Boing Boing » planes

Snake actually on a plane

Rob Beschizza — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:05:37 +0000

Reuters: "The three meter-long (9.1 foot) non-poisonous Amethystine python appeared about an hour into the Qantas flight between Cairns in northern Queensland and the Papua New Guinean capital of Port Moresby on Thursday."

How safe is safe?

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Mon, 31 Dec 2012 17:51:36 +0000

The precautionary principle comes up a lot when you're talking about the side effects of technology in the real world. When you don't have evidence that something is dangerous — but you suspect it might be — you could cite the precautionary principle as a reason to ban or limit the use of that thing. It's a messy idea, though, and I'm still not sure what to think about it. On the one hand, technology is often available before data on the wide-ranging effects of that technology are available. Do you use it or not is a legitimate question. On the other hand, following the precautionary principle in a blind sort of way can lead to things like this.

Composited, time-accelerated video of airport traffic

David Pescovitz — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:17:43 +0000

Filmmaker Cy Kuckenbaker composited four and a half hours of San Diego International Airport traffic into 25 seconds. "With an even blue background it’s fairly easy to key out each airplane and put them together. The bridge in this shot is an added time lapse under the 1st Street bridge in San Diego." Kuckenbaker was inspired by Ho-Yeol Ryu’s incredible composite photo of airplanes at Hannover Airport. "All Landings at San Diego Int Airport Friday Nov 23 from 1030am to 300pm" (via Colossal)

Solar Impulse plane lands, completing world's first intercontinental flight powered by the sun (photos)

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 07 Jun 2012 01:53:34 +0000

Photo: REUTERS/Youssef Boudlal

The Solar Impulse plane project president and pilot Bertrand Piccard lands after a 19-hour flight from Madrid at Rabat's International airport, June 5, 2012. The plane landed in Morocco on Tuesday, completing the world's first intercontinental flight powered by the sun to show the potential for pollution-free air travel.

More about the successful completion of the project here.

Photo: REUTERS/Youssef Boudlal

Crew members check the Solar Impulse plane after it landed following a 19-hour flight from Madrid at Rabat's International airport, June 5, 2012.

Photo: REUTERS/Youssef Boudlal

The Solar Impulse plane's project president and pilot, Bertrand Piccard (L) celebrates with co-founder and CEO Andre Borschberg (R) and Moroccan Agency for Solar Energy (MASEN) CEO Mustapha Bakkoury after the plane landed.

Sun-powered airplane "Solar Impulse" attempts transcontinental flight

Solar-powered airplane "Solar Impulse" attempts transcontinental flight

Xeni Jardin — Thu, 24 May 2012 20:33:39 +0000

Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

A Solar Impulse aircraft takes off at Payerne airport May 24, 2012, piloted by André Borschberg. The Solar Impulse HB-SIA prototype aircraft, which has 12,000 solar cells built into its jumbo-jet-sized wings (about 200 feet long), attempted its first intercontinental flight from Switzerland to Morocco with a few days for a technical stop and a change of pilot in Madrid. This flight will act as a final rehearsal for the 2014 round-the-world flight.

The project website is here. More coverage: NPR, Telegraph, AP, more photos and video at MSNBC, AFP, and video from Reuters.

Follow Solar Impulse on Twitter, and pilot André Borschberg is tweeting from the skies.

Flying along big wall of clouds. beautiful and impressiv but will climb higher #solarimpulse
— André Borschberg (@Andreborschberg) May 24, 2012

Starting the climb to make the big jump over the pyrenees #solarimpulse
— André Borschberg (@Andreborschberg) May 24, 2012

Live video feed below.

Flying the Hello Kitty skies (photo)

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 01 May 2012 20:27:00 +0000

Almost as much fun as the "Unicorn Chaser" plane Boing Boing named for Virgin America airlines! A passenger looks out of an Airbus A330-300 aircraft of Taiwan's Eva Airlines, decorated with Hello Kitty motifs, in Taoyuan International Airport, northern Taiwan, April 30, 2012. Taiwan's second-largest carrier, Eva Airlines, and Japan's comic company, Sanrio, which owns the Hello Kitty brand, collaborated on the second generation Hello Kitty-themed aircraft which was launched on October 2011. There are currently three Hello Kitty-themed Airbus A330-300 aircrafts flying between cities such as Taipei, Fukuoka, Narita, Sapporo, Incheon, Hong Kong and Guam. More photos here, and we've previously blogged about the earlier generation of the Hello Kitty planes on Eva. (REUTERS/Pichi Chuang)

Gorgeous photos of jets flying too close to the beach

Amy Seidenwurm — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 00:26:48 +0000

Princess Juliana International Airport (SXM) on St. Maarten has an extremely short runway (7152 feet) that forces jets to get mighty close to people at Maho Beach.

Photographer Josef Hoflehner has taken some amazing shots of this phenomenon.

FAA to review in-flight gadget policies, maybe, eventually

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 04:06:43 +0000

The US Federal Aviation Administration today announced it is exploring ways to make it easier for airlines to allow travelers to use connected gadgets like phones, iPads, and tablet PCs during plane takeoff and landing.

A statement released today says the FAA is “exploring ways to bring together all of the key stakeholders involved” (airlines, plane manufacturers, consumer electronics producers, and unions representing flight attendants) to discuss the possibility of testing devices to determine if they are safe for passengers to use during the most critical phases of flight.

“No changes will be made until we are certain they will not impact safety and security," read the statement. FAA rules currently require fliers to shut down their electronic devices when the plane's altitude is below 10,000 feet.

Snip from Nick Bilton at the NYT's Bits blog:

Abby Lunardini, vice president of corporate communications at Virgin America, explained that the current guidelines require that an airline must test each version of a single device before it can be approved by the F.A.A. For example, if the airline wanted to get approval for the iPad, it would have to test the first iPad, iPad 2 and the new iPad, each on a separate flight, with no passengers on the plane.
It would have to do the same for every version of the Kindle. It would have to do it for every different model of plane in its fleet. And American, JetBlue, United, Air Wisconsin, etc., would have to do the same thing. (No wonder the F.A.A. is keeping smartphones off the table since there are easily several hundred different models on the market.) Ms. Lunardini added that Virgin America would like to perform these tests, but the current guidelines make it “prohibitively expensive, especially for an airline with a relatively small fleet that is always in the air on commercial flights like ours.”

More at the New York Times, Associated Press, and Wall Street Journal.

Photo: "Person Holding a Business Phone While on a Plane," Jim Lopes, Shutterstock.

Soviet Union announces F-22

Rob Beschizza — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 13:03:53 +0000

Photos: Sukhoi; U.S. Air Force photo by Scott Wolf

Russia's new Sukhoi T-50 stealth fighter (right) may remind you of something else. [via Metafilter]

3 things you need to know about biofuels

Maggie Koerth-Baker — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 15:30:09 +0000

Why care about liquid fuel?

There’s a reason we use different forms of energy to do different jobs, and it’s not because we’re all just that fickle. Instead, we’ve made these decisions based on some combination of what has (historically, anyway) given us the best results, what is safest, what is most efficient, and what costs us the least money.

In a nutshell, that’s why liquid fuel is so valuable. So far, it’s the clear winner when we need energy for transportation—especially air transportation and heavy, long-distance shipping—because it allows you to stuff a lot of energy into relatively small amount of storage space, and easily refill on the go. There are other options, of course, like electricity. And that can work quite well, depending on what you’re trying to do. Eventually, we may find ourselves in a world where liquid fuel is no longer the best option. But we aren’t there yet. And for those forms of transport that take us into the air or move our belongings very long distances, we aren't likely to get there for a good long time.

That's why I care about liquid fuel, and why I'm interested in the future of biofuels. Yes, biofuels do have a future. But what that future will be depends on whether we can control for some very messy variables. Here, in three points, are the big things you need to know about biofuel.

1. Corn ethanol really is flawed. But maybe not as much as you think.

Biofuel is a nice, round word encompassing a lot of tricky, little, oddly shaped dots. You can make biofuel from lots of different things, in lots of different ways. Corn ethanol, cellulosic ethanol, bio-oil, bio-diesel, algae oil—they all have some benefits and some detriments, which means they all have some big backers and some big haters. Right now, any biofuel produced at a big, commercially useful scale is bound to be ethanol, and in the United Sates, that means corn ethanol. But, from what I see, the evidence favors using options that aren’t dependent on a dedicated corn crop. That’s not to say that corn ethanol is the devil—its bad reputation comes, at least in part, from backlash against some pretty heinous overselling—but it does have some big drawbacks and we might have an easier time making truly Green biofuels another way.

Part of this stems from corn’s big appetite for inputs, like fertilizer. Those inputs represent energy spent, and energy spent is (in today’s world) greenhouse gas emissions produced. The more energy you have to spend on producing a biofuel—from making fertilizer and running the tractor for annual replanting, to powering the fuel production process and shipping fuel to the gas station—the less benefit you actually end up with at the end. There are lots of different ways to tally those numbers up, but Argonne National Laboratory has one of the best calculators around. Called GREET—a perky, welcoming acronym for The Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy Use in Transportation Model—it’s a software program that adds up all the different ways energy is used and greenhouse gases are emitted over the life of a fuel, and runs simulations based on variables like geographic location, types of farming methods, and types of fuel production methods.

GREET figures that corn ethanol really can be better than gasoline. You can get more energy out of a gallon of corn ethanol than you used to make it. And a gallon of corn ethanol can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by somewhere between 18% and 28%, compared to a gallon of gasoline.

But here comes our friend, the yesbut. Yes, you can get an emissions benefit from corn ethanol. But, this only works if the ethanol plant is powered by natural gas. If it runs on coal, you’re not reducing emissions at all.

Also: The picture only looks this rosy when you compare corn ethanol to gasoline, but not to any of the other competing biofuels. A 28% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions sounds fabulous, until you look at cellulosic biofuels—made from things like grass, stems, wood chips, and trash paper. There’s lots of different ways to make cellulosic biofuels, including a cellulosic version of ethanol, and they reduce emissions by a whopping 82%-to-87%. Nobody is producing them at scale yet, but in a world of limited time and resources, cellulosic biofuels look like a better bang for our buck. Plus, you get some ancillary benefits from the plants that make cellulosics that corn can't match, including improvements to soil quality, and reduction of erosion.

2. We can screw up cellulosic biofuel, too.

It’s important that I don’t give cellulosic biofuels the used-car lot megaphone treatment that corn ethanol received. They’re better, not perfect, and a lot of the research being done on cellulosic biofuels is focused on figuring out how to not screw them up. They could still backfire spectacularly—driving up food prices, dumping more fertilizer into the Mississippi, or even increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. To keep that from happening, scientists say we have to pay a lot of attention to what’s being grown, and where.

For instance, in the Midwest, it’s likely the best biofuel crop won’t be a single crop at all. David Tilman, an ecologist at the University of Minnesota and winner of the 2008 International Prize for Biology, has been studying prairie plant biofuels for more than a decade.

Out on the prairie, Tilman and his team found significant problems with growing a field of nothing but switch grass. By its lonesome, the grass grows in the sickly, patchy style of a 15-year-old’s goatee—creating a temptation to douse it in fertilizer. After seven years, Tilman said, it usually needs to be plowed under and planted again. But when the team planted a mix of four native grasses and four native legumes—think alfalfa or clover—the results were very different. Together, the plants grew in a thick mass and didn’t need to be re-seeded or fertilized. After 10 years, Tilman found these mixtures were producing 238 percent more energy, every year, than any one plant grown alone. They also made the soil more fertile, naturally increasing levels of nitrogen and phosphorous. “It makes sense,” Tilman said. “It’s a mixture of prairie plants that made that soil to begin with.”

But even the most well-meaning, soil-enriching mix of plants has to deal with the problem of land-use change.

3. Land use matters. But there's still a lot we don't know about that.

Direct land-use change is easy to wrap one’s head around. Say you own an acre of timber and you decide to clear it, because you can get a good price for growing biofuel crops there, instead. That timber was locking in a lot of carbon in the form of trees, and plants, and virgin soil. Depending on what happens to the trees, and how you treat that soil, you can end up inadvertently releasing a lot of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Enough to affect the net emissions of the biofuel crop you grow there later.

Indirect land-use change is a little more thorny. The world, as they say, is flat. An acre of corn or wheat grown in the United States isn’t merely used to fatten American cattle or bake American bread. We participate in a global food market and what we do here has consequences abroad. So, if a farmer in the Midwest decides that she’s going to take an acre of corn and replant it with a prairie grass and legume mix for biofuel, what happens?

Some experts are worried it would lead to an decrease in availability of corn, which would lead to a rise in the price of corn, and a farmer in some other part of the world, or even just another part of the U.S., deciding that he’s going to capture that cash benefit by taking an acre of timber and turning it into an acre of corn. Or, just as bad, that the price increase would lead someone, somewhere, to go hungry.

At first glance, that logic sounds foolproof. And most researchers agree that it has to be taken into account and studied as we plan the future of energy. But, when you ask how big an impact land—use change might have—that’s when the experts start to disagree.

There are some researchers who think land-use change basically negates the usefulness of all but a tiny portion of biofuels that come from certain farm, industrial, and municipal wastes. There are others who think that it won’t really be a problem. Based on the majority of scientists I've spoken with and the research I've read, I think the reality lies somewhere in between, and that there’s a good chance cellulosic fuels can skirt the issue if they’re done the way people like David Tilman have proposed.

At the heart of this debate: How well the computer models used to predict land-use change reflect reality. A model is only as accurate as the assumptions that go into it, and critics say that the worst-case-scenarios are based on some pretty faulty assumptions. First, there’s the assumption that increased demand for a crop like corn will inevitably lead to deforestation, or plowing under previously wild land. But in the United States, as well as overseas, there’s a surprising amount of previously cleared land that isn’t being used to grow much of anything, either because farmers have been paid a subsidy to leave it fallow, or because the land turned out to be no good for annual row crops, or, as is common in developing countries like Brazil, because cleared land is owned land—even if you’re just keeping one cow on it.

“We’re only using between half and a fourth of all previously cleared forest land on Earth for crop production in any given year,” says Keith Kline, a global change and developing countries analyst with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Kline, who worked in developing countries for 22 years studying and promoting biodiversity, is one of several scientists I spoke with who said that—contrary to some land-use change models—deforestation is not about crop prices. At least, not solely. Social and cultural factors—like the desire to own land you can get for free just by clearing it—are equally important. You can’t assume that a rise in global crop prices will naturally lead to an increase in deforestation, or that deforestation would stop if crop prices stayed the same or went down. In fact, according to Kline, the highest rates of deforestation worldwide happened in the 1990s, before the ethanol boom in the U.S. and at a time when food commodity prices were consistently low. And deforestation rates have been falling ever since.

The second bad assumption the worst-case models make is that the same amount of land can’t grow more crops. Perennial mixes for cellulosic biofuels could actually be grown alongside row crops, or on the same land, between the harvest and next planting, Tilman told me. At the same time, crop yields—the amount of useable stuff you can grow without increasing the square footage—have consistently gone up, every year, in the United States. That happens in small increments today, but there’s plenty of room for yields to improve dramatically overseas. The productivity of what you do with the crops can also increase. For instance, most corn is actually used for feeding livestock, not people. But less corn being available doesn’t necessarily mean people eat less meat. Instead, they might just switch the kind of meat they eat. It takes about 10x as much corn to grow a pound of beef as it takes to grow a pound of chicken.

Finally, some predictions in the worst-case models don’t match up with what we’ve seen in the real-world. They assume corn exports will go down, as U.S. ethanol production rises, leading to those higher global prices that theoretically inspire deforestation to begin with. But that’s not what happened. Instead, in 2007, as corn ethanol production in America hit 6 billion gallons, corn exports rose by 14 percent, compared to the previous year. In fact, they’ve been, generally, trending on the rise since 2003.

Image: Cornfield, a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivative-Works (2.0) image from der_bauer's photostream

NC teen stowaway breaches US airport security, hides in plane wheel well, dies, falls in Boston

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 10:49:00 +0000

The mangled body of a 16-year-old boy from North Carolina mysteriously dropped from the sky down to a Boston suburb last month. Authorities now believe the teen breached airport security, and managed to hide himself inside the wheel well of a US Airways Boeing 737. He is believed to have then fallen to his death as the plane lowered its landing gear on approach to Boston's Logan Airport.

The corpse of Delvonte Tisdale, 16, was found in a quiet neighborhood in Milton, Mass., Nov. 15, below a flight path to Logan.
"It appears more likely than not that Mr. Tisdale was able to breach airport security and hide in the wheel well of a commercial jet airliner without being detected by airport security," Norfolk County District Attorney William R. Keating said at a news conference Friday afternoon.
Mr. Keating said he alerted federal authorities and the Charlotte Airport that the teenager was able to breach airport security and get onto the plane. While the case is a tragedy, Mr. Keating said, it also underscores fears that someone with malicious intention could do the same thing.

At the risk of pointing out what is very much apparent: all the TSA's invasive body-scanning and crotch-groping failed to prevent this. What if this kid was a suicide bomber stowaway, strapped with explosives? How did this happen?

From a report by a Charlotte, NC news station:

Police found a note on the body which appears to be a school "hall pass" with the "Delvonte Tisdale A Lunch" written on it, along with a signature and the date 10/19/2010.

Body Fell From Plane, Authorities Say (NYT)

Report: 'Nearly certain' teen stowed away on US Airways jet (Charlotte Observer)

DA: NC teen's body found in Milton likely fell from plane (WHDH) North Carolina kin baffled by theory teen fell from plane (Boston Herald)

N.C. school grapples with teen's death (Boston Globe)

Will recent "parcelbomb" threat block inflight WiFi and cellphone use?

Xeni Jardin — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:38:52 +0000

[Image: Bricked Sky, submitted to the Boing Boing Flickr Pool by Cameron Russell]

Over at New Scientist, Paul Marks speculates that "the long-awaited ability to use a cellphone or Wi-Fi connection on an aircraft might become a casualty of the latest aviation security threat."

It is not yet known whether the cellphones in the printer bombs were intended to be triggered remotely. They may have been intended simply as timers, as in the 2004 Madrid train bombings. But future devices could take advantage of wireless communication.
In-flight Wi-Fi "gives a bomber lots of options for contacting a device on an aircraft", Alford says. Even if ordinary cellphone connections are blocked, it would allow a voice-over-internet connection to reach a handset.
"If it were to be possible to transmit directly from the ground to a plane over the sea, that would be scary," says Alford's colleague, company founder Sidney Alford. "Or if a passenger could use a cellphone to transmit to the hold of the aeroplane he is in, he could become a very effective suicide bomber."

Aircraft bomb finds may spell end for in-flight Wi-Fi (New Scientist)