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Every time I drive i think of all the entertaining stuff I could be doing instead of staying between two lines for hours at a time. Every time I fly I have some drinks and mess around on some kind of portable computer, sometimes with internet access. If I could fly the three hour drive to my parents' (MIA-MLB) without connecting in ATL I would.
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Feb 16, 2012 21:30
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Driving is only cheaper if your time is worthless.
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Feb 16, 2012 21:51
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niggerstink420 posted:Driving is only cheaper if your time is worthless. Well it's certainly not worth $500 an hour or whatever a flight costs.
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Feb 16, 2012 21:53
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darknrgy posted:Here's something a common person can actually do: First person view rc planes. With the right skills someone could build a pretty high tech reconnaissance plane with range in the miles. Things are going to get interesting real fast when people start doing suspicious things with them. Meanwhile here's a go-pro on a flying wing (I think). Usually these videos are pretty disorienting and piloted by daschunds with alzheimers, but I think this guy practiced first. http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3386779 If you are a fan of FPV flying and UAVs in general then please take a few minutes to sign this petition: http://www.change.org/petitions/rear end...m_term=own_wall Currently big defense contractors like Raytheon and Northrop Grumman as well as aerial photography companies are lobbying hard to keep the UAV/AP market to themselves. This makes perfect sense when you realize the amount of money that goes into a simple traffic helicopter, let alone a photoshoot for a documentary, as well as the monopoly of UAV use by the military and police. Here's a better description of the problem: quote:The RCAPA-(radio controlled aerial photography association) meets all of the requirements to hold a seat on the UAS ARC. The ARC is an aviation rulemaking committee which is supposed to be open to public discussion, in this case pertaining to the use of UAS/r/c aircraft for commercial aerial photography, among other uses. The RCAPA would be the only voice for the small business stakeholders on the UAS ARC if Ms. Gilligan would give them a seat but so far she has not. This is disenfranchisement. So please, please sign the petition so in the future people can do this without fearing government punishment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4Nw2f48ScU Nebakenezzer posted:I was thinking about this while writing up the airship thing. Do you suppose flying in the USA could get so miserable that people would just stop flying and get there some other way?
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Feb 16, 2012 21:59
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revmoo posted:Well it's certainly not worth $500 an hour or whatever a flight costs. a flight costs about 50$ an hour, but you can use those hours for reading/dranking/watching Aliens on the IFE. Driving costs about 20$ an hour in gas and recurring costs and soda, plus whatever your reading/drinking/watching Aliens on IFE time is worth (and it takes 2-3x as many hours). For one or two people, flying is a slam dunk. It's just when you've got a bunch of kids that the per-head starts making the back seat sound good. Slo-Tek fucked around with this message at 22:04 on Feb 16, 2012 |
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Feb 16, 2012 22:01
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I love the sensation of travel when going by motorcycle. But I can't claim it to be faster, more convenient or more practical. Certainly not transatlantic. My time is pretty much worthless to others, but important to me. 8 hours of free time smelling cow pats and pine trees on a bike across Norway beats the hell out of 3 hours of imprisonment in the manflesh relocation apparatus. That said, I wouldn't bitch so much about flying cross country in one of these.  http://www.dynamicaero.org/description.htm (warning, video autostart with d'n'b) In other news, the Dragon Lady might see 100 years of service. quote:Thursday February 16, 2012 http://www.airforce-magazine.com/Pages/HomePage.aspx From the Wright Brothers' first flight until the U-2's: 52 years. From the U-2's first flight until today: 57 years.
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Feb 16, 2012 22:11
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I think stuff is cheap enough nowadays that you can probably mount a GPS unit on a RC plane or some such small UAV and have it fly a pre-plotted course? How long before I can buy my own cruise missile?
Throatwarbler fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Feb 16, 2012 |
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Feb 16, 2012 22:16
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Slo-Tek posted:a flight costs about 50$ an hour, but you can use those hours for reading/dranking/watching Aliens on the IFE. Driving costs about 20$ an hour in gas and recurring costs and soda, plus whatever your reading/drinking/watching Aliens on IFE time is worth (and it takes 2-3x as many hours). $20 an hour? Maybe in a truck. My 10 year old Focus will burn about $110 in gas over two days of driving, plus a $70 hotel room. Plus the return trip, and I'm still under $400. And I have my car which saves hundreds on a rental. Searching roundtrip airline tickets for 1 month from today with 2 weeks at the destination, yields $435 nonstop, $462-820 for 1-stop. The 1-stop plan usually takes 9-12 hours. So, I could spend about $70 and a day and a half (or about 100 and save one day) for each leg of the trip, but have to rent a car when I arrive plus deal with the airport loving up my tickets, freaking out about the chapstick I'm carrying, and walking around the airport looking for a place to set my stuff down so I can put my shoes back on...or I can drive.
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Feb 16, 2012 22:38
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If I'm going on a 2 week trip, I want to be as far away from family as possible. That means flying. In many cases I *could* do the 2 day trek to visit my parents, but the flight is a little over an hour and much more enjoyable even with security. I can even work a full day first so I don't need to blow the leave.
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Feb 16, 2012 23:34
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revmoo posted:Well it's certainly not worth $500 an hour or whatever a flight costs. What is this, 1950?
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Feb 16, 2012 23:53
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Godholio posted:$20 an hour? Maybe in a truck. My 10 year old Focus will burn about $110 in gas over two days of driving, plus a $70 hotel room. Plus the return trip, and I'm still under $400. And I have my car which saves hundreds on a rental. I just did some calculations, and my bike costs about $30 an hour to run (including insurance, registration, fuel, tyres, and servicing). In Australia though flights are closer to $100 an hour but it's still a no brainer.
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Feb 17, 2012 00:08
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Cygni posted:I can't wait to see air travel in California in 50 years, if the train doesn't get built and these population/travel projections hold true. Add SAN to that list. They keep voting down moving it out east. It's already a cluster.
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Feb 17, 2012 00:14
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revmoo posted:Well it's certainly not worth $500 an hour or whatever a flight costs. First class from MIA to ATL (600 crow miles, a twelve hour drive, two hour flight) booked a month in advance is $600 round trip, or $150 per US domestic first flight hour, or $25 per drive hour. It's probably that cheap because MIA and ATL are both hubs (AA and DL, respectively), so there's lots of capacity (seventeen daily flights for something like 2500 seats total, and that's not counting FLL, which is 30 miles away from MIA and has approximately 30 daily flights) and competition.
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Feb 17, 2012 00:47
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In a city I prefer to ride my bike rather than wait for a bus when practical. The bike might not gain much in time, but I can choose when I leave as opposed to somebody else's schedule. I'm thinking driving vs. flying is kinda similar: assuming similar transit times, you feel empowered driving and disimpowered killing time at a airport someplace. Hm. Thinking about my first question, I think that if people don't just refuse to fly because it's now just too much hassle, then domestic airlines have no floor in how horrible they can be. They just have to stay 'with the pack' in how bad they are, and not jump out in terms of shittiness.
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Feb 17, 2012 01:17
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Nebakenezzer posted:Hm. Thinking about my first question, I think that if people don't just refuse to fly because it's now just too much hassle, then domestic airlines have no floor in how horrible they can be. They just have to stay 'with the pack' in how bad they are, and not jump out in terms of shittiness. I wouldn't be nearly as thrilled about flying if I couldn't spend money on improving my personal experience; the first-class lounges, the upgrades, and the faster and less stringent security lines ( http://www.tsa.gov/what_we_do/escreening.shtm ) all add to that. Some of this stuff is a fixed annual cost ($450/year amex platinum for the lounges and the global entry which fed into pre-check) so it gets cheaper the more I use it, and the upgrades happen more often the more I fly. It turns out that for most people there is a floor: most people I know who've flown with Spirit won't again, and many people I know who've flown Southwest won't fly a legacy unless they're going somewhere Southwest, JetBlue, and Virgin America/Atlantic don't fly.
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Feb 17, 2012 01:58
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Since this mini-derail about the price of flying came up, I had a question. I'm probably going to be booking a one-way ticket from Beijing to Toronto in the next month or two. Anyone know any tricks or tips to get a cheaper price? I've looked into the usual suspects (Air Canada, Travelocity, Expedia, Flightnetwork) and they all usually come in around +/- $20 of each other. The biggest problem is that I don't know the exact date yet, and when I do, I'll probably only have about 3-5 weeks notice, which means the tickets have gone from $900-1100 to $1200-1500. Any ideas?
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Feb 17, 2012 01:58
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Blistex posted:Since this mini-derail about the price of flying came up, I had a question. I'm probably going to be booking a one-way ticket from Beijing to Toronto in the next month or two. Anyone know any tricks or tips to get a cheaper price? I've looked into the usual suspects (Air Canada, Travelocity, Expedia, Flightnetwork) and they all usually come in around +/- $20 of each other. Look in to doing some janky ticket stuff: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_booking_ploys
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Feb 17, 2012 02:02
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Ola posted:In other news, the Dragon Lady might see 100 years of service. Myspace angle  Showing off to the Navy  "Hey guys, what's going on up front?"  With another member of the  Edit: I'm sure several children (and possibly grandchildren, by now) of B-52 crewmen have gone on to fly the BUFF themselves ("It's not your father's Air Force, but it may be your father's airplane") but has anybody been issued the same airframe their dad had? Chillbro Baggins fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Feb 17, 2012 |
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Feb 17, 2012 02:37
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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Nebakenezzer posted:I was thinking about this while writing up the airship thing. Do you suppose flying in the USA could get so miserable that people would just stop flying and get there some other way? I think there's bigger cultural factors at play, such as the fact that we get two weeks of vacation per year and assuming you don't have to use any of that to deal with kids or car repairs or normal life stuff, your travel might be devoted to funerals/weddings/family reunions. A few hours of misery and cramped quarters via the airports is a much better deal than the two or three days of travel that might be required for going by car or train. Train travel in the US (outside of the northeast corridor) isn't really feasible due to distances and the fact that freight always gets priority and it can take you a looonng time to get where you want to go. The immediacy of flight generated by business travel (sales, training, law, repair, meetings, etc.) keeps things going for the airlines and also means that the airlines don't really have to worry too much about the casual flyer. I love flying, and I took my first flight when I was 2 months old in 1976. Dad has been in the aviation biz since he got his pilot's license at the age of 16 in 1967. We used to fly from MEM to BNA to see relatives because the plane was cheaper with the employee discount and more reliable than the family car. Now, we always drive, but if we're talking MEM to ATL, flying is a better option. Time, gas, road conditions, weather... There's a different calculation for every two travel points.
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Feb 17, 2012 03:13
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Delivery McGee posted:Edit: I'm sure several children (and possibly grandchildren, by now) of B-52 crewmen have gone on to fly the BUFF themselves ("It's not your father's Air Force, but it may be your father's airplane") but has anybody been issued the same airframe their dad had? One of the Lt Cols in my squadron is the son of our former squadron commander (about the time I was born), so yes. That's an E-3 squadron. There are a couple of enlisted guys who've been here whose fathers flew on this jet too. So yeah, it happens a lot more than I expected. Edit: Fair chance my dad fixed the F-15C I got a ride in 25 years later. Godholio fucked around with this message at 04:45 on Feb 17, 2012 |
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Feb 17, 2012 03:25
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Maybe I just fly so much that I'm totally acclimated, trained and desensitized to flying, but none of the poo poo anyone complains about really bothers me. I dress to go through security and I secure all of the things I need in the correct place for when I go through security. Standing in line is slightly annoying or whatever, but really not bad at all. Then I sit in the lounge and do a little work, read the paper or whatever, roll on to the plane, read for fun or do work, maybe make chitchat with the person next to me if they're amenable. I contrast this with driving for say, six hours (or four hours even) where I spend that time not getting anything accomplished except for perhaps listening to the radio. I'm not entertaining myself or culturing myself via reading, and I'm not getting anything done. It's wasted time. I've definitely gotten to the point where I'm pretty zen about air travel so that's probably part of it. Plane cancelled? Oh well, what are you going to do? Bitch and moan like a child?
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Feb 17, 2012 03:30
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Blistex posted:Since this mini-derail about the price of flying came up, I had a question. I'm probably going to be booking a one-way ticket from Beijing to Toronto in the next month or two. Anyone know any tricks or tips to get a cheaper price? I've looked into the usual suspects (Air Canada, Travelocity, Expedia, Flightnetwork) and they all usually come in around +/- $20 of each other. Dunno how old you are but if you're still a student or just out studentuniverse is decent. International travel is expensive. Not giving a gently caress about your routing or stopovers might help, as will flex dates sometimes. Do you need to travel on a Specific Date or can you flex? Typically Tues-Wed-Thurs are cheaper for int'l flights. KLM for a while was doing a thing where you could lock in a price for a certain period of time for a nominal ($20) fee, which could be useful in your situation... but I don't think they offer any Beijing to Toronto service. edit: I just looked at AC prices for the direct end of march and it looks like Tuesday and Wednesday are around $600 ish, Mon-Thurs-Fri-Sun are around 900 and Sat is around 700. That's using Kayak. KYOON GRIFFEY JR fucked around with this message at 03:36 on Feb 17, 2012 |
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Feb 17, 2012 03:34
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Delivery McGee posted:("It's not your father's Air Force, but it may be your father's airplane") I'm pretty sure my dad flew f-4s that were built brand new and retired within the lifetime of the C-130s my squadron is still flying today.
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Feb 17, 2012 03:46
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Delivery McGee posted:
Saw a Canadian C-130 come into FLL the other day and it's amazing how smokey the plane is even at idle. It's almost as bad (but awesome) as the 737-200. And all this talk about paying for tickets, I can fly for free.  I don't fly often enough though, I really should just go on random daytrips just for the hell of it (I work for an airline).
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Feb 17, 2012 05:09
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Mobius1B7R posted:Saw a Canadian C-130 come into FLL the other day and it's amazing how smokey the plane is even at idle. It's almost as bad (but awesome) as the 737-200. FLL is too far north IMO. Cab fare annihilates at savings I'd get flying in or out of there.
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Feb 17, 2012 05:17
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Mobius1B7R posted:Saw a Canadian C-130 come into FLL the other day and it's amazing how smokey the plane is even at idle. It's almost as bad (but awesome) as the 737-200. I used to see the last C-141s fly into Ramstein (from WPAFB's wing, in 2004) and was amazed how smokey they were.
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Feb 17, 2012 05:18
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hannibal posted:I used to see the last C-141s fly into Ramstein (from WPAFB's wing, in 2004) and was amazed how smokey they were. I can't find the video right now, but there's a relatively recent video of a DC-8 taking off and the smoke is seriously incredible.
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Feb 17, 2012 05:24
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To jump back to flight chat real quick, I recently drove from MI to Kansas City, MO to visit my brother and school, and deliver him his car. So that obviously means booking a flight back. The flight back cost $160 w/ all fees included booked 5 days in advance, and that was a hop from KCI to Cleveland, and then from Cleveland back to Flint, MI. It took ~2.5 tanks + 12 hours for the drive, so the costs come out pretty damned close to each other. (Roughly $55/tank of gas). I was jealous of some of my classmates who were co-oping with Delta and such, they would just take random trips across the globe whenever they felt like it.  One guy was working on IFE stuff, I think he crossed the Atlantic at least 50 times in a few months.
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Feb 17, 2012 06:00
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Godholio posted:One of the Lt Cols in my squadron is the son of our former squadron commander (about the time I was born), so yes. That's an E-3 squadron. There are a couple of enlisted guys who've been here whose fathers flew on this jet too. So yeah, it happens a lot more than I expected. Yeah, there are more than a few instances of people whose fathers have flown/worked on/etc the same tails they are now flying/working on/etc...the ones that are really noteworthy is when someone's GRANDFATHER has flown/worked on the same airframe. IIRC this has happened a couple of times with KC-135s and BUFFs, which is entirely possible given how long that iron has been around. Cygni posted:I can't find the video right now, but there's a relatively recent video of a DC-8 taking off and the smoke is seriously incredible. Water injection, most likely.
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Feb 17, 2012 06:53
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Cygni posted:I can't find the video right now, but there's a relatively recent video of a DC-8 taking off and the smoke is seriously incredible. I watched a B-52 do a hard climb the other day, and man it's awesome watching it just claw it's way into the sky on a pillar of smoke that stays around for a good 10 minutes.
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Feb 17, 2012 07:16
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TF-33s are smokey as poo poo. Especially when you've got 8 of them.
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Feb 17, 2012 07:27
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:words I'm pretty much the same way. Going through security isn't bad at all. It's the people who don't know any of the rules, and then whine about throwing a brand new bottle of hand lotion away that piss me off. (not to mention the people who bring 5 bags as a carry-on) I live in Colorado and normally fly back to the midwest (MN and WI) to visit friends/family. I can leave my house at 7am, and be with friends having a drink by 5pm. Sometimes it takes a bit longer, sometimes a bit less. I don't have to concentrate on anything other than getting on the correct plane. I can read, I can surf the net, whatever. Contrast that with driving through the cornfields of Nebraska/South Dakota for 18+ hours, and I'll fly any day.
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Feb 17, 2012 08:50
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Delivery McGee posted:
Really showing off... Hosting is mine.
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Feb 17, 2012 10:15
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co199 posted:Bringing things back down to Earth, check out the glass cockpit in the C-17 in this CNN story: That is one weird rear end cockpit layout. It looks like the HUD blocks the outboard displays or something, but maybe that's just the picture messing with depth of field. Military cockpits just always seem so small no matter how big the bird is.
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Feb 17, 2012 15:09
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Mobius1B7R posted:And all this talk about paying for tickets, I can fly for free. The only nice thing about working for the airlines! I did 59 legs last calendar year and only spent $60 on int'l taxes.
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Feb 17, 2012 15:57
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Mr. Despair posted:I watched a B-52 do a hard climb the other day, and man it's awesome watching it just claw it's way into the sky on a pillar of smoke that stays around for a good 10 minutes. As in this clip in which a Vulcan has to climb sharply to avoid getting dirty when taking off after a B-52: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYOgsgnZ8dw
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Feb 17, 2012 16:17
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Plane cancelled? Oh well, what are you going to do? Bitch and moan like a child?
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Feb 17, 2012 16:28
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Lobster God posted:As in this clip in which a Vulcan has to climb sharply to avoid getting dirty when taking off after a B-52: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYOgsgnZ8dw Vulcans don't fly. They are so ugly that they repel the ground.
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Feb 17, 2012 17:04
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PhotoKirk posted:Vulcans don't fly. They are so ugly that they repel the ground. Oh no you loving didn't go there!
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Feb 17, 2012 17:24
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nummy posted:I'm pretty much the same way. Going through security isn't bad at all. Going through security loving infuriates me. I do it all the time. I have my poo poo together. It's not the security process itself, it's that all this loving money and time gets wasted on an absolutely *useless* loving process administered by people who could barely manage to work the frier at a Chik-Fil-A without scarring themselves for life. It's right when the planes have been turned back on after 9/11. I'm flying from Dulles to Norfolk. That morning, I'd been setting off NAVSEA-related explosives. Three charges, 60 lbs of HBX each. My jacket and backpack are laying on the ground outside our bombproof trailer. I'm not the one pressing the button, so I'm watching from the quarry shore as they go off. Once, twice, three times, I see the plume of nitramine fragments and TNT residue drift down across the bombproof, and my backpack, and my jacket. So of course I get picked from the line in Dulles that night for a random explosives. They swab my backpack down with that little pad, and put it in the sniffer. My internal monologue is going "Oh, gently caress," I'm going to have to call the base's security guys, my boss, his boss, etc. Nothing. Not a goddamned thing from the detector. But that was years ago, surely they've gotten better since then? Surely security's more coherent than that ad hoc mess we all had to deal with, with NG guys standing guard in the airports with M16s at port arms, sometimes with their *loving fingers* on the *loving triggers* (which was probably still safe since they didn't have rounds chambered or anything, which demonstrates how purely for-appearances-sake the whole thing was). Cut to 2010. I'm flying back from Bluegrass Station to Philly with a solid-state drive packed with data. Wouldn't ordinarily do that, but a test flight with a 160th SOAR G-model Chinook went wrong (broken control actuator, pilot was instantly 180 degrees out-of-phase with the aircraft, pitching up and down like a roller coasted 20 feet off the ground) and people needed to look at the data *right now*. On X-ray, the drive unit looks like a big opaque brick, since it's entirely clad in metal. So they make me pull it out for an explosives inspection. Great, the drive's been on a 160th bird for like two months, who knows what the hell it's got on it. Yep. *Ping!* Positive for explosive residue. Security's response is to ask me what the thing is, look through the rest of my bag, and then let me board the plane. Entirely a rational decision, because I wasn't a terrorist with a bomb, but the entire system is set up so that they can't admit that it was a rational decision, they can't say "Well he clearly didn't fit the profile" because they can't even admit that there *is* a profile. Last year. Flying back from Huntsville to Philly, connecting through Charlotte. At Huntsville, I check my bag, because I know it will be too big for the overhead compartment on the little puddle-jumper to Charlotte. Lots of people don't check their bags at check-in, and so have to check them planeside, because they're too big for the overheads. So, we land at Charlotte, and they've pulled off all the planeside check bags for people to collect as they get off the plane. I see my bag on that rack. It's clearly got the big white coded tag on it, says PHL, and not one of the little pink tags. I say "That's supposed to be checked through to Philly," luggage ape tells me "You have to take it with you now." So now I'm in the secure area of the airport, with a bag that could have a firearm in it. Or box cutters. This is airport security. It's a loving joke. It is a colossal and staggering waste of money, and time. Going through security isn't bad at all, but *having* to go through security, *having* to have my bags searched through or my person groped by the same organization of monkeys that rips out colostomy bags, can't tell an insulin pump from a bomb, and seriously has to pretend that grandmothers in wheelchairs and prosthetics are a threat, is definitely in the Top 5 Stupidest Things in America, it's right up there with the War on Drugs and the Washington Nationals. Phanatic fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Feb 17, 2012 |
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Feb 17, 2012 17:25
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