A remarkable application of bionics: a miniature land and air vehicle that can fly like a fixed-wing aircraft and also crawl around on the ground. Flight International has an article and a video on the subject.

Pre-ordered the new Portishead albumn today. Used some of my Nectar points for this, so it didn't cost me any actual money at all, which is good. Should hopefully receive it immediately after it is released, which is in less than four weeks from now.

Incidentally, a song off that albumn is available on their MySpace. Certainly no shortage of ( Read more... )

The Faeroe Islands, a Danish dependency in the North Atlantic, is served by an airline called Atlantic Airways. Said airline operats a fleet of BAe 146 and Avro RJ aircraft, the latter being a warmed-up version of the former. They also do quite a lot of flying under a contract to SAS. On their website, there is a page aptly called "Unfamiliar ( Read more... )

As we all know, the standard SAS website booking engine (ResAid) is a bit rubbish. It's inflexible, it's slow, and it doesn't always give the best fares.

Luckily, there is a known workaround. At the time of writing, SAS Australia uses a different system, based on Amadeus, which is accessible here. Amongst its advantages are such diverse elements ( Read more... )

Absolutely classic Dilbert cartoon today, I really felt I must share this one.

Just to let everyone know, my laptop recently went from having a QWERTY keyboard to a WERTY (sic!) one. The 'q' key has just died, and so did the '1' key (together with the exclamation mark). As you may have guessed, I've resorted to using the on-screen keyboard to type in those characters. What joy, what rapture unforeseen ( Read more... )

'Twas exceedingly breezy here in L'boro in the last few days. Last night, one woke up at some wee hour of morning thinking the roof tiles were developing enough bernoullis to depart one's roof for good. Or so it sounded, anyway.

On a related note, some action at Flughafen Hamburg-Fuhlsbüttel earlier today: that'd be a new wingtip fence, at the ( Read more... )

Just had a bit of an earthquake here (00:58 GMT approx.), I would say subjectively felt about 3-4 on the Richter magnitude scale here in Leicestershire - enough to wake me up. Picture lots of people running around in their undies shouting "Bl**dy hell, what was this!?".

Shouldn't be allowed, this sort of thing. I blame global warming. Tsk, tsk.

( Read more... )

The weather is unusually warm here this weekend; it feels more like late March or April than early February. The sun is shining through the haze, the winds are calm, and daytime temperature reaches 12 degrees centigrade. It is positively mild. Luckily for us, this good weather has coincided with some flying. ( A2A (19 pics) )

Got my hands on some of the images I've taken earlier this month. They are, as usual, of somewhat poor quality; that's mainly due to the fact they've been taken through glass (or acrylic, as the case may be).

( January on the Isle )