Rubénerd Blog :)

Got an email this morning from Google claiming one of their advertising products will be retroactively branded as DoubleClick. Huh?

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Well that’s just a tad bit worrying.

Delta chief executive Richard Anderson has reiterated his bullish view that the carrier’s large fleet of ageing Boeing MD-80s retain a cost advantage over newer Boeing 737-800s that is largely driven by lower ownership costs.

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Having already typed one pointless aviation related post, I figured one more before I head off to bed wouldn’t hurt. I call it "what a bit of paint can do!" The photos were both taken this year by Jan Ostrowski and Nils Baker respectively.

And you know I never did learn what those "nostrils" in the DC-8 nose were for. Were they for bleed air? Because if they were, one could say the DC-8 had a… nosebleed! Get it? Get it? I’m going to bed now.

Today’s favourite photo I found on the internets is the one included above for your convenience. Really, there’d be no point talking about a photo I’d found without showing you what it was, otherwise for all you know I could have been making it up. It’s an integrity thing.

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In the paraphrased and modified words of Tom Lehrer, if I may digress momentarily from the mainstream of blog posts here, I would like to share something that is completely pointless. Aside from the lack of wood veneer on some of the walls, don’t you think Yerevan’s new airport kinda looks a bit like Adelaide’s new airport? It even has the slanted roof, round skylights, free standing signs and whatnot.

Hard hitting stuff.

If I had posted this entry before my praise for Unicomp (Kudos to Unicomp), it would have been entry 1787, a particularly onerous number considering troubles at Boeing with their latest generation 787 Dreamliner. A sub-par segue I admit, but I did think it was spooky.

After yet more delays, Qantas have cancelled their order for 15 of the medium range, energy efficient airliners and have deferred their order for Jetstar, their low cost subsidiary. From Flightblogger:

The news came early this morning in Sydney, that Australia’s largest airline, Qantas had made significant changes to its 787 order, deferring the 15 787-8s it was supposed to receive starting in mid-2010 for Jetstar, while [cancelling] 15 additional 787-9s scheduled for delivery in 2014 and 2015.

Qantas management claim this has nothing to do with the repeated delays for the 787, instead citing troubling economic times as the reason. I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on this one, but I can’t help but think these delays did have some bearing on their decision. On the other hand as a regular air traveller I would take designs thoroughly safety tested over well timed releases any day of the week!

While ultimately I’d much prefer to have high speed trains replace the bulk of air travel because they’d use less energy and would be more comfortable and fun, I think the 787 Dreamliner is a remarkable plane. If you haven’t followed it’s development, the fuselage is the first to be fabricated largely out of composite materials which is more lightweight and stronger than aluminium, and the uniquely shaped GE engines give similar thrust with less fuel consumption. We’re really looking at the future here, at least I hope we are.

ANA Lockheed L-1011 TriStar alongside a Boeing 747 (a -200 series I think) for size comparison. Taken by hyougushi in Osaka, 1992

I’ll preface this post by saying that while I am aware this is supposed to be a blog discussing software and the intertubes, I have long since given up attempting to stay on topic here the whole time because it’s just not in my nature. It’s not that I’m scatterbrained or anything, more that I just have far too many unrelated interests for my own good. One of these disparate interests is commercial aviation, you can check out my Transport category to read more if that’s your cup of tea.

I narrowly missed post 1011 by one entry; 1011 isn’t only an important number because it could be interpreted as binary (it’s 11 in decimal by the way), but also because it was the service number of the commercially unsuccessful Lockheed L-1011 TriStar developed in the 1970s.

For those not versed in the history of the jetliner, the L-1011 TriStar was a widebody commercial airliner developed shortly after the Boeing 747 for customers who wanted the 747’s range but didn’t need as much passenger capacity. While the temptation was there to place deck chairs on the nose to resemble a 747, the high cruising speeds of the jetliner would have made safety hard to guarantee, ant it would have been horribly noisy for the passengers sitting in such chairs. And a bit chilly. I’m such a dolt.

As with the McDonnell Douglas DC-10 with which it competed in the same market segment, the L-1011 TriStar was a trijet with the second engine mounted in and under the vertical stabiliser. Unlike the DC-10 which placed the second engine above the fuselage, the L-1011 used an S duct similar to the Boeing 727 which was far more complicated to design and maintain, but was much quieter and more stable. Indeed the L-1011 was one of the quietest commercial jetliners of the period which I’m sure people who had houses in the flight paths of jetliners would have appreciated.

Another L-1011 photo by Hyougushi in Osaka, 1992

One of the interesting aspect of the Lockheed L-1011 TriStar’s development was it’s turbofans. Unlike McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed opted to partner with Rolls Royce exclusively for the engines for the new jetliner. In a cruel twist, given the complexity and size of the project Rolls Royce went bankrupt and had to be purchased by the British government, an eerie thing to read about given all the bailouts governments around the world now are undertaking. Ultimately because of Rolls Royce’s financial difficulties Lockheed were unable to complete any of their airframes until over a year after Douglas had entered the market with the DC-10.

Despite the bad initial reputation the DC-10 had with reliability and noise, the quieter L-1011 was never able to recover from this year long lag in development time, and Lockheed abandoned all commercial airline manufacturing after delivering 250 aircraft, only half of what they would have needed to break even.

Another interesting aspect of the development of the L-1011 which I didn’t even know about until reading it’s article on Wikipedia (and if it’s on Wikipedia it has to be true!) was that Lockheed officials and senior members of the Japanese Diet were even involved in a bribery scandal!

Lockheed bribed the members of the Japanese government to subsidize ANA’s purchase of L-1011s. The resulting political scandal led to the arrest of Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka. Within Lockheed, board chairman Daniel Haughton and vice chairman and president Carl Kotchian resigned from their posts on 13 February 1976. Tanaka was eventually tried and found guilty of violating foreign exchange control laws, but was not charged with bribery, a more serious criminal offense.

Definitely a very troubled airliner, but the L-1011 still to this day is one of my favourite designs just because it was so unconventional, and because of Lockheed’s decision to proactively tackle the problem of sound pollution.

Now if only the eejit who has the cheap 4 cylinder 1990s Honda Accord across the street from us removed the silly, 1 metre wide muffler so we wouldn’t have to put up with his noise pollution every evening and early morning we’d be home free. "Muffler" in this case is really stretching the term. Then again, who am I to judge, perhaps he’s desperately attempting to compensate for something he lacks, or can’t do very well. I take public transport and ride motor scooters for this reason.

Another great photo from Airliners.net, one of the first websites I discovered when we got internet in the 90s. It does look as though it’s wearing mascara, or some very swish shades! I will let you draw your own conclusions.

Aircraft

Dassault Falcon 900DX, OE-IDX (cn 604)

Taken at

Innsbruck – Kranebitten (INN / LOWI), Austria, October 31, 2008

Photographer

Florian Larcher

Despite WordPress assigning this post as p1198, this is in fact the 777th post! Yes, it’s time for another one of our really hated loved Useless Rubenerd Blog Milestones!

Given the fact I’m in the 700+ range of posts, there are some posts which have the same number as famous Boeing jetliners. Having nurtured an interest in commercial aviation since I was a kid, I figured I’d create some small posts about these planes. I missed the boat on the 707/720 and 727 (no, I’m sorry the 717 was the MD-95!) but I did do posts on these 7×7s: 3, 4, 5 and 6.

Very sleek Singapore Airlines Boeing 777-300 9V-SWA from Wikipedia by Juergen Lehle

Despite the name "Boeing 777", the Boeing 777 was designed by Boeing Commercial Airplanes in response to the then large capacity gap between the 767-300ER and the 747-400. The 777 is currently the world’s largest twin engined commercial airliner; in laymen’s terms this means its the largest commercial airliner to have more than 2 full-sized engines, but less than 4. It can carry between 283 and 368 passengers in a three-class configuration and has a top range of 17,500 kilometres, or 6,890,314,960.63 inches for those who use the Imperial system.

The Boeing 777 was the first airliner to be fully designed on a computer; despite this a smaller ratio of airframes have been involved in catastrophic crashes as compared to other airliners currently flying. In another departure (pun intended) from traditional design, eight airlines were directly involved from the beginning of the project (Cathay Pacific, American, Delta, All Nippon Airways, British Airways, Japan Airlines, Qantas, and United).

The latest generation 777s use the world’s largest diameter (3.25m) and most powerful turbofan engines currently avaliable: the General Electric GE90-115B. To get an idea of how gigantic these engines are, take a look at this classic Boeing 747 which has been retrofitted with a GE90 (inner) compared to the original engine (outer):

A GE90-115B mounted on the #2 pylon of GE’s Boeing 747 flight test aircraft at the Mojave Airport in 2002 by Alan Radecki Akradecki

As of May 2008, 56 customers have placed orders for 1,080 777s, with Singapore Airlines being the largest customer; Singapore Airlines of course being the national airline of Singapore, strange though it may seem.

You can find out more about the Boeing 777 at their official website.

Cranky Geeks is one of the best video podcasts I watch… probably because it’s one of the only video podcasts I watch. No but seriously it’s a fantastic show, I encourage you to check it out especially if you enjoy lighthearted and cranky discussion of tech trends and the well-deserved ridiculing of stupid news stories.

This was my review Episode 080 dated the 04th of September 2007.

“Yeah well the Zune phone STARTS in the toilet!” Guy Kawasaki definitely seemed like he was having a great time, I wish I could have been there… unless that would mean I have to use one of those Vista microphones he mentioned!

Adam Curry dragged on a tad (as I seem to always do) a bit with some of the points he was making, but he was definitely an interesting guest and a great guy to have on considering the discussion points. He made a great point about crime in the US versus the Netherlands, which I think could easily apply to many, many places. And I hadn’t thought about not being able to drive away in a flying vehicle after landing at an airport. That would be a real bummer.

Sebastian and Adam’s point that the “green” label is being used to sell things is increasingly true in so many consumer products, but as with both of them I can’t help but feeling skeptical at the same time. Woolworths in my birth country of Australia was recently busted because they claimed their tissue products were from sustainable forests when actually they were from endangered rainforests in Indonesia. If a company is sincere in it’s efforts to be greener that’s great, but if they’re just using it as a marketing ploy without much real substance its a bit of a worry.

Sebastian was really sharp this episode, he really looked as though he knew what he was taking about. Not that he usually doesn’t, that didn’t come out right! I thought his comments about blog linking, spamming and Wifi were right on the mark.

What’s with the “paper” newspapers though? Do they still make those stone-tablet-era things? And does anyone still use Yahoo Messenger anymore? Or ActiveX? Or Monster? Or flying cars?

I was in Malaysia when the DVD sniffing dogs were there and it really seems like their authorities are finally starting to crack down on piracy. Its much easier to find them there still than most places, but many of the shopping centres that used to be full of discs are being boarded up. Whether this is just a token move like the Russians shutting down AllOfMp3 to appease American copyright owners or whether its a genuine effort (pun intended) remains to be seen.

I couldn’t care less about American football (I’m a nerd at university and jocks are my sworn enemies) but perhaps not wearing the suit jacket allowed John to be a bit less formal. Hookers. He certainly looked better this episode too because I watched this episode on my laptop instead of my iPod. That didn’t come out right either.