Feb

23

There is a backlash against travel meme occurring. I don't have numbers but I'm noticing travel is down. I don't feel like traveling. My traveling friends are staying home. I saw a magazine article on why travel is bad. Boeing is down.

The Case Against Travel
It turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best.

H. Humbert responds:

Boeing is down because of the well publicized mechanical problems and the exposure of their general carelessness. They're not affected a great deal by the minute-to-minute variations in travel demand due to long lead times and large backlog.

Pamela Van Giessen writes:

The Davos crowd has been pushing no travel because climate change. Except for their private jets to exclusive Swiss resorts.

Air fare to AZ is high for Feb-April and Scottsdale airbnbs are pricey so I’m not sure if travel is really down except to MT because no snow for skiing. A friend reports that Park City was busy for Sundance. Besides, don’t most people travel a bit later during spring break when the kiddos are out of school? And could it be they are booking their travel for when they can drive and avoid airport unpleasantness?

Word is that Coachella sales are slow but Stagecoach which takes place a week later sold out super fast. Seems like Coachella is flagging on the booked acts, not a lack of travel interest (given that Stagecoach is basically down the road). Charley Crockett tickets for the middle of nowhere Emigrant MT sold out in about 20 mins for June. Maybe it’s all local but I suspect a fair number of tickets were bought by out of towners.

H. Humbert observes:

I was in Napa Valley recently for somebody’s birthday and everything was sold out but the winery. Some people needed to find last minute hotel reservations, was almost impossible. The restaurant where you eat in a yurt had no empty yurts, in torrential rain. Not considered the best time of the year to visit it either because it does tend to get rainy.

Henry Gifford comments:

10 or 20 years ago Boeing moved their corporate headquarters to Chicago for the stated purpose that they wanted to be taken seriously by Wall Street. Headquarters >1,000 miles from the nearest factory? Insane. The place was run by engineers, which is smart for a company manufacturing complex things. Now I think they are run by accountants and lawyers - see how Detroit has been making out with that strategy.

The problems a few years ago with planes diving unexpectedly were caused by the MCAS system: Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System - an acronym giving little indication about what it is or does. The system took an input from one angle-of-attack sensor on the nose - a fin whose position changes with the angle of the wind passing over the nose of the plane - and if it saw the nose was too high (could lead to a stall: chaotic airflow over the wings causing a loss of lift), it automatically pointed the nose of the plane down. This broke the rule in aviation design that the failure of one mechanical device (the angle-of-attack sensor) should not lead to a crash. Bad sensor readings caused the sensor to push the nose down when the plane was actually flying fine - two planes nosed down into the ground, killing hundreds of people. A better design strategy is to require simultaneous failure of two mechanical devices to cause a crash. In other words, the computer should have been wired to two sensors. The crazy thing was that the computer was wired to two sensors; each plane had two, or optionally three. If the software received contradictory signals, a red light should have alerted the pilots and disconnected the "ANDS" (automatic-nose-down-system (my name), and if the plane was on the ground, it should not take off until the sensor(s) work. Basic engineering 101.

The company might do well with government contracts, automatic market share, etc. But it will be decades before the young and ambitious will be proud to work there.

Bo Keely relates:

A new Slabber just retired here from Continental Air. He insists that Continental for years has been tied to the CIA, and that he too was that. With a Masters in Electronics, he is also the person the President called to deflect missals gone astray. The technique is to send two jets after the launch to intercept the wrong destination. The most recent example was one shot from a submarine off Hawaii aimed for a Utah test target, that misguided toward LA. That would have been a horrendous traffic jam. The first jet, slower that the missile, intercepts its trajectory to radio the bearing to a second jet to close in to electronically knock the missile off-course. It landed outside San Bernardino to cause a forest fire that the military blamed on careless campers. Other scapegoats have been UFOs, but they've been US missiles.

Humbert H. is skeptical:

Distance from Hawaii to Utah is about 3000 miles. So slow moving cruise missiles can be ruled out. For either ICBM or IRBM, depending on the phases of the trajectory, the speeds can vary. These vehicles' speeds after the boost phases range from Mach 18 to 25. Mach 1 is 767 miles per hour. A typical passenger jet can reach no more than 600 miles per hour. There are many things about the fictional story of the ex pilot just simply don't add up.


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