Took this shot of the Gulf of Mexico on a calm day when my wife and I were driving around Naples, Florida. While there are public beaches along the Gulf Coast, I hate that a lot of it is taken up by large mansions, etc.
I have very fond memories of riding a similar ride to this one in the mid to late 70s when I was much younger. I loved this ride. Of course, it’s nearly, if not completely, impossible to find this ride anymore in the US because, I’m sure, it’s “too dangerous.” There are attractions similar to this at Oktoberfest which is always fun to watch those who’s have a liter or two of beer riding.
For those who’ve never seen or ridden one, essentially, it’s a cylinder. Riders enter and stand against the wall. The ride starts spinning and once it reaches a certain speed, the floor drops away, leaving the riders hanging on the wall. Pure physics.
This recent NY Times article about the quest to build a flying Taxi service is interesting but doesn’t address some of the less thought about questions when moving from the ground to the air.
In the real world, and not the imagined one of Silicon Valley, all air traffic is controlled by Air Traffic Control (ATC) making sure that all planes operating in controlled air spaces are accounted for and aware of other traffic in the area. Much like the highway system, in the sky there are lanes of traffic that planes generally fly on.
And yes, even helicopters work with ATC.
Jason Henry for The New York Times What Is a Flying Car?
By Cade Metz and Erin Griffith – June 12, 2021
Inside Silicon Valley’s 10-year quest to make soaring above a crowded city street as easy as calling an Uber.
If we ignore the large commercial airlines that most people are familiar with and think about the private airplanes like Cessna or Piper, when operating under Visual Flight Rules (VFR), the planes do have more leeway on where to fly, but generally will follow a specified flight plan when flying cross country. This is because in the air, it’s easier to get lost or disorientated then when driving on I-10, for example.
So the question becomes under what rules will flying taxis operate under? If they would be required to essentially be a replacement for helicopters then the idea of them being Taxis where you wave down a passing one is no longer a “taxi” replacement. It will not be, as these investors would have you believe, as easy as calling an Uber.
It will be that you will have a set time to depart, flight plans will need to be filed and there will be a set destination. Nothing as quick and easy as calling an Uber.
Now, some may argue that these flying cars are essentially large drones, but even today, drones have sever limits on how they can be operated (if not fully practiced by the public in general). For example, because of the private/public air space, drones should not be flown above 400 feet. In many countries, it’s illegal to fly drones above crowds of people (being that if the batteries fail or the device needs to make an emergency landing, it won’t come down on top of someone). While it’s easy to say, okay, 350 – 400 feet is good enough for a flying taxi, these certainly won’t be permitted to operate within cities and especially not in downtown New York, for example.
So to be usable, you’ll still need to call an Uber to get to the landing pad for the flying taxi, which, in a large metropolitan area, would at best be on top of a building or in an open field. And at that point, why not just let the Uber take you the rest of the way.
The other issue will be emergency procedures. Airplanes fly above ground level (AGL) at certain minimums to avoid ground bases obstacles and, in case of engine failure, power loss, or emergency event, the time to try and get a controlled landing as safely as possible. If Air Taxis were flying down 5th avenue in New York City, as futurists envisioned, any single emergency event would put many lives at stake from above.
While I’m not negative on the development of the technology, these are, at best, a new generation of helicopters that may provide cheaper and quicker short hop ability. For example, a flying taxi hub is being built in central Florida to take passengers from Lake Nona to Tampa in 30 minutes. That trip, by car, is about an hour and half. However, remember, the flight is 30 minutes, but I’m suspecting there will be time on each end, so at best, it’ll be about an hour total time (get to terminal, wait for taxi, board taxi, ATC flight clearance, etc, take off, fly, landing, etc). It’s still faster, yes, but once you get there, you’ll then need to get another taxi/Uber to take you to your final destination.
The distance you will be able to take these taxis will be limited by weight and battery life, so while a lot of people say by 2023 we’ll be zooming around in air taxis are probably, as usual, being a bit aggressive. And a lot of the development and promise focuses on autonomous vehicles doing the flying.
I.e. without a pilot (although, lets be honest, there’s no way in hell the government will license this for public use without a backup pilot on board)., so would you trust it enough right now to be a passenger?
Maybe in the future, when autonomous cars have fully shown the capability to drive us without us paying attention., but that’s not going to be 2023…probably not until at least 2030 at best.
The new generation of air taxis will change the helicopter business, that’s for sure, but will they become a societal change for the future? Maybe about as much as the Segway was.
Copyright © 2021 Mark D Wolinski On this day in 1889, the Eiffel Tower of inaugurated.
This past year while a lot of tourist attractions have been closed, museums have been putting their collections online for people to peruse from the comfort of their homes.
A couple of weeks ago, the Louvre announced their database of more the 480,000 works from the Musée du Louvre and Musée National Eugène-Delacroix are now available online.
The nice part is that the information pages may include multiple photos of each work of art and if currently visible at the Louvre, where it’s located at…for when you’ll next be able to visit that is.
The pages are in French, but if you use Google Chrome or the latest versions of Safari, the browser should be able to auto-translate pages for you.
Visit the Musée du Louvre Collection at https://collections.louvre.fr
It should probably not be a surprise that I love French patisseries. It’s great to see this three part video looking behind the scenes of the magic of the workers making everything from scratch and fresh ingredients.
Première partie
Deuxième partie
Troisième partie
Copyright © 2021 Mark D Wolinski Big Ben is actually the bell inside the tower…which you can not see from the outside. The tower is officially called Elizabeth Tower. Next time you’re in London, make sure you don’t make the same mistake of most every other tourist and say, “Oh! I see Big Ben…” Ya don’t!
Copyright © 2021 Mark D Wolinski The Atlantic has an article about a new cookbook by Sam Sifton that throws out the traditional recipe in favor of a less ridged structure. They pull this quote from the book for Teriyaki Salmon With Mixed Greens:
Turn your oven to 400°F or so, and while it heats, make a teriyaki sauce with soy sauce cut with mirin, plus a healthy scattering of minced garlic and ginger. It should be salty-sweet. Then put your salmon fillets on a lightly oiled, foil-lined baking sheet, skin-side down. Paint them with the sauce and roast them in the top of the oven for 10 to 12 minutes, painting them again with the sauce at least once along the way. Slide the finished salmon onto piles of mixed greens and drizzle with remaining sauce. Cooking’s not difficult. It’s just a practice.
I’ve often said that recipes are guides, not rules, but this feels more like a technical challenge from The Great British Bake Off more so than a “recipe.”
The one issue I would have with this example is the “healthy scattering of minced garlic and ginger.” Too much of either of those can make the whole meal go south pretty quickly, so while, as the pulled quote says, “Cooking’s not difficult. It’s just a practice.”
One has to wonder how many times you’ll need to spoil the salmon before you get it right.
I’m a huge fan of seeing photos from France in Paris in the distant past and 100 years ago is amazing to see how much is different and how much hasn’t changed.
These colored photos by Jules Gervais-Courtellemont will take you back through time to see how Paris looked in 1923. The vivid images are produced using the autochrome technique in which the plates are covered in microscopic red, green and blue colored potato starch grains (about four million per square inch).
When the photograph is taken, light passes through these color filters to the photographic emulsion. The plate is processed to produce positive transparency. Light, passing through the colored starch grains, combines to recreate a full-color image of the original subject.
