News notes from around the interweb:
- Booking hotels through the Mastercard portal can be a great way of finding mistake rates
- BWI airport bought robots to give passengers directions and take parking payments but the robots weren’t compatible with the airport’s network and were never deployed. They were purchased without a competitive bidding process, in apparent violation of law. (By the way here’s the strange story of how ‘BWI’ got those letters in the first place.)
Credit: BWI Airport - Woman sues Marriott claiming Residence Inn by Marriott Portland Downtown/Convention Center made her sign a ‘no party policy’ agreement, while not asking white guests to do the same.
- Somehow I hadn’t ever seen this episode of The Twilight Zone about a Boeing 707 whose ground speed increases rapidly, taking the plane back in time. When they arrive in 1939 there’s no Idlewild airport, no FAA, and the runway at (what would later be called) LaGuardia was too short for them to land.
- Such an amazing train wreck of a conspiracy theory, I couldn’t look away. (HT: @jonostrower)
Gotta say, the best part of that conspiracy theory video were the clips of the vertical takeoffs, where the actual footage was morphed into CGI animation…looked “almost” real.
I saw the “no party policy” news item early this morning. I’m an old boring looking white guy and I’ve had to sign “no party policy” forms many times at hotels. I didn’t stick around long enough to see if black, Asian, Hispanic guests had to sign one.
This seems like a woefully poorly explained conspiracy theory. Now that we’ve established what does not power commercial aircraft, can they enlighten us about what does power them? Perhaps we could get one of the Alaska Airlines 747 pilots to explain it.
Idlewild was renamed John F. Kennedy airport.
A tanker trailer holds only 3000 gallons? Someone is innumerate AND has no experience estimating by eyeball. Try about 5 times that.
I would bet that the “discriminated against” person still had a local address on her ID or Marriott account, so that is likely why she had to sign a no party agreement and others did not. Almost certainly this will be dismissed as frivolous when they show that all local guests need to sign the agreement.
BWI’s full name is a mess. They wanted to honor Thurgood Marshall but there are better ways to do so than throw it on an airport where no one locally ever uses it.
Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport is a mouthful. Even the web page is simply https://www.bwiairport.com/
As far as competitive bids go, they are a mixed bag. You want some competition to get a reasonable price but too often (at least with labor contracts) someone wins a contract and then cannot staff the contract because no one wants to work at the too low pay rates.
Contracting, especially at the Federal level is a huge mess. You often have to use minority firms but what do they do? They buy items from the large companies, mark them up 10-20% and resell them to the government. So the government ends up making a “donation” to those firms.
Hard to believe that people actually believe in these stupid conspiracy theories.
But then there is trump as president to remind us that people are in fact that dumb…scary.
The mastercard hotel mistake rate link is broken.
As a Flight Test Engineer/Propulsion SME, I found the conspiracy video so compelling, I watched some of his others (like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNhVAuz02Bg&t=310s). However, he got one major fact wrong about how jet engines work. We don’t compress air to separate nitrogen from oxygen – after all, GN2 is inert, so we cannot burn it. What we do is pull the VOCs out of the chemtrails we leave in the atmosphere and burn those. This gives us the added benefit of enhancing the CIA-driven mind-controlling powers of the chemtrails and allows us to accelerate global warming because, as an industry, we hate people who get to live in tropical and sub-tropical climates and want them to suffer. Airliners are so overpowered, we could easily operate them only on the 90% thrust produced by the spinning fan, but that wouldn’t advance the goals of our Illuminati overlords.
Looks more like the mistake rate article/post being linked to has been pulled.
Mastercard World Elite service is not available for Canadians, so frustrating that so many perks are not available for Canadians!
I understand what the jet fuel conspiracy theorist means about the wings being too thin to hold 1000’s of gallons of fuel. But i missed how he explains why plane crashes often create fireballs and black smoke? Perhaps these events are staged to support the illusion?