in position to be used and re-used with minimized friction. The one above, of a coal-fired power plant in Utah that supplies electricity to Los Angeles, and which I shot from a flight overhead in January 2009,… Continue reading