Galley Gossip: SFO airline museum, LAX airline show & a request for photos!

by Heather Poole on

Here are two different letters I recently received from two different guys named Ken concerning two different airline themed topics you may be interested in – the San Francisco airline museum and the airline show that is now on tour…

Heather,

Thanks so much for your blog and Galley Gossip, I’m a regular reader! As a matter of fact I gave your blog info to a pilot I met today (through my regular course of work) who actually has flown with and knows Kent Wien (and his brother) but was unaware of Kent’s Cockpit Chronicles on Gadling, which is where I found your site. Since you have a mini airline museum perhaps I will email you a few things from my Pan Am collection some day that would be suitable for framing! Don’t worry, no pictures of me! If you ever get a long layover in SFO check out the Airport Museum in the non-secure part of the International terminal. It’s pretty impressive and free!

All the best and I will continue to read and enjoy your work.

Warmest regards,

Ken A.

Ken A.

Thank you for reading my blog! And thank you, thank you, thank you, for telling me about the San Francisco airport museum located in the international terminal. I went to the website and found myself amazed. The museum is so cool, in fact, that I don’t know how it is I’ve never heard of this museum.

“I told you about that museum!” my husband exclaimed when I mentioned it in passing.

I looked at him like he was crazy. “You did?”

“Don’t you remember when I told your friend Stephen he should donate a couple uniforms from his collection to the museum?”

“Oh yeah!” I exclaimed. As for Stephen, he’s a flight attendant who has an amazing collection of flight attendant memorabilia that may just rival any museum in the world.

Anyway, next time I find myself at the San Francisco airport I will definitely make the extra effort to visit the exhibits on display. I’m bummed that I missed Take Your Seat, A History of Passenger Airline Seats, as well as Cathay Pacific Airways, Six Decades of Service, but I do hope to catch Cabin Comforts: Photographs of Airliner Interiors, which will be running until May 2009. And to think something so amazing is actually free!

Like you mentioned above, Ken, most airline enthusiasts have a mini airline museum of their own. I’d love to see your Pan Am collection. As you already know, I have my own collection of anything and everything airline related located in my guestroom closet. Gadling writer and pilot Kent Wien apparently has a pretty big collection, too, and my guess is a lot of his memorabilia has his name on it due to the fact that Wien Air, which folded in 1985, was the second oldest airline in the United States. So what do you say we – me, you, Kent, Stephen, and anyone else who has a collection – take photographs of our personal airline museums and share them here on Gadling? I’ll create the gallery. All you have to do is take a photo, just one photo, and email it to me at the address posted below.

Thanks for writing, Ken!

Heather Poole

Heather,

I just thought I’d let you know, that the airline memorabilia show will be held Sat. Jan.24th 9:00a-3:00p. It will be at the Hacienda Hotel on Sepulveda just south of LAX. I know you’re in NYC this month on reserve but i thought I’d let you know just the same. Hope you make it through reserve!!! UGH!!! Keep well. Fly Safe!!!!

Ken J.

Ken J.

Thank you for the reminder. I’ve been meaning to check out that airline show for two years now. After five scheduled days off, I’ll be on-call in New York on the 25th, so I’ll be commuting from Los Angeles to New York on the day of the show. Just my luck. But I did go to the website and saw that the show will be in New York at the LGA Marriott hotel on March 21st, so perhaps I’ll catch it then. Are you going to the show in Los Angeles? If so, let me know what it’s like, and more importantly, what is sold, because as you know I’m interested in anything with a flight attendant theme that I can add to my own airline museum, the one I will be photographing for the gallery I mentioned above. My husband recently boxed up my museum and put it in storage while I was away from home on a layover. Hey, that’s okay, just means I have more room for more stuff! Thanks again for the reminder.

Happy travels,

Heather Poole

Email photos to Skydoll123@yahoo.com

All photos courtesy of Telstar Logistics – flickr.com

A wrap-up of Cuba news and stories

by Brenda Yun on

As my plans to travel there solidify, Cuba has been on my mind — and luckily quite present in the news! Here’s a wrap-up of some of the interesting stories coming from Castro country.

  • Taxis and transportation: Unlike his brother, Raúl Castro is encouraging independent drivers to apply for taxi licenses to improve transportation in major cities in Cuba.
  • Guantanamo hunger strikes reach a two-year high: Despite the looming closure of the Guantanamo prison, close to 50 prisoners are refusing to eat.
  • Fidel is lost but not gone: Venezuelan President and close friend of ailing Fidel Castro says the former Cuban leader, who has not been seen in public since July 2006, will likely stay behind closed doors.
  • Over 10,000 artifacts from Hemingway’s Cuban farm are being digitized: To literary historians’ delight, 2,000 documents, 900 maps, 3,000 photographs, and 9,000 books are being preserved for the Ernest Hemingway Museum in Cuba.
  • Dateline Havana on NPR: I heard a great program on NPR yesterday based on Reese Erlich’s book, Dateline Havana: The Real Story of U.S. Policy and the Future of Cuba, which touches on such ripe topics as organic farming and traveling musicians.

Making light of Colombia’s crime problem

by Brenda Yun on


There was much debate in the comments on my article about “dangerous” travel destinations — most of which pertained to the current clean-up of Colombia’s city of Medellín. Having traveled to Colombia for three months during the spring of 2008, I believe Colombia as a country (particularly the dangers of traveling there) is largely misunderstood.

Take Mike Peters’s “Mother Goose & Grimm” comic strip that was published a week ago on January 2, 2009.

The Colombian Coffee Growers Federation, which includes over 500,000 coffee producers, were so offended by Peters’ suggestion that it is suing Peters “for damage and harm, detriment to intellectual property and defamation.” The federation is seeking no less than 20 million dollars, claiming that the cartoon links Colombian coffee to organized crime and “attacks the national dignity and the reputation of coffee from Colombia.”

As a cartoonist, Mike Peters seeks controversy, but this type is harmful to our already skewed perception of Colombia. Peters’s cartoon suggests that Colombia is a dangerous place. I’m not clear about how drinking Colombian coffee could be considered a dangerous activity, but there’s definitely a sense of fear in this comic strip with regard to crime in Colombia.

While I’m all for freedom of speech, I think in this particular instance Peters could have picked a topic that he knew more about or discussed a country that he really understood. Instead, this particular cartoon defames a nation and offers an unfair and inaccurate portrayal of Colombia and its coffee for all the world to see. I just hope readers will know the difference between sarcasm and reality.

[via the Associated Press]

The Incorrigible City: Detroit

by Grant Martin on

I’ve spent the better part of ten years around the city of Detroit, but except for brief forays into the city for DEMF or to visit St. Andrew’s Hall, have been too shy to spend much time downtown. To many of us metropolitan folk, Detroit is trouble. Dirt, crime, poverty, empty buildings and dilapidation, while not really that prevalent downtown, is what many people come to view the city as, and perhaps as a result, much of the core has suffered.

Detroit has a much more to offer, however, the old city full of culture, rich architecture and history. You just have to look in the right places. The Incorrigible City, a new blog about Detroit, does just that.

The blog looks past much of the grime that Detroit has now collected and is an interesting look at the culture, architecture and development of Michigan’s largest city. It’s stories hit a particular chord right now, too, as the automotive industry begins to crumble and jobs and people flee from the state. It’s a sobering, beautiful look at the city, but well worth the visit.

Star Island won’t make you change

by Tom Johansmeyer on

It seems like every effort to “go green” requires a change of behavior. Hotels let you choose to use towels or sheets twice. Your parents instructed you to turn the lights off when leaving a room. These measures can affect change, but they usually don’t. Despite the clear benefits, people just won’t change. But, what if you could find a way to protect the environment without having to change any part of your life? This is the elusive goal of most eco-minded designers, builders and activists, but few have discovered the secret handshake.

David Sklar, it seems, has found the answer.

Star Island, located in Eleuthera, Bahamas, is designed to be carbon-neutral, even if you forget to turn the television off when you slip out to the beach. A unique combination of embedded power sources that harness natural forces and savvy architecture allow you to save the planet by doing nothing. Sklar’s project, which includes both resort and residential properties, is your ticket to guilt-free luxury.

The property is currently under construction in the Bahamas. Sklar, the president and lead designer, and his team at Dalu Design Group, envisioned a resort built around pragmatic environmentalism. Buildings account for about 70 percent of the factors that lead to global warming, he says, particularly around the consumption of energy. So, Sklar realized that a better design could have a pronounced impact on the environment. The key, however, is to affect conservation without thought. People won’t change, but you can change everything around them.

See artist renderings of Star Island, including an EXCLUSIVE shot of the pavilion.

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Here’s where the essential tension lies. We all love fast cars, big rooms and oversized televisions. We like big and convenient and immediate. When traveling, we’re even worse. At home, my sheets are fine for a full week, but on the road, I can’t imagine using the same set two nights in a row. I have the same attitude toward towels. Conservatism doesn’t work unless I can have fresh sheets every night without damaging the planet. We all love big rooms, oversized television screens and fast cars. Even if we privately lament what we’re doing to the environment, we can’t let go of what makes us happy.

Fortunately, this is what Sklar has in mind. He believes you shouldn’t have to make these tough choices. A carefully considered engineering effort can deliver the lifestyle you crave without impairing the world around you.

Star Island does not tap the power grid to fuel the washing machines, lights and kitchens. The resort generates its own power. Don’t expect to see any wind farms or endless rows of solar panels on the 35-acre resort. The tools are built into the structures, with photo voltaic energy-generating roof panels, and water is gathered through a rain water collection system.

Once open, the resort will offer guilt-free villas, bungalows and homes, where visitors (or residents) can live guilt-free. The Star Island villas range from one to three bedrooms and include custom gourmet kitchens. And, they aren’t small, some reaching 2,000 sqft in size (much, much larger than my apartment). Restaurants and recreation (such as snorkeling) are available on site, a nice touch since you probably won’t want to leave anyway.

The amenities that Sklar promises are exactly what you’d expect to find at an upscale resort. You can dip into a private plunge pool at one of Star Island’s bungalows or refresh yourself in an outdoor shower. Of course, you’re never far from the beach, not to mention snorkeling and other on- (or under-) water activities. None of it happens with the help of oil, coal or split atoms.

What possesses a man to pursue green recreation and living with such zeal?

Sklar was not kidnapped by Greenpeace, and he didn’t have a mountain-top epiphany that changed his view of the world. Instead, he took his cues from his life. The experienced architect, who was “raised on fossil fuels,” as he puts it, realized when he looked at his son that the Earth would continue to be here well into the future. Even though he may not be around to suffer the most severe consequences of environmental mayhem, he understood that his actions would shape the world his son inherits.

Star Island began with this altruistic motivation … and a sense of defiance. Sklar sought to prove that he could create from scratch a top-tier resort that could operate without the support of a substantial, global energy industry. He plans to resist the convenient pull of traditional energy source and create an example to his peers, one that can be replicated. Sklar believes that Star Island can serve as a model to real estate developers and architects everywhere. If a trend emerges, he will have started a revolution in building design and construction.

But, we need to take this one step at a time. Star Island is still under construction. Houses have yet to be sold, and guestrooms need to be filled. Sklar doesn’t expect the warm, fuzzy feelings of environmentalists to get his business humming, though he certainly welcomes them. The call of luxury, he expects, will bring people to his resort, and their experiences will bring them back. Star Island is a business, after all, it just happens to be doing something great in the process.

Learn a bit more about Star Island in the NY Times.