I'm younger than the 747.

And we value you more than $18,200.

That's good. I try to look like I'd be an expensive lawsuit if a driver hits me when I'm crossing the street.

I feel like a loud anti-stunt faction is such a part of 21st century life.

Chinese airliners newly announced. GE/Snecma engines, as far as I know there are no reliable jet engines made in China.
https://english.news.cn/20221209/47eaf5a68b0b4874b13b371cadbaf61f/c.html

I think that China sold some fighter jets made from Russian kits (not their current generation) to Pakistan. Knowing about the maintenance schedule for those would be interesting.

I know that the check-and-rebuild schedule for passenger jets in the US is super-stringent, I'm curious about what's required how often. This is both clear and not clear:
https://www.faa.gov/documenTLibrary/media/Advisory_Circular/AC%20120-16F.pdf

Jet engines are packed with sensors, tubing, and extremely high-precision parts. This is a rich topic.
https://www.ndt.net/article/IranNDT2018/papers/1070-IRNDT-Mr-rezaei-IRNDT2018.pdf

I've been on a 2 aisle jet like five times in my life and not at all in at last twenty years. It's always smaller ones.

I feel both like I should go more places and that going places is for suckers.

I've flown on the upstairs level of an A380.

I've never been on a plane with two levels.

I think I was only on a 747 once, but the experience was memorable for a bunch of other reasons, so I can't swear to it.

I'm very happy that the 747 outlasted the fugly A380.

So very, very tired of internet scolds.

I recently picked out a flight to Japan with one of the weighting factors being that I could be in a newer model Boeing, the 777-300 -- not super new but I'm not sure I've been in one before. (A heavier factor: it being operated by a major Japanese airline.)

I guess the second level of the 747 wasn't cost-effective, as it seems not to be in more recent 7*7s.

FWIW, the "they did the math" people are usually not scolding. Just curious to compute things.

Here's the link if you feel like reading for tone or accuracy.

I miss 747s -- when I was a kid flying with my mother on standby passes, those were usually the planes. They had a staircase! And in the 70's and 80s, on TWA at least, the upstairs was a little lounge/bar area. It was so great.

I got on exactly one plane before 1990. A flight from JFK to Dulles.

Looks like it was partly motivated by an era of scarce gates compared to soaring demand, but now the verdict is that expanding to create the second deck costs more in weight (fuel) than you get with a single deck, and it's more efficient to just do the single floor. (I suspect the A380 was just copying that feature for prestige reasons.)

I guess the second level of the 747 wasn't cost-effective, as it seems not to be in more recent 7*7s.

I just learned about this: the second level had nothing to do with selling seats or whatever: it was a place to put the cockpit so that the whole nose could open for cargo, which has been a staggering success. The seating/lounge behind the cockpit was just making use of available space, it wasn't the guiding design brief for the airplane.

None of Boeing's other liners are designed with the flip-up nose, so no need for a second deck.

so that the whole nose could open for cargo, which has been a staggering success

Interesting. But if it was such a success, why was that feature also not repeated?

Deregulation meant that airlines had to be committed to sucking or go broke.

I'm vaguely sad that I never took the Concord to Europe. Or not even sad, but I enjoy the specter of absurdly rich people from days of yore more than I enjoy them at any present moment. I like that the Concord existed, and fuck today's rich people.

16 (and ignoring 17): more efficient to have your passengers run 5Ks through giant airports than climb a flight of stairs on the airplane, got it.

I've been on a 747 a couple times but never went upstairs. The weirdest plane I've been on had stairs that went down from the main cabin to where the bathrooms were. I have no idea what it was but since there aren't that many planes with stairs I guess a weirdly configured A380? 777s are nice. Don't remember if I've been on a 787.
Speaking of anti-stunt factions in 4, I'm not sure what to think of the Mr Beast cures blindness stunt. I guess my problem is more the reporting making it sound like he miraculously cured 1000 people with his Jesus power instead of a rich guy paid for a simple surgery a lot of people couldn't afford because our health care system sucks.

Google says it was an A340-600.

That's a funny name for an eye surgery.

I'm not sure what to think of the Mr Beast cures blindness stunt. I guess my problem is more the reporting making it sound like he miraculously cured 1000 people with his Jesus power

He got them to stop masturbating?

I've flown upstairs on an A380 on Singapore, not sure if I flew in a 747? I flew DC to London on British Airways in 1994, and that was long before I paid attention to stuff like what kind of plane I was on, but I don't remember it having two levels so probably not?

Jesus got mad at an anti-stunt faction. A woman anointed him with perfume and people muttered that the money would have been better spent feeding the poor. He told the muttering faction to knock it off.

I think paying someone to not masturbate for 100 days was an earlier stunt he did.

South African 747s had the upper deck as just more Y-class seats, rather than business class - all the J-class and F-class seats were in the nose of the main deck. I've flown on one of those, years ago, and made sure to specify I wanted an upper-deck seat.

I've even been on the An-225, but only on the ground, at an airshow. Blown to bits now, alas.

17 is right - the 747 was designed primarily as a freighter, back in the 60s when everyone thought the future of passenger travel was supersonic. The Boeing team working on the SST (the 2707, I think it was called) were terribly patronising to the 747 team - "you make it a good freighter, and maybe we'll see about getting you a job designing proper airliners".

The question about double-deck aircraft is really a question about which you think is more expensive, fuel or landing slots? And the answer is generally fuel. Double deckers burn more fuel per seat mile than single-deckers; there you are. Compared to that, the price of a landing slot is pretty small, outside a few very congested routes; and those routes alone aren't enough to support the double-deck market.

27: Larry Gonick had a great heterodox read on this episode. A page ends with a panel close-up of Judas fuming to himself: "'You'll always have the poor'? What kind of Kingdom of God is that? Can it possibly be that our rabbi is just another luxury-loving power-tripper??"

Judas had trouble getting into the spirit.

I keep sounding out the post title along the lines of Baba Booey rather than Bye Bye Birdie.

The 747 looks cool, but my favorite nostalgia big plane will always be the DC-10. In night flights back from Honolulu on one of those beasts, it was possible to get a full row of 4 center seats to one's self where one could stretch out.

I did that transatlantic once by flying on Thanksgiving. There wasn't an American on the flight except possibly some of the crew. It was half empty. Best long flight I ever had.

Everyone should take long-haul flights to enjoy the lack of crowding.

6
I've been on a 2 aisle jet like five times in my life and not at all in at last twenty years. It's always smaller ones.

I've never been on one of those for a domestic flight but it seems to be the standard way to fly to Europe. They aren't really any more comfortable than single-aisle jets, they're just bigger.

I do most of my flying on Alaska Airlines, because they have a direct flight from our city to one fairly close to Cassandane's parents, and I like how they have a couple hundred free in-flight movies if you provide your own device. I'm sure in any fair comparison it sucks - the innovation isn't Alaska's luxury, it's streaming video being better than the nonexistent it was 10+ years ago - but I still prefer it to the old days or to carriers that don't have any option like that.

I've flown 747s a few times, each time to the US. I've flown A380s a couple of times, too. Both sitting upstairs and down. I don't really recall anything memorable about them except the last time, Boston to LHR, the plane crashed and couldn't be restarted and I had a 24 hour delay as they just couldn't find enough alt flights for that number of people. To be fair, they were also gigantic dicks about it, so I don't have a lot of sympathy.

We flew international for Thanksgiving last year. It was awesome- no lines, easy to book things abroad. We should just ban 99% of Americans from traveling abroad all the time.

a panel close-up of Judas fuming to himself: "'You'll always have the poor'? What kind of Kingdom of God is that? Can it possibly be that our rabbi is just another luxury-loving power-tripper??"

Stand Up For Judas (song)

Listening to the song in 39; it's been a while and I'd forgotten (a) how strong it is and, (b) the seriously old-school socialist vibes.

Also, oddly, I see that Leon Rosselson has written a Medium post about his reasons for writing the song.

[In the 1970s] I was walking down the Harrow Road in a dreary part of London one bleak December day when I passed a church. A large placard outside caught my eye. On it was written in dramatically bold letters this quotation:

IF YOU BELIEVE NOT THAT I AM THE CHRIST YOU SHALL DIE IN YOUR SINS (John 8:24)

For some reason I felt indignant. Not that being in or out of my sins when I'm dying concerns me but this seemed so presumptuous. Who was this cocksure Jewish preacher to make such an assertion? . . .

...

The title of the song, Stand up for Judas, is deliberately provocative since it not only references and challenges the hymn Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus but also upends the image of Judas Iscariot as the very embodiment of venality and betrayal. Iscariot is derived from 'sicarus' meaning dagger-man. The Sicarii were the most militant of the Zealot party and the Zealots were the militant wing of the Pharisees. They believed in open resistance to Roman rule and that God would come to their aid but only if they showed 'zeal', like Phineas the Zealot in Numbers 25. So in the song, Judas the Zealot is the voice of the resistance and a critic of the passivity of Jesus in the face of oppression.

One May Day in the early nineties I gave a concert in Catholic Belfast. To my amazement I was asked if I would sing Stand Up for Judas. So I did. Nervously. Apparently, the IRA, or some members of it, identified with Judas as a hero of the resistance.

Judas would have liked Netanyahu and Trump.

The figure of Judas, like Jesus, can be re-purposed to fit many different political arguments.

I think I'm better at it than the IRA though.

Seriously, while I don't like to scold, I do think air travel is enough of a carbon source to be worth some rethinking of how much we do it.

A whole lot of flights are short-haul that could easily be made obsolete by HSR - even banned once decent train service exists, as they're trying in France.

For longer trips, it's tricky because we like to have tourism and mobility and family connections, but a large share of consumption is definitely by rich jet-setters who could stand to be forced to cut back. From my analysis of the National Household Travel Survey (2017), 26% of the person-miles traveled by air were in households making over $200k, which was about 7% of the population then. And I imagine it gets even more pronounced at 500k or higher ranges.

It doesn't even need to be high speed.

HSR is never going to be viable in most of the US, it's just too spread out. If we want to limit flying we need to make it easier to build in high density corridors (NE, coastal CA, TX triangle, Piedmont, and maybe Chicago-Detroit-Toronto-Ottawa-Quebec) and let the rest of the country empty out (see Japan). I'm also skeptical how much leisure flying drives flight frequency in general, there's just so much more profit in selling to business travelers and on a lot of routes they'd still fly just as often even if the planes weren't full.

I am trying to switch on the margin to longer trips. Go to Europe once a year for a month and half, and not go once a year for a couple weeks. But that's unique to being an academic, most people don't have summers off and so are forced to make short trips.

I haven't been to Europe since 1993.

Though maybe the added weight of a person to a plane is already meaningful even if the planes keep flying?

That second one was supposed to say "twice a year."

Though maybe the added weight of a person to a plane is already meaningful even if the planes keep flying?

It definitely does have an effect on the amount of fuel they need for a trip. The marginal effect of a single individual on, like, a 737 is probably negligible, but on small planes they take down everyone's individual weight to do the fuel calculations.

46: I recently saw a blog post debunking this persuasively - I'll try to relocate it, but the point was where people actually live, they are in regions tight enough that HSR would be highly attractive even with our current level of density. Not just the megalopolitan Acela corridor, but also South Florida, and the Dallas-Houston-Austin-San Antonio triangle, and of course all of California; and so forth. It made quantitative comparisons to density levels in Europe where HSR exists and is well-used.

Obviously we should also go gangbusters on re-urbanization as you say.

I'm a 3:20 drive from Harrisburg and the wonders of the being able to take a train quickly to most of the Northeast. But there's only one train a day from here to Harrisburg and it takes 5:30 to get to Harrisburg.

We're also wealthy enough as a country to build and subsidize infrastructure that doesn't really make sense economically. We do it all the time with highways and airports.

I've also never been to Harrisburg.

What's the line on density where HSR stops making sense?
Would it not be worth it to connect all the major airport hubs with HSR, more or less following flightpaths? If a region can support an airport, can't it support a HSR line going wherever that airport primarily goes?

My grandfather grew up in Harrisburg. But I've also never been there.

Did he work on the trains?

I've driven through Harrisburg but never stopped. I don't have any strong impressions of it.

Harrisburg is essentially part of the Acela Corridor. This is clearer if you turn the map the right way:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_megalopolis#/media/File%3ABoswash.png

Yes. That's why I want to get there.

The problem with Harrisburg is that it should be as large as Philly or Baltimore, but isn't. If you want high speed rail we need to make everyone who lives in Kansas City and Omaha to move to Harrisburg.

I was going to keep flying to get to Omaha.

The real problem is states. It's just completely insane that there's no train (not even low speed!) from the Lehigh Valley to NYC, but that's inevitable when the route involves three states!

Are they too full of themselves to go through Harrisburg?

Wait. That's Allentown. Never mind.

I've been on a plane with stairs, though it was a 727. It was cool.

53: It's not a question of economy, it's a question of it taking too damn long. Even with genuine high speed rail NYC to Atlanta is going to be 6 or 7 hours, NYC to Dallas is going to be over 10 hours.

67: Yeah, fair. It's never going to be a practical option for routes like that.

51 and 46 don't disagree. There are a few parts of the country where regional high speed rail could be viable (which I listed in 46!) but a *lot* of flights go between different regions, and a lot of the US is not in any of those regions. What you want is everyone to move into one of those regions, the way that everyone in Japan is moving to Tokyo or Osaka.

You people with direct flights are spoiled. To get from Pittsburgh to Omaha by plane is at least six hours from entering the first airport to leaving the last.

57: Nope.

NYC to Dallas is going to be over 10 hours.

That would be so great. Let's do it!

while I don't like to scold, I do think air travel is enough of a carbon source to be worth some rethinking of how much we do it

Same here, except substitute "private planes" and "rich people" and "I love to scold" where appropriate.

It's kind of depressing how whenever they drag rich people for using their private jets excessively, it's strictly in the realm of celebrities and not the actual shadowy 0.01%.

46: there's just so much more profit in selling to business travelers

There is, but there are many fewer of them than there used to be. Post-pandemic (as if), leisure travel has recovered to earlier levels and then some, but business travel has not, so airlines are scrambling to make the numbers work in the way that they used to. Maybe the days of being subsidized by the business travelers will return? But they certainly hadn't come back by the end of last year.

22 The weirdest plane I've been on had stairs that went down from the main cabin to where the bathrooms were.

This is super common on Lufthansa flights, IME.

Oops, tag-failure typo there, second line shouldn't be italicized.

I enjoy expensing meals, so I should try business travel more often.

I've been to Harrisburg. I guess I would say that its better than York.

Aren't the longest HSR trips in Europe in the range of 6 hours?

79: But have you ever been to you?

79: Harsh, but probably fair. If I were to move back to the area I think Lancaster is clearly the way to go. Though housing is now almost triple the cost in Lancaster than York. Not sure about Harrisburg.

Oh, yeah, Lancaster by far. It has Dutch Wonderland and the birthplace of James Buchanan.

America's Worst President!

Interesting. But if it was such a success, why was that feature also not repeated?

Because they only just stopped building 747s! There simply sin't enough worldwide demand to justify development of a second one, but that doesn't mean the first one wasn't a success. I can't find overall numbers, but it seems like about half of the 1550 delivered aircraft were cargo, which means ±15/year for 50 years. It's both a small number and a business that we know was very profitable.

Fun fact: Buchanan served in various governmental positions for so long that his nickname was "Old Public Official."

That's what he called his penis too.

55: Even in Japan, where you can travel from the top of the country to the bottom almost entirely on bullet trains, almost anyone would choose to fly.

(Setting aside Sapporo which won't be linked up until 2030 and starting instead from Shin-Hakodate, the furthest-north bullet train station, that would take 4.5 hours to get to Tokyo, 22-minute transfer, 5 hours to Hakata, 6-minute transfer, 1.3 hours to Kagoshima.)

Oops, the furthest-north is actually Shin-Aomori. Close enough.

Strike 89. Hakodate is northernmost; duh.

87: Old Pubic Official, I think you meant.

Thanks. I missed the 'l' in the original.

84: I can jump a very low bar.

The origina.

Living in Franklin Pierce country, I'm not one to throw stones at the hometown bad presidents of other places.

This here is Tom Vilsack county. He was so close.

99 mph winds at -46F means -109° F wind chill on Mount Washington right now.

Is the wind really 99 mph or does the gauge only have two digits?

That was my thought but then it said gust of 116

Anyone who has programmed anything would wonder.

We just hit -10. I went outside for a minute, and then decided to come back in.

It's not that cold here, but cold enough that I made banana bread rather than go out for something sweet.

39: Thanks for sharing! Interesting to compare it to Woody Guthrie's "Jesus Christ".

Its -13 F out and my mini-splits are blowing cold air. They must be using a ton of electricity to do it. Is it worth it to even run them? Right now the fireplace is doing most of the work.

That sounds awful and I don't even know what mini-splits are.

uh oh

huh

This morning its 32 degrees in the basement and no water in the taps. Outside its up to -5.

I would bet the mini splits are still keeping your house warmer than it would have been without them. I mean, they have to be; that's how they work if they're working at all. But that sounds really rough.

Is a mini split just a heat pump?

I thought they didn't work when it was cold enough outside.

It all sounds very eerie and ominous. Stay warm, you all.

Our kids got sent home early on Monday because of the coming ice storm. Then school got cancelled one day at a time, and Friday was already going to be day off for parent-teacher conferences. So they ended up having about four hours of school this week.

The ice storm really did materialize just north of us, but not really here. We had some pretty ice on tree branches one day and a lot of drizzle and mud.

Not exactly a bad week, just disrupted.

We're looking at converting from forced hot water radiators to mini splits but some people say keep the gas system as a backup. I guess if you never run the furnace there's no harm in keeping it other than the space the 300lb radiators take up?
Costco was having trouble heating their building this morning.

I heard some people haven't had power for 4 days?

Up there?!? Or down here? Here, yes, up in Austin and elsewhere the power grid totally failed again. But I really hope up there people aren't losing power for four days.

It's ok, they can shelter in a tauntaun's belly. There was a mythbusters about it.

Stay warm now, you all y'all.

FTFY

Four days in Austin. My parents lost power in NY but usually that only lasts a day and they're in a fairly rural area.

Yeah, a mini-split is basically just a modern heat pump. It does have trouble when there is no heat to pump. We're up into the teens outside now and they are working a lot better. We have wood heat as a backup.

Our water meter froze and cracked, so that explains the lack of water.

That doesn't sound cheap.

It turns out my apartment has mini-splits, but I only heard them referred to as "ductless". This is the first place I've seen them. It doesn't get below freezing here often - probably not even every year - but it has been dropping into high 30s and low 40s. In my four months of living here, going from record heat to non-record but lower than normal cold, the models my landlord installed have been much more effective at cooling than heating.

Speaking of ending of flying things, we shot down the balloon.

I'm on airplanes more than I really want to be, mostly packed in on Hawaiian's 717s interisland for work, and it's still amazingly cool that we can do this. Squeeze into the big metal tube, look down at the clouds for a while, and come down some place completely different. I was sad when I realized a year or two before the pandemic that I'd gone more than a year without setting foot on a wide body for the first time in a couple of decades. Fixed that now (including a comical HA A330 segment from Maui to Oahu last year), and looking forward to my first trip on an A380 later this spring. Still haven't been on the 747 upper deck, but my wife and I did have the two seats in the nose a few years back, thanks to a large pile of United miles. That was nice.

Fucking balloons, man.

Also: WTF, Boeing? Get your shit together and start caring more about building good airplanes than fighting your unions. As a child of the PNW, it's painful to see you too busy fixing shitty South Carolina-built 787s to design a decent replacement for the 737.

The next time I shoot the Underdog balloon at the parade, I'm saying I thought it was Chinese.

"Squeeze into the big metal tube, look down at the clouds for a while, and come down some place completely different."
I read a joke about how dogs must think elevators work- you go into a box, wait a few seconds, and there's a whole different world outside.

That's why the AKC recommends you take your dog for their first elevator rides in a glass elevator.

I was wrong about Austin's woes being a grid collapse. But yeah, apparently it's a total shitshow up there. Hope M/tch and Sir Kraab weathered it safely.

114 and 119: Some company now owned by Google was relying to do an "affordable" geothermal system using shallow loops. I trust that more in extreme cold than the air models.

This Old House did a program on it. I don't think it works without ducts though.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMO9jvwlHFg

Also that video talks about them being in NY, but Dandelion energy has expanded into some MA zip codes.

https://dandelionenergy.com/massachusetts-geothermal

Drilling a fancy hole in the ground seems way more expensive than just installing a metal box outside, which is what the air models do. But maybe there would be net savings over time from using less electricity.

Connecting it to the water heater is cool.

More on geothermal (which sounds like it has better economics at larger scale, but I know of one person locally who has geothermal home heat)

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/10/21/21515461/renewable-energy-geothermal-egs-ags-supercritical

I read a joke about how dogs must think elevators work- you go into a box, wait a few seconds, and there's a whole different world outside.

When the kids were very small, their daycare had an elevator to the floor with classrooms, and we had a running joke/fantasy about what would be on the other side when the doors opened. Should we take the elevator all the way to the car? all the way home? Let's see where it lets us off! It's a sweet memory.

The Carnegie Museum has the Stratavator, which is an elevator-looking thing that purportedly goes deep into the earth.

If you ban ignore the coal company sponsor and the 1980s video screen, it's very convincing.

Ban s/b can

127, 134: A la Severance.