Content tagged with "air-travel"
“ Solid thriller about the apparent cover-up of an inflight incident on trans-pacific flight. Lots of a super geeky airline industry information. If you like jets, this is your book. Fast-paced, page turner. I legitimately couldn’t put it down. ”
“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…”
“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…”
“I normally find things to research by reading books. This time I read a book because I wanted to learn more about a thing I was researching. I was writing this entry: Types of Aircraft Engines . I wanted to know more about the differences between turboprops and turbofans. So I found this book, and…”
“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:…”
“ Somewhat interesting, but scattered. The author bounces around a lot. ”
