What you don’t want your flight path to look like

by Grant Martin on

American Airlines flight 1586 on its way to Toronto blew a tire on its takeoff from LAX earlier today, requiring them to return to the airport. As you might already know, however, you can’t land an aircraft with a full tank of gas — it’s just too hard on the brakes — so the pilots had to kill some time.

As a result, instead of the pleasant transcontinental flight that flight 1586 passengers were expecting, the aircraft ended up circling around Catalina island for a little while, burning jet fuel and offering a nice tour of the off shore vacation island. In the end, the flight landed safely and the passengers were sent out about five hours late. I would have much preferred a circling tour of the Grand Canyon, but I guess that was too far away.

All standard procedure for a blown out tire though. From the flight map above courtesy of FlightAware.com though, it looks like a boring afternoon for some 130 passengers.

Check out the AA1586 flight on FlightAware for other interesting tidbits about the flight.

Other tales from the skies
Amazing and insane stories from a real-life flight attendant and co-pilot


10 tips for smarter flying


Urban mapping creates multi vision foldable maps

by Grant Martin on

Ever get sick of carrying around a huge guidebook with ten different maps of your favorite city, with each pertinent map flagged so you can flip all over the place when you’re searching? Urban mapping thinks that they have the solution for you.

Remember that 2d-3d technology that they created 60 years ago where you can print on various angles on a document and see a different image when you look at the picture from a different angle? Apparently it’s good for more circus tricks and cracker jack prizes.

Urban mapping has used the technology to overlay multiple maps onto one canvas — neighborhood, street, subway, what have you — look at the map from a different angle and you’ll see a different layer. Sound useful? Check out the map in action below:

How 1920’s Englishmen found their way around

by Scott Carmichael on

Forget GPS, Google Maps, Mappoint and the new iPhone; this is how navigation was done back in 1920. Drivers would insert the tiny scroll maps into the watch, and turn a little dial as they progressed.

Sadly, back in 1920 there were not enough drivers to make this a successful product, and it would take 80 years for personal navigation units to become popular, though clearly not as fascinating as this watch.

The watch is part of a large collection of 19th and early 20th century gadgets on display at the British Library business and intellectual property center in London. The gadgets come from the private collection of Maurice Collins OBE, author of Eccentric Contraptions and Ingenious Gadgets.

Other gadgets on display include the first automatic food processor and a cup specially designed to let mustached men drink their soup without getting bits of soup stuck in their stache.

The exhibition opened last Thursday, and will be open until Thursday November 10th 2008.

(Photo courtesy of British Library Business and Intellectual Centre/PA Wire)

Create high resolution maps of all your trips with Flightmap

by Scott Carmichael on

It’s raining outside, so this morning was the perfect opportunity to sit down, browse through all my boarding pass stubs and enter them in a new application I’m testing.

Flightmap is a flight logging program that keeps track of every flight you have taken. You can log the flight number, aircraft type, airline and geeky things like the aircraft registration number and your seat number. Frequent fliers can even keep track of their award and status miles.

The application has an internal database that calculates the distance between all airports in the world, and naturally, it can also convert airport names into airport codes.

Once you have entered all your flights, you can view a summary that displays your most frequently flown routes, the longest and shortest flights you’ve ever taken as well as your most popular airline.

The best part of Flightmap is the ability to generate high resolution maps of your flights. In fact, Flightmap can generate stunning maps up to 32 megapixels large, which is great if you want to print them as a poster. If the built in map colors don’t interest you, then you can even export your flight history as a Google “KML” file, which can be imported into Google Earth (which is totally useless, but oh so cool looking).

Once you have created a map, it is fairly easy to save the image file and set it as your new desktop background so you can show all your colleagues what a well traveled individual you are.

Flightmap is a very slick, easy to use application and the interface is nice and clean. You can view a guided tour of Flightmap here. The application costs 19.90 EUR ($30) but a try before you buy version is available on their site, albeit with several limitations; maps are “defaced” and you can only export your first 10 flights.

All in all, it’s been great to finally have a nice place to save my flights. There are some other services with similar features, but this is the first one I’ve come across that is not web-based (which means it’s easy to take along with you). Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got some more flights to enter!

National Geographic launches Topo.com

by Grant Martin on

I kind of have a thing for maps — when I was a kid I either wanted to be a cartographer or a pickle factory (proper) — so I perked up when I heard that the National Geographic Society had just launched Topo.com, a comprehensive database and guide for topographic maps in the United States.

Inside, users are free to browse around an interactive Google map onto which the NGS’s topo database has been integrated. One can browse around updates trail and wilderness maps and ultimately customize a personal map to be printed and shipped to you.

The best part is that users can add their own video, pictures and trip reports to the site, making it incredibly easier to research a trip.

User content is still a bit low on the site, but take the opportunity to tool around your local area and see how the topography of the land around you changes. It’s really interesting to see your neighborhood not from the perspective from the roads, proper, but rather from the perspective of elevation and boundaries.