Jim Rittenhouse's semidaily journal of news, commentary and reports
The new lead musicians for a Birmingham, Alabama rock band….Meredith Grace and Meredith Ellen. Boom tada Boom Boom! Mere is due back today on a 5:30ish flight. I’ll be putting up a set of photos and stuff on Duckon and her vacation with her sister’s family shortly.
NYT story about an FAA inspector who blew the whistle on a new airplane’s safety problems, and was silenced by the FAA and the airline by removing him from his job. Remember that airplane that crashed near Buffalo this winter? Yep, that airline and that airplane was the one in question. Mr. Monteleon said his supervisors [...]
British discount airline mulls making their planes’ toilets PAY toilets, assume people have pound coins in their pocket. I assure you, I don’t carry major change in my pockets in US airliners – the metal detectors would go nuts. UK bankers have a fit over cuts in bonuses and whatnot; some say they’ll look for [...]
Old WW2 era military airfield in the Arizona desert, which has been open on and off since then, now as a Arizona National Guard Heliport.
It’s official that we will have a visitor for the Christmas – New Years holidays – the Harringtons bought Meredith Ellen a ticket to fly up here for a week, from the 28th to the 3rd. Both the twins are rapturously happy. The reaction, as I related it to Leigh Ann: Mere: *huge amounts of [...]
“That luxury jet was over the top. I put it on eBay.” – Sarah Palin, at the RNC. “You know what I enjoyed the most? She took the luxury jet that was acquired by her predecessor and sold it on eBay — made a profit,” John McCain said, introducing Palin. Palin did place it on [...]
On the night that Biden’s name finally came up, this air tracking URL came up as the likely flight that was waiting to take Joe Biden to Chicago / Springfield for the announcement Saturday afternoon. Close, but not quite. We now know that Biden got The Question on his cell phone while he was waiting [...]
Airlines are majorly cutting international flights into LA because costs have risen dramatically for fuel and foreign demand for flights to the USA have dropped. Noting the cyber-attacks on Georgia during the recent war, it’s starting to occur to people that the USA could be similarly hit. Reports are coming in that while a few [...]
Some stray items: The whole Edwards/Hunter thing just gets weirder and more frayed by the moment. Rielle Hunter’s old website was purged off of the Internet Archive; I would imagine that required a specific request from Hunter. And a lot of the old follow-the-money issues are getting snarly; the same deep pockets that are paying [...]
The major vacation expense that we have around here is and has been for a long time Sissy Trips so that the twins can see each other ever so often. This year, there’s been two times – March camping in Kentucky and May for a long weekend camping thing in Georgia (with a brief before [...]
Photos from the hot-air ballooning at this weekend’s Eyes to the Skies event in my town of Lisle, Illinois. Here’s an example:
PopMech articles on Planespotter geeks and US nuclear weapons safety. All planespotters belong to the same genus, but their behaviors divide them into different species. Some spotters want to see every plane at a particular airport. Others, known as fleeters, focus on a single manufacturer, type of plane or airline. One of the most popular [...]
Finished IN THE COMPANY OF THE DEAD by David Kowalski, a new Australian AH writer, with great joy to be over and done with the thing. It’s a great example of What Not To Do in writing AH… In some AH novels, the writer is so enthralled with the whole layout of what they’ve [...]
Possibly the oddest X-plane; when the B-36 needed to get a escort fighter for cover in the middle of Ust-Yutsk, Siberia, there’s a problem…until out of the bomb bay pops the tiny F-85 Goblin, terror of the skies, to be picked up through a hooking system and pulled back in. (see youtube of the testing) [...]
One of my favorite planes when I was growing up was the B-58 Hustler, and then the XB-70 Valkyrie and the American SST. All seriously cool. And apparently, all were nightmares to maintain, and a lot of the reason they never got anywhere (aside of Robert McNamara) was because of cost problem on maintenance. A [...]