Content tagged with “air-travel” under “Stuff I Looked Up”
There are 10 item(s) tagged with “air-travel” in this section.
See items tagged with “air-travel” across the entire site.
“This is simply a place where aircraft take off and land. Most often, we call these ‘airports,’ but aerodrome is more inclusive. A small dirt landing strip in the jungle could be an aerodrome. A patch of ocean where seaplanes launch could be an aerodrome. From Wikipedia : The term airport may imply…”
“Yes…ish. Some of them can under some circumstances. ‘Autoland’ is a feature on some larger airlines. But it has limits: It has to be enabled and initiated. It doesn’t just do it automatically. The airport has to be equipped for it. The plane doesn’t really ‘land itself’ – the plane and the airport…”
“Defining what actually constitutes an individual ‘plane’ can be hard. In each case, there is a basic airframe (ex: 737), but there are sometimes dozens of variants of it (100 through 900, as well as MAX versions 7 though 10). Some common changes: Lengthening the body (you can’t increase it in any…”
“It has to do with the transition from two-letter to three-letter codes. Originally, airport codes were just two-letters. In Canada, they decided to use the same code as the Morse code for the corresponding Canadian railway station. Eventually, it became important to know if an airport had a weather…”
“This is a purchase made at a shop in the international terminal of most airports which is free from taxes. Since some goods – like alcohol and cigarettes – are highly taxed, this can result in a steep discount on these items. There are three separate concepts at work: If you have checked in and…”
“In geometry, a ‘great circle’ is a flat plane that cuts through the middle of a sphere. Essentially, it becomes the longer line that was drawn around that sphere. In aviation navigation, a ‘great circle route’ is the shortest path between two points, and is achieved by finding the great circle that…”
“This is a value commonly used to describe the speed of an aircraft. It’s not a constant value. It represents the speed of sound in whatever air is being used at the time. The speed of sound changes with elevation and air density. Also, ‘speed of sound’ is kind of a misnomer. What’s really being…”
“Chicago’s largest airport is named for Edward ‘Butch’ O’Hare. He was a Naval aviator during World War II. He’s most known for single-handing attacking nine bombers who were threatening his aircraft carrier. He shot down five of them. O’Hare was awarded the Medal of Honor. He was shot down by the…”
“O’Hare is built on what used to be an airfield complex called ‘Orchard Field.’ It served a Douglas manufacturing plant and an Air Force service depot. That’s where the ‘ORD’ comes from: ‘Orchard.’ When the city of Chicago needed more capacity than the original airport (now Midway), they purchased…”
“This is short for ‘tarmacadam,’ which differs slightly from macadam . Wikipedia defines it as: Tarmacadam is a road surfacing material made by combining crushed stone, sand, and tar […] It is a more durable and dust-free enhancement of simple compacted stone macadam surfaces… Vocabulary.com says:…”