Today’s Photo of the Day depicts an incredibly small airplane in a vast blue sky. In addition to forcing a recognition of scale, it’s also a downright delightful and uncanny viewing pleasure to look at such a tiny speck of a plane in an enormous sea of blue. The plane in the image is so small that it almost resembles a radar tracking image. Photographer lucyinthesky withdiamonds snapped this image in Breckenridge, Colorado last week.
Been gazing at the sky lately? Got an image of said sky you’d like to share with the world? Upload it to Flickr’s Gadling group pool and it might just end up as a future Photo of the Day.
It was planned long before the earthquake-turned-tsunami event in Japan to test the readiness of 33 Caribbean countries in the region’s first full-scale tsunami warning exercise. On Wednesday, March 23, a fictitious earthquake of 7.6 magnitude occurred off the coast of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Bulletins were issued by the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Island and by the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Ewa Beach, Hawaii for the rest of the area and the test was underway.
The Caribbean tsunami test, named Caribe Wave 11 did not involve communities but aimed to test the effectiveness of alert, monitoring and warning systems among all the emergency management organizations throughout the region. The test was designed to determine whether Caribbean countries are ready to respond in the event of a dangerous tsunami. Results will be reported in April.
“The earthquake and tsunami that have devastated Japan have shown how essential alert systems are,” said Irina Bokova, UNESCO’s director general.
The countries that attended the tsunami alert exercise are: Aruba, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, France (Martinique, Guadeloupe, St. Martin, Guyane), Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Netherlands (Bonaire, Saba, Sint Eustatius, Curacao and Sint Marteen), Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, United Kingdom (Anguilla, British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Montserrat, Turks and Caicos), and the United States.
Over the past 500 years, there have been 75 tsunamis in the Caribbean, which is about 10 percent of the world total during that period, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Tsunamis caused by earthquakes, landslides or volcanoes have caused 3,5000 deaths in the region since the mid-1800s
Encounter Restaurant, housed in Los Angeles iconic Theme Building was named a top spot on the list of best airport restaurants by Frommers.com recently.
Frommers.com placed the airport restaurant on its list of top ten favorite list calling it, “… a 1960s Star Trek set gone Technicolor, serving ‘art-food’ (American classics in oddball visual arrangements) that’s simultaneously hip and kid-friendly.” when asked by USAToday.
But Frommer’s is just the latest in a string of high rankings for Encounter.
Esquire.com placed Encounter on its list of Ten Best Airport Restaurants in the World. Esquire, whose list includes One Flew South at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport and Piquillo at JFK added “With its Star Trek-meets-Austin Powers decor (not to mention menu) and a lighting design by former Disney Imagineers, this recently refurbished restaurant has to be seen to be believed.”
Food and Wine has also given Encounter the nod, including it on its “Ultimate Airport Dining Survival Guide: Best Airport Restaurants noting “It’s home to this space-age restaurant, known for 360-degree views, stylings stolen from The Jetsons and California-style dishes like organic salads and mushroom ravioli with grilled asparagus”
The 50-year-old landmark LAX Theme Building, recently finished a three-year, $12.3-million renovation, which included a unique seismic retrofit involving the installation of a rooftop Tuned Mass Damper (TMD) containing 600 tons of steel (equivalent to the weight of two Boeing 747s), which was the first time in the U.S. that a TMD was installed at the top of a building.
The restaurant was created and is operated by a joint-venture partnership between Delaware North Companies Travel Hospitality Services, Inc. and Connie Bass, a Los Angeles entrepreneur and operator of the Ultimate Symphony Event Planners, a full-service event planning and gourmet catering service, and Cookies By Connie #1. As Director of Outside Sales and Marketing for the Encounter Restaurant she is responsible for local marketing efforts, community outreach and media relations. As a side dish, the Los Angeles native positions the restaurant as an entity for airport travelers, as well as for the diverse communities surrounding the airport.
Encounter’s hours are: Lunch from 11:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., 7 days a week. Dinner: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. and Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, 4:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. The observation deck is open to the public on Saturday and Sunday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. It is located at 209 World Way at LAX. For more information and reservations, call 310-215-5151.
In this video we see a kayaker off the coast of Panama City, Florida caught on video paddling near an enormous basking shark. Basking sharks are the second largest fish in the world, second only to the whale shark and can grow to 33 feet long and weigh up to four tons.
Kayaker/Adventurer Josh Reeves works for a shark tour guide company, so when he saw a rare “basking shark” off the Panama City Coast, “he couldn’t believe it” reports KTLA.com.
Have you ever had baggage problems when flying? Lost, misplaced, damaged in some way? Did it make you mad? If so, you are not alone. A new study shows that baggage problems irk over one-third of travelers. 34% of all air passengers have experienced baggage-related delays when checking in, depositing or picking up bags on their most recent flight.
The study was commissioned by Amadeus, the Global Distribution System used by many travel agencies, composed by Norm Rose of Travel Tech Consulting and says new technology can help. It details three key “passenger pain points” in the airport experience; Baggage, Delayed or Canceled flights, and Time Delays at check-in and security.
Called “Navigating the Airport of Tomorrow” the study suggests that adopting technology can help solve some of the problems too.
The report found that 18 in every 100 passengers had experienced a delayed or canceled flight during their last travel experience. Ten percent of passengers complained that they had not received “relevant and real-time information.”
The survey found that at 43%, “disruption management” ranked as the single most important area where travelers would like to see improvement.
Just under 40% of travelers said they would “adopt services that delivered real-time information to their mobile devices on flight and baggage status, as well as directions at the airport.”
A third of respondents require greater self-service options, including the ability to purchase additional services at airport kiosks and self-tagging options for luggage.
The survey found that these problems translate into negative perceptions of the carriers. If customers are made to wait in line for longer than 30 minutes to check-in, their perception of the airline swings negatively by 10%.
New, emerging technologies can help too such as one-touch check-in and progress tracking, permanent luggage tag technology that enables bag tracking through the airport, onto the airplane and off again at the final destination and roaming agents with iPad-like computers to provide information to passengers.