Month: March 2012

Is the Boeing 737 Safe? Or is this Scaremongering?

ssegraves

Is Boeing’s 737 an Airplane Prone to Problems? →

Clive Irving on skin cracking on Boeing 737s:

For decades, Boeing had had that market to itself. Then, in the late 1980s, Airbus introduced a competitor, the A320, loaded with the latest technology; Boeing seriously underestimated the European upstart—until itrealized that it could lose a world market that it had created and monopolized. The result was the NG series, which arrived in 1997 and was a huge improvement on the old Classics. The NG had new wings, engines, and avionics systems to match the Airbus. But, surprisingly, the original fuselage was retained, albeit with some refinements.

It is an interesting posit by Mr. Irving but in the entire article he fails to lay out why the Airbus A320 is supposedly so much safer. While the A320 has not been involved in any decompression incidents it has been involved in around twelve fatal accidents.

The other piece in all of this that does not really fit is Mr. Irving pointing out that hard landings have generated concerns about the bulkheads in the aircraft. Of course it should generate concerns. Any hard landing puts a lot of stress on an aircraft and that’s the reason most airlines put aircraft through extensive inspections after such incidents.

The whole article comes off as scaremongering masquerading as a investigative reporting. I fly Boeing 737s just about every week and I’m not going to change my booking habits to avoid them.

In-Flight Wi-Fi Usage Numbers Increase

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To Tweet From 30,000 Feet: Picking Planes Wired for Wi-Fi →

Scott McCartney on some interesting trends:

Airlines say Wi-Fi usage-the percentage of passengers paying for Internet access—is picking up, driven partly by the popularity of tablet computers and partly because more planes have the service. Currently about 8% of passengers use the service, up from 4% at the end of 2010, according to In-Stat, a research and consulting firm. That likely will reach 10% of passengers by the end of this year, In-Stat says.

In-Flight Wi-Fi usage growth is no surprise. We are addicted to being connected just about everywhere we are. Why should an airplane limit that addiction? My opinion on this is two-fold. Sure, it is great to get your e-mail, work on your website, post photographs, etc. while you’re in the air but as someone who travels for work, I relish being cut off from the outside world for a while.

Since United announced a push to install Wi-Fi on a number of their aircraft, I will see if my perception and opinion changes over the next year. I tried to use in-flight Wi-Fi on a trip from Seattle to Frankfurt on Lufthansa in December but it was inoperative the entire time. On a flight of that length, it would have been quite nice.

The Linked List Conundrum

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I was reading Stephen Hackett’s post on linked lists and it got me thinking. I have been exploring the possibility of mixing my normal, long(er) form posts with shorter linked list posts.

If you do not use RSS to read this site in a feed reader such as Google Reader then the rest of this post may not make much sense to you, but for power users of such tools, I am interested to know what your usage patterns and preferences are.

Let’s take an example from Shawn Blanc’s feed. The part circled in red is the title for the post as well as a link to the source of information. To reach Shawn’s actual post, you must click the “Permalink” link at the bottom of the post.

The other way of doing this is to have the link circled in red link directly back to Shawn’s post and have the outgoing link to the source inside of that post. I am partial to the latter option but a lot of sites are moving to the style that Shawn (and places like Daring Fireball) use. I agree with Stephen that the latter method, linking back to your own article, is not double-dipping, especially if a link to the source is within the article. Some writers go as far as to mark a link as outgoing.

What do you think? What makes more sense when reading posts? I am thinking I will stay with my current format, but maybe in the near future trying the linked list method.

Hitchhiking In Germany

ssegraves

A delay. We’re sitting in the Bremen train station trying to figure out what is going. We have run down one set of stairs and up another to get to a new platform and now it looks like our train will actually leave from a completely different platform. Welcome to regional train travel to remote parts of Germany.

Originally, the goal was to make it to Bremerhaven, a port city on the northern coast of Germany west of Denmark, before 2pm. Why you ask, are we going to Bremerhaven? It is the city where my wife was born. Her parents were stationed there as Air Force personnel and we wanted to see the city, the barracks, and just visit a little bit of our family history.

Everyone is standing around a Deutsche Bahn employee. I try to listen with my minimal German skills and hear what is keeping us from making it to our destination. Sadly, it sounds like an accident on the tracks to Bremerhaven ended in a fatality. The official assures us that the train will leave in 15 minutes.

Sure enough, 15 minutes later and we are onboard a train and moving toward Bremerhaven. The train is packed with all of that day’s passengers to Bremerhaven being onboard. We stop at two or three stops and everything seems normal. At the last stop, in a town called Lunestedt, an announcement is made that this is the final stop and everyone must leave the train. What I had missed in the earlier discussion with the Deutsche Bahn official was that from Lunestedt all passengers would be required to take a bus the rest of the way to Bremerhaven.

The tiny train station in Lunestedt is overflowing with people, a light rain driving them to take cover under the shelter for the bicycles. It becomes clear that only one bus is in use to shuttle passengers to Bremerhaven and the roundtrip for the bus takes 30 minutes. There is no queue for the bus, when it shows up people just scramble for it.

I start asking around to see if anyone speaks English and happen upon a woman about our age. She explains that it is going to be a long wait but that her boyfriend is coming to pick her up, then taking pity on us, asks if we’d like a ride. Normally, I would hesitate, but she seems like a nice lady and the line for the bus is overwhelming.

Twenty minutes later and the woman’s boyfriend drives up. At first I do a double take, then a triple take. The car is a four dour sedan with a hatchback but there are three other people already in it, the boyfriend and his two friends. The hatchback area is stuffed full of luggage, clothes, and other small items. The boyfriend gets out of the car, kisses his girlfriend, then shakes my hand and takes our suitcase, shoving it on top of the stuff in the back of the car.

I look at my wife. I am sure she is trying to telepathically communicate her uncomfortable feeling but at this point, we’re committed. We stuff ourselves into the car and the music starts. No one in the car is talking, just listening to death metal as we drive through the northern German countryside. My brain was trying to do the math on how to escape should these good Samaritans turn out to have nefarious plans. It, my brain, came to the conclusion to push my wife out of the car then quickly follow.

Thirty minutes later and we’re arriving in Bremerhaven and the first real conversation with us is started. “Do you know where your hotel is?”. “What’s it called? Oh, we know that place”, and five minutes later, there’s the hotel. We get out and I am trying to figure out the proper thing to do. I pull out 30 Euros and hand it to the boyfriend, thank him for driving us and my wife and I breathe a sigh of relief.

Looking back at this experience a couple of years later, I wonder if I would do the same thing today. In one word, probably. We were desperate. Was it the right thing to do? Probably not. But we have a funny story to share with you and our kids. And last but not least, these were actually really nice people who went out of their way to help us, who would have otherwise been stranded in a small town in northern Germany.