Telstar Logistics flew to Chicago this week to meet with a new client, but as we were departing from San Francisco International Airport we took note of yet another superb museum display curated by the airport's museum staff. We've written about them before, so as you may recall: SFO is not just a transportation hub — the airport is also a fully accredited museum, which helps explain why the displays there are so consistently excellent.
From elaborate toy play sets and space operas of the 1930s and 1940s, to robots and rocket ships of the space age and beyond, each generation presented its own notions about what the future would bring, both here on Earth and in the mysterious worlds beyond our atmosphere. The artifacts exhibited in Out of this World! The Twentieth-Century Space Invasion of American Pop Culture are reminders of a period when our collective infatuation with space resulted in products that ranged from fantastically silly to truly visionary, objects that may have inspired the conquest of space as much as they reflected it.
Count us among the infatuated. The show is up through through March 2009 (we think), so if you happen to find yourself flying United in or out of SFO, take a few minutes and enjoy a little bit of retro-futuristic space appreciation. It's worth the trip.
Sad news: Ed Grothus, founder and proprietor of the post-apocalyptic surplus store the "Black Hole," has passed away at age 86.
Telstar Logistics toured the Black Hole in Los Alamos, New Mexico during 2006, and we're grateful we had the chance to meet Ed during our visit. To give you a sense of what the Black Hole was all about, here are a few photos we took while wandering the aisles:
Ed is a former employee of the Los Alamos National Laboratory -- America's R&D facility for nuclear weapons -- and The Black Hole is his masterpiece; an improbable combination military surplus outlet, pacifist shrine, and "museum of nuclear waste."
Ed was on hand when we stopped by, so we had the opportunity to talk with him and watch his presentation on the perils of atomic warfare. Though he's clearly spent a lot of time in the desert sun, he's a very likable character -- articulate, thoughtful, and passionate about his cause.
This most remarkable and unusual gentleman is gone, but not forgotten.
Speaking of strange hybrids... ever heard of the Taylor Aerocar? We were fascinated by them during our early years. Built by an American entrepreneur named Moult Taylor after World War II, the Aerocar was a road-ready automobile that could be converted into an airworthy airplane by attaching a set of wings. The Wikipedia sketches out the rest of the tale:
Taylor's design of a roadable aircraft dates back to 1946. During a trip to Delaware, he met inventor Robert E. Fulton, Jr., who had designed an earlier roadable airplane, the Airphibian. Taylor recognized that the detachable wings of Fulton’s design would be better replaced by folding wings. His prototype Aerocar utilized folding wings that allowed the road vehicle to be convertible into flight mode in five minutes by one person. When the rear licence plate was flipped up, the operator could connect the propeller shaft and attach a pusher propeller. The same engine drives the front wheels through a three-speed manual transmission. When operated as an aircraft, the road transmission is simply left in neutral (though backing up during taxiing is possible by using reverse gear.) On the road, the wings and tail unit were designed to be towed behind the vehicle. Aerocars can drive up to 60 miles per hour and have a top airspeed of 110 miles per hour.
Civil certification was gained in 1956, and Taylor reached a deal with Ling-Temco-Vought for serial production on the proviso that he was able to attract 500 orders. When he was able to only find half that number of buyers, plans for production ended, and only six examples were built.
As one might expect, the engineering compromises required to create a car that could fly and a plane that could drive meant that Aerocars suffered from a variation of the Mermaid Problem — that is, with a mermaid, when you want a fish you get a woman, and when you want a woman you get a fish. Awwwwkward.
Much like mermaids, Aerocars may not be practical, but they continue to
fascinate. The second of the six Aerocars, tail number N103D, built in
1956, is now for sale, and via eBay,
no less. Fidel Castro's brother Raúl once flew this vehicle around
Cuba, and it later logged more than 1000 hours in the air doing traffic reports for KISN above Portland, Oregon. The bidding on eBay starts at $3.5 million, and
the buyer is responsible for transporting the vehicle from Grand Junction, Colorado. Fly or drive — it's your choice.
In 1936, Pan American Airways inaugurated the world's first commercial air service between the United States and China. Departing from Alameda, California aboard a Martin M-130 "China Clipper," passengers reached Asia by playing hopscotch across the Pacific, stopping along the way for rest and refueling in Hawaii, the Midway Islands, Wake Island, Guam, and Manila before arriving in Hong Kong.
With a cuising speed of 150 mph, the Martin M-130 made the 8000-mile journey to China in five and one-half days. Tickets cost $1600 per person — roughly $10,000 in contemporary dollars.
All that background comes by way of explaining why we were so excited to find a Pan American Airways brochure at a flea market in San Francisco last weekend. The booklet promotes the airline's flights to China aboard the M-130, and based on a few clues — the emphasis on the M-130, as opposed to the Boeing 314 which didn't enter service in 1939; the absence any mention of Treasure Island, which became Pan American's San Francisco base in 1939 — we estimate that it dates from 1937 (give or take a year).
As the brochure explains:
Who has never dreamed of seeing China—the treasure-house of travel wonders that no one who lives upon this world should ever fail to see. Once these were so far away that few could ever hope to reach them. No longer! The travel adventure of a lifetime is there for the taking.
We scanned the whole thing, so if you want to learn more about
travel marketing in the pioneering days of intercontinental commercial
air service, feel free to thumb the virtual pages.
Uh-oh. As if the latest economic news wasn't scary enough, Google just introduced a new productivity-killing tool that is all but guaranteed to shave a few points off this quarter's projected GDP growth figures. The culprit: Google's digitization of the vast photo archives of the former LIFE magazine. Google's official blog explains:
We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images
from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online
was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and
make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.
Only
a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The
rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives,
slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We're digitizing them so
that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time.
Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few
months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million
photos.
That's right, we fully expect you may well lose the next several hours in a reverie of deeply fascinating photo-historicial procrastination. You will enjoy it, but our global economy may suffer as a result. You have been warned.
And now for a refreshing dose of retrofuturism....
Filmed in 1956, the following video is part of a Walt Disney series called "Man and the Moon" that envisioned the technology that would enable human space travel. As is so often the case with these sorts of things, the imagined future turned out to significantly more gee-whiz than the subsequent reality, but that's just part of the fun. No less fun is the narrator, the eminent scientist Werner von Braun, who describes the rockets and space stations of tomorrow in a parody-perfect German accent. Buckle up your space suit, and enjoy the ride:
Wasn't that fun? There are several other episodes in the series available for your viewing pleasure, here.
As part of our recent exploration of the San Francisco waterfront with BoingBoing TV, Telstar Logistics fleet operations officer Todd Lappin visited the submarine USS Pampanito to learn all about the sub — and the remarkable technology that made her so effective against Japanese shipping in the Pacific during World War II. We could explain all this in text, but why bother when the moving pictures — and Zach Salin, our all-knowing USS Pampanito guide — tell the story so much better? Let's thread the film through the Internet movie projector and watch...
More discoveries from this morning's New York Times. (OMG! Print newspapers! So random-access! So serendipitous! What an innovative technology!)
We've been hearing tales about this unique little subculture for a while, but the Times has a wonderful piece today about the folks who purchase and restore old railcars — small vehicles that were once used for trackside maintenance — to take them on meandering journeys along little-used trackbed across the American countryside. The NYT sez:
A railway motorcar, or railcar, is a peculiar, no-frills, gasoline-powered vehicle not much bigger than a golf cart and not much more powerful than a riding mower. The seats do not have much padding, if any, so the rider feels every clickety-clack. A railcar ride is not like a trip on any comfy old commuter train.
That is actually one reason the railroads once used railcars, which are also called speeders, jiggers or putt-putts. Tracks needed inspecting, and supervisors felt the bumps and peered through holes in the front of these cars to spot defects. Then bigger railcars, carrying track workers and equipment, were dispatched to make repairs.
About 25 years ago, railroads phased out railcars in favor of pickup trucks fitted with carriages that can adapt to railroad tracks. Railcars became collectors’ items, like antique automobiles. Now, collectors use these vehicles on excursions that offer views of remote scenery on rented tracks meandering miles away from the nearest roads.
“You can see countryside that you don’t see from a car,” said Bob Knight, a railcar owner from Sandwich, Ill., who takes excursions as often as twice a month in warm weather.
There's lots more goodness where that came from, so read the whole thing and drool over all the excellent multimedia the Times has assembled. It's perfect fodder for meandering thoughts on a Friday afternoon...
A few weeks ago our friends from BoingBoing invited Telstar Logistics fleet operations officer Todd Lappin to tour the World War II Liberty Ship SS Jeremiah O'Brien as part of a video segment for BBtv. Here's BoingBoing's summary of the episode:
We marvel (!) at the cool old retro-technology that kept this behemoth
boat running to and from the beaches of Normandy, and we meet the
volunteer caretakers -- obsessive nerds just like us, only with white
hair! -- who keep her ship-shape today. Did you know that shipyards in
the San Francisco Bay Area once churned out Liberty Ships like this in
4 days or less, during the heat of the war? Watch and learn, li'l
skippers.
Indeed. We hope you enjoy these moving pictures, and we've provided links to our previous coverage of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien, below. And if you're in San Francisco, remember: The SS Jeremiah O'Brien is tied up at Pier 45, near Fisherman's Wharf, and it's open daily for visits. Check it!
It was the kind of offer Telstar Logistics cannot refuse: "Please join us for an exclusive opportunity to experience and fly on Emirates’ cutting-edge A380 aircraft during a two hour ‘demo flight’ and reception," they said. So we said, "Sure! Sign us up!"
And away we went. Dubai-based Emirates brought the airline's first Airbus A380 to San Francisco today to provide the locals with a first-hand demonstration of the aircraft's formidable bling. Airbus delivered this A380 less than two weeks ago, and Emirates quickly put it to use as a high-profile billboard to introduce the airline to the American public. San Francisco will become Emirates' newest destination on December 15, when nonstop service to Dubai begins (using a Boeing 777-200, alas).
As you may recall, Telstar Logistics also toured the first A380 ever to land at SFO last October. That A380 was a very different creature, however. Operated by Airbus as a test platform, its interior was unfinished and hollow, but for a few instrument racks and simulated cargo. For comparison's sake, this is what it looked like inside that A380:
Here's the view from roughly the same spot, in the Business cabin of the A380 we flew aboard today:
The Emirates A380 is A6-EDA (cn 011), the eleventh A380 to roll off the Airbus assembly line. When its promotional tour is completed, it will be put to work flying Emirates' Dubai-JFK route. Today, however, it was our airborne plaything, so we explored it from front to back -- from the frilly fountain sculpture at the top of the main stairway to the inflight toaster and bunwarmer installed in the aft galley. We even played bartender in the upper deck lounge. Swingin'! Here are some other impressions from our 90-minute joyride over San Francisco and the Pacific Ocean:
There really is such a thing as a "new airplane smell." In fact, it smells a lot like a new car. It also smells much better than the skanky interior of a typical American Airlines MD-80 that was built sometime during the Reagan Administration's first term.
We'd heard that the A380 was very quiet, and it's true. The cabin
interior was exceptionally hushed — a fact which became very clear when
thrust was applied for takeoff. We barely heard the engines spinning
up to speed. Seriously quiet. Want proof? As you watch this (seriously awesome) video of the takeoff taken by our distinguished colleague Theorem, listen to how hushed the cabin remains throughout. Note also that Theorem was sitting in a window seat just behind the port engines. Let's listen in:
Also, let's hear it for the Tailcam! One of the coolest things about
the A380s onboard video system is the realtime view it displays of the
plane in flight. Theorem captured the takeoff, and we shot this video that shows the view from the Tailcam as we came in for a landing at SFO. This is what we saw from our seatback video display:
Passengers in all classes can choose to watch live
video feeds from three cameras positioned on the exterior of the plane:
A view from the top of the tail, a view forward from the nose, and a
view straight down. Endlessly entertaining.
This A380 was configured to carry a total of 489 people. On the lower deck, Economy Class has 399 seats. The upper deck was fitted with 76 Business Class seats and 14 First Class "suites."
The Economy seats are reasonably spacious, and the inflight entertainment system has a lot to offer. There's inflight email and SMS, 100 movies on-demand, 50 on-demand television channels, 350 audio channels, and 40 electronic games. Here's the view from a typical Economy seat — this is where we sat during our takeoff and landing. Notice the gimballed cup-holder built into the back of the tray table (clever! handy!), and the fact that our knee is not bumping up against the seatback:
Business Class seats are semi-private pods that offer lie-flat seats, a large-screen video display, storage space, and a personal beverage station. The pods are very comfortable, but they also resemble office cubicles, which is a tad unsettling.
First Class "suites" offer even more privacy, burlwood trim, a large-screen video display, lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of gold-chrome trim, and a retractable personal beverage station, which operates as follows:
First Class passengers enjoy access to the aircraft's two showers.
Yes! Showers! Each of the 14 First Class passengers can enjoy a 5-minute shower in one of two private lounges, each of which looks vaguely like something one might expect to find in a Napa Valley golf club. Two dedicated shower attendants clean and freshen the rooms after each use, and the A380 carries an extra half-ton of water to meet the personal-hygiene needs of these elite First Class passengers. In aeronautical terms, there's a word for this: Super-decadent.
We even took a photo from *inside* the shower, since this is the closest we may ever get to it shy of paying more than $10,000 for a First Class ticket:
The shower was nifty, but the upper deck bar/lounge area was perhaps even more enticing. The bar is spacious enough and comfortable enough to encourage serious socializing, and there was an attentive bartender (Hereby dubbed "Isaac of the Airways") pouring the drinks. Extremely civilized:
All told it was a rarefied experience — not least because who the hell knows when we'll get to fly on an A380 again. (No American carriers have ordered the A380, and those that do come to the U.S. will be used sparingly on international routes.) Yet that made us all the more grateful for the opportunity to take the A380 for a test drive. And since we treat our responsibility to share such experiences as a solemn duty, we've enclosed a link to lots more pictures. Happy flying!
Alas, we couldn't be there. But all day today we were tuning in to our Twitter box as our friend Xeni Jardin attended the unveiling of White Knight Two, the privately built mothership that Virgin Galactic will use to offer passenger rides into space. Sir Richard Branson was on hand too, as the four-engine, twin-hulled aircraft was rolled out to an adoring public at Mojave Airport, in Mojave, California.
My blogger buddy, who shall remain nameless: "I kissed the spaceship. I walked right up and hugged it and kissed it." I did too.
Frankly, we'd have kissed it too. Although, properly speaking, WN2 isn't a spaceship. It's actually a launch platform for the smaller craft which will carry passengers — briefly — into orbit. You can see the spacecraft tucked between the hulls of White Knight 2 in these artist renderings:
After Scaled Composites put the rocket plane SpaceShipOne (SS1) into suborbital spaceflight twice in 2004, thus winning the Ansari X-Prize,
Virgin Galactic placed an order for 12 similar spacecraft capable of
carrying six passengers and two crew members into space. Before those
ships can get into space, however, they will need a lift up -- which is
what WhiteKnightTwo will provide.
The original WhiteKnight carried SS1 into the upper atmosphere
before releasing it at 48,000 feet. The SS1 then fired its booster and
flew to an altitude of over 110,000 meters (69 miles), well past the Kármán line, which is commonly used to define the edge of space.
WhiteKnightTwo is a dual-hull quad-engine aircraft roughly three
times larger than the original WhiteKnight. WK2 employs a different
tail construction, using a cruciform instead of the WK's "T" style. The
engines and cockpits are also located in different areas compared to
the original WhiteKnight.
WK2 is the world's first all-composite full-sized aircraft.
Everything apart from the engines and landing gear is constructed from
ultra-lightweight composite materials. Even the newly patented flight
control cables are made from carbon fiber.
And finally, for those of you who were wondering, "What exactly should one wear when attending the unveiling of a revolutionary new spacecraft system?"
In the above photo, Xeni provides the answer: A stylish jacket in Moonbase Control Purple, of course!
Telstar Logistics spent a good part of Saturday afternoon checking out the first-ever Mechanicrawl along San Francisco's northern waterfront. Organized by the folks at the Long Now Foundation, Mechanicrawl is a celebration of the many magnificent mechanical marvels (whew!) clustered along the Bay in this part of the city.
Taking aim at the Jeremiah O'Brien from the Pampanito
Planet Earth in the Orrery, at the Long Now Museum
All were excellent, although the Jeremiah O'Brien scored extra points by firing up one of its boilers for the tour. The ship's giant pistons were bouncing up and down throughout the day, so it felt sort of like playing Fantastic Voyage inside the engine of your car. Amazing:
The crankshaft of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien
It's also worth emphasizing that whole the point of the Mechanicrawl was to call attention to various attractions on permanent display along the San Francisco waterfront. So if you couldn't make it to the Mechanicrawl last Saturday, no sweat... go see these things next chance you get, because they'll still be here, and they do not disappoint.
Whirly Bird, a 1969 arcade game, at the Musée Mécanique
OFFICIAL MEMORANDUM To: All staff and associates From: Telstar Logistics Office of Launch Control and Human Resources Re: Telstar 1 Anniversary
Dear colleagues,
On this day in 1962, our corporate namesake, the Telstar 1 telecommunications satellite, was launched into orbit. For those of you who weren't here last year to take part in our employee orientation, you can review the history and significance of Telstar here and here.
For your convenience, we are also making available this vintage Telstar launch footage from 1962, for those of you who prefer to watch moving pictures:
For everyone else, remember that today is a paid holiday, so enjoy your time off as we celebrate Telstar I, America's heroic "Tower in the Sky."
Mr. Chris Cooper, a Telstar Logistics Strategic Associate who normally operates under the callsign Coop, contacted us over the weekend. Coop directed us toward an amazing set of scans he'd posted which show some of the less well-known illustration work done by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth during the 1960s and 1970s.
In case you've been living in a cave for the last four decades, here's what the Wikipedia sayeth about Big Daddy Roth, and his seminal contributions to the gearhead arts:
Ed "Big Daddy" Roth (March 4, 1932 – April 4, 2001) was an artist and cartoonist who created the hot-rod icon Rat Fink and other extreme characters. As a custom car builder, Roth was a key figure in Southern California's "Kustom Kulture"/Hot-rod movement of the 1960s. He grew up in Bell, California, attending Bell High School, where his classes included auto shop and art.
Roth is best known for his grotesque caricatures — typified by Rat Fink — depicting imaginative, outsized monstrosities driving representations of the hot rods he and his contemporaries built. Although Detroit native Stanley Mouse (Miller) is credited with creating the so-called "Monster Hot Rod" art form, Roth is accepted as the individual who popularized it. Roth is less well known for his innovative work in turning hot rodding from crude backyard engineering where performance was the bottom line into a refined artform where aesthetics were equally important, breaking new ground with fiberglass bodywork.
The illustrations in Coop's collection were mostly created to serve as window decals and other ephemera, and as such they provide terrific insight into early hot rod aesthetics and the kinds of illustration gigs Roth took on to keep bread on his table. They also reflect the way his sensibility lent itself to other audiences, such as soldiers serving in Vietnam. All told, these illustrations have a rawness and diversity that's less evident in Big Daddy's more heavily commercialized work. Don't miss Coop's entire collection.
PS: It should be noted that Coop is also an illustrator of no small repute, and also a formidable gearhead, and it's no stretch to say that he is in many ways a latter-day heir to Big Daddy Roth's throne. If you've never checked out his work, you should. Now!
What's this? A rare color photograph from World War II showing two American P-51 Mustang fighter planes departing for a sortie from an airbase somewhere in England?
Hardly. The planes are authentic, and the setting is convincing, but truth is, this photo was taken last weekend at Hollister Municipal Airport in Hollister, California. The sight of two Mustangs taxiing for takeoff isn't the sort of thing we get to see every day (sigh!), so we paused to enjoy the spectacle.
