Glad I'm not a passenger

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
16,340
https://www.npr.org/2026/05/31/nx-s1-5841913/united-airlines-flight-diversion-bluetooth
"There is an active Bluetooth network labeled 'BOMB,' " one self-identified passenger wrote on TikTok. (She shared a video of herself drinking sangria, geotagged to Palma de Mallorca, after the flight finally arrived.) Another Reddit post of someone who claimed to be the spouse of a passenger similarly reported that the word in question was "bomb" and that the device was a teenager's speaker.

The flight eventually reboarded and landed in Palma de Mallorca at 3:47 p.m. local time on Sunday, about 9 and a half hours late.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
32,925
I'd love to get that for my daughter, even though she refused to let me insist that she learn how to drive a stick (which, admittedly, would have been hard to do in practice because we don't own a stick and haven't for almost two decades).

But, she IS a classically-trained violinist, so I think she and her friends would appreciate the joke.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
32,925
Wow. Stubborn!

Not only did she refuse to learn, but she refused to let you insist that she learn!
Oh, you have NO idea!

On balance, she is an amazingly sweet kid that everyone adores, be it relatives, teachers, classmates, friends, parents of friends, you name it. But she can most definitely be one of the most stubborn people I've ever known -- which may explain why she has earned a slot at one of the country's elite music conservatories with what amounts to an 80% scholarship. She's currently 5862 miles from home performing in Japan (just got a Life360 notification). So I can't complain too much -- I'm willing to concede defeat on a few things (and they've been remarkably few) given that she's also been exceptionally well behaved her entire life. She got grounded once when she was in elementary school, which she accepted without qualms because she knew she had been in the wrong. When she got her license, we set a 10pm curfew for her and she has never once broken it (though, for a while, she seemed to be making a point of getting home with only a few minutes to spare). Of course, the curfew didn't apply if she was at an official event, such as a quartet performance or a school dance, but even then she always left as soon as she could in order to not break curfew when possible, and always came straight home if not.
 
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Thread Starter

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,783
1780398759566.png


In 1965, Pan Am president Juan Trippe asked Boeing for an airliner that could carry 400 passengers, cross any ocean non-stop, and cut the per-seat cost by 30%. Boeing's CEO Bill Allen agreed on a handshake.

"If you build it, I'll buy it," Trippe said.

"If you buy it, I'll build it," Allen replied.

Then Boeing had to figure out how.

The job went to Joe Sutter, a 44-year-old engineer Boeing pulled off the 737 program. He had 29 months from concept to rollout. He had to design an aircraft 2.5 times the size of anything Boeing had ever built. And he had to do it in a factory that did not yet exist.

The first disagreement was about the shape. Trippe wanted a double-decker. Essentially two 707 fuselages stacked. It was the obvious move. Single-aisle was the only proven commercial layout in 1965.

Sutter saw the problem. The FAA required all passengers to evacuate in 90 seconds. Getting people off an upper deck through slides that long was not possible with 1960s engineering.

So Sutter pushed back.

He proposed a single deck with two aisles. A fuselage wider than anything in the air. Nobody had built a twin-aisle wide-body airliner before. His team built two full plywood mockups side-by-side inside a Boeing hangar. Trippe walked through both. When he came out, he said: "You made the right decision."

The next disagreement was about the cockpit. Boeing and Pan Am both believed supersonic jets would replace the 747 within a decade. So they designed it to convert into a freighter. To load cargo through the nose, the entire nose had to hinge open. The cockpit could not stay there. They moved it up onto a bump on the upper fuselage. Engineers then extended the bump aft into a teardrop to reduce drag. That teardrop became the most recognizable silhouette in aviation.

Sutter's team of 4,500 engineers worked nights and weekends through the 29-month sprint. Boeing nicknamed them The Incredibles. The first 747 rolled out of the new Everett factory, then the largest building in the world by volume, on September 30, 1968. It entered service with Pan Am on January 22, 1970.

The supersonic jets that were supposed to replace it never did. The Boeing 2707 was cancelled. Concorde flew for 27 years and stopped. The 747 stayed in production for 55 years. Boeing delivered the last one on January 31, 2023. They built 1,574 in total.

The wide-body twin-aisle layout Sutter fought for in 1965 is now the default for every long-haul aircraft in the sky.
 

joeyd999

Joined Jun 6, 2011
6,334
Oh, you have NO idea!

On balance, she is an amazingly sweet kid that everyone adores, be it relatives, teachers, classmates, friends, parents of friends, you name it. But she can most definitely be one of the most stubborn people I've ever known -- which may explain why she has earned a slot at one of the country's elite music conservatories with what amounts to an 80% scholarship. She's currently 5862 miles from home performing in Japan (just got a Life360 notification). So I can't complain too much -- I'm willing to concede defeat on a few things (and they've been remarkably few) given that she's also been exceptionally well behaved her entire life. She got grounded once when she was in elementary school, which she accepted without qualms because she knew she had been in the wrong. When she got her license, we set a 10pm curfew for her and she has never once broken it (though, for a while, she seemed to be making a point of getting home with only a few minutes to spare). Of course, the curfew didn't apply if she was at an official event, such as a quartet performance or a school dance, but even then she always left as soon as she could in order to not break curfew when possible, and always came straight home if not.
Wanna know what's worse? Mine is studying Materials Engineering. All of the classes she is currently taking I could write the syllabi for, and a good portion of the textbooks.

Yet, she will not let me teach her, or assist in any way whatsoever.

It's like she wants to learn these things on her own.

Go figure.

Edit: In case you're wondering -- all A's and B's so far.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
32,925
Wanna know what's worse? Mine is studying Materials Engineering. All of the classes she is currently taking I could write the syllabi for, and a good portion of the textbooks.

Yet, she will not let me teach her, or assist in any way whatsoever.

It's like she wants to learn these things on her own.

Go figure.

Edit: In case you're wondering -- all A's and B's so far.
Mine was similar. I offered to assist her with any computer, math, or science related course and even collected numerous textbooks over the years specifically to be able to make a good library available to her. She never once took me up on the offer, which was sad for me because I was seeing it as a way for her and I to connect a bit more. It didn't stop her from taking calculus as a sophomore, going all eight semesters with straight As, or graduating summa cum laude. Some kids are just not natural.
 

joeyd999

Joined Jun 6, 2011
6,334
Some kids are just not natural.
Ha.

I am sooooo looking forward to our first engineer-to-engineer discussion over beers and successfully solving some apparently intractable problem together on the back of a napkin.

But life is getting shorter every day. I hope it happens.
 

Thread Starter

cmartinez

Joined Jan 17, 2007
8,783
My 29 year old kid studied engineering, just like me. Although he majored in chemistry, and I in mechanics. But we both love science, and some of the happiest moments I've ever had are our nerdish science conversations ... over beers. :)
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
32,925
Ha.

I am sooooo looking forward to our first engineer-to-engineer discussion over beers and successfully solving some apparently intractable problem together on the back of a napkin.

But life is getting shorter every day. I hope it happens.
That is something, regrettably, I will never get to have. She's not interested in talking technical stuff, which is, of course, my passion. But I'm more than willing to talk music with her, about which I know very little but which the depth of her knowledge has amazed me for years. But about the only time I can pin her down long enough to have those nice discussions is when I am driving her somewhere, and those opportunities largely ended when she got her license. I'm hoping (possibly whistling in a graveyard?) that only seeing her a few times a year while she's away at college will make it easier for us to make the time and effort to have more meaningful conversations when we are together. My dad and I were always pretty close, but we didn't really start having those kinds of conversations until I moved to a different city. I treasured those phone calls, even though we often ended up just solving all of the worlds problems much the same as we had the last time we talked.
 

WBahn

Joined Mar 31, 2012
32,925
As with most things IE, that's pretty misleading. It was a novelty made by a team as part of an internal design competition called Fantasyard (which it won). They essentially took a pocket bike and tore it apart and then did some pretty clever packaging. It was never meant to be pursued as a serious product. It was basically a conversation piece at trade shows for a short while.
 

nsaspook

Joined Aug 27, 2009
16,340
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62r2ldyejro

The group were returning from Mali, where they had attended celebrations for the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha, when they ran out of water, stranded more than 80km (50 miles) west of Assamaka, a major border crossing point between Niger and Algeria.
"The travellers found themselves trapped in the heart of a hostile environment where extreme temperatures and lack of supply points make survival extremely difficult," said the governor of Agadez.
Only two survived, trekking across the desert to Assamaka, where they alerted the authorities.
 
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