Today’s Shapshot

Untitled, a photo by Kemon01 on Flickr.

A little vintage United Air Lines.

Tags: 737, Boeing, United Air Lines

Norfolk, VA to see Amtrak trains again

Amtrak train travels through Virginia on it's way towards Washington, DC.

Governor Bob McDonnell  announced on January 18, 2012 that the expected start date of the Amtrak Virginia extension to/from Norfolk will begin by December 31, 2012.  This moves the service to start 10 months earlier than originally projected.

“This service will provide immediate relief to road weary travelers between two of the state’s most congested regions” said Governor McDonnell.  “This service is long overdue and I congratulate our partners and commend their cooperation in moving up the scheduled start date.”

The Commonwealth’s Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation (DRPT), CSX, Norfolk Southern and the City of Norfolk have been working speedily to make the necessary upgrades for the service. The round-trip train will bring intercity passenger rail service to Norfolk for the first time since 1977, and will link Norfolk with a single-seat ride to Richmond, Washington, D.C. and cities as far north as Boston.

The updated timeline comes from today’s Commonwealth Transportation Board meeting where they passed a resolution outlining the new goals and start date.  

“There is high demand for passenger rail service in Virginia as demonstrated by considerable ridership growth throughout the Commonwealth,” said Amtrak Vice President of Government Affairs and Corporate Communications Joe McHugh. “We have a strong partnership with the Commonwealth and look forward to operating this expanded service to Norfolk in 2012, providing passengers the option of convenient one-seat service to Washington and Northeast Corridor destinations.”

The Norfolk train marks the third service expansion launched under the Amtrak Virginia partnership, which has introduced service to Richmond and Lynchburg since October 2009. Virginia is the 15th state to partner with Amtrak for intercity passenger rail service, and the successful launch of these new services is made possible through the partnership between DRPT, Amtrak and the host railroads along the routes. Amtrak Virginia routes had sizable gains in fiscal year 2011 over fiscal year 2010 with increases of 28.5 percent on the Washington-Lynchburg route and 19.1 percent on the Washington-Newport News route.

“This service is a win-win for Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia.  The economies of these two regions are intertwined and getting this service operating will strengthen them both”, said Thelma Drake, Director of the Department of Rail and Public Transportation.

For project highlights, visit www.drpt.virginia.gov/activities/norfolk.aspx

Tags: Amtrak, Norfolk, Virginia

Southwest to Atlanta…

Last week Southwest Airlines announced that beginning this summer they will operate daily non-stop service between Los Angeles and Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.  The new service will commence on June 10 and will compliment the already three daily flights that AirTran offers.  This new route is in addition to the other new Atlanta routes that Southwest is adding.  

I think this is an interesting move for Southwest.  First, they are making the route non-stop, which grabbed my attention first.  Southwest adding a non-stop route of that distance?  Wow.  Second, AirTran already serves the route three times daily.  Finally, the LAX-ATL route is pretty saturated by Delta with no less than nine daily flights with half of those flights being wide-body aircraft.

 

Southwest is trying a number of things right now and it’ll be interesting to see how everything turns out.  Stay tuned.

Tags: AirTran, Atlanta, Delta Air Lines, LAX, Los Angeles, Southwest Airlines, SWA

BART plans to order test batch of new cars in May

BART plans to buy a slick new ride – 260 new rail cars - for about $1 billion in May. The cars will sport a sleek modern look, cleaner seats, digital information displays, even air conditioning that works on hot days. And if transit officials are pleased, and can come up with another $2 billion or so, they’ll buy another 515 cars.

After years of planning and scrounging for funding, BART is ready to lurch forward with the start of its plans to replace its 669-car fleet of rail cars, most of which are about to turn 40. The rail fleet is the oldest in the nation.

“Even on the most optimistic schedule, by the time we are able to replace all of our cars, many of them will be 50 years old,” said Paul Oversier, BART’s assistant general manager for operations.

Oversier expects the BART board to award a contract in May, and the contractor will produce 10 pilot cars for testing, with the first delivered at the start of 2015. The cars will be tested for eight months before the manufacturer is allowed to start full production. The first cars are expected to arrive in September 2016 with the last of the batch arriving by the end of 2018. All 775 cars would be delivered by 2023.

The new cars will still feature the traditional brushed aluminum exterior but it will be broken up with color, including signs to indicate which line the train serves. Each car will have three doors to speed boarding, but will still have 60 seats, all made of an easier-to-clean material. Seats will be reconfigured with standard seating in rows at each end of the car, and seats situated more informally around standing areas and places for wheelchairs, bikes and luggage in the center.

BART began the replacement effort in earnest in the past year, soliciting passenger suggestions through workshops, surveys and online. About 10,000 people have offered advice. The agency hired BMW Group Designworks to help design the cars, and solicited offers from companies interested in building them.

Five firms – none from the United States – expressed interest, and BART has narrowed the field to three: Alstom, of France; Bombardier, of Canada; and Hyundai Rotem, of South Korea. BART is in negotiations, trying to bargain the best deal on a variety of factors with price the most important.

Based on initial bids, the cost to build each new rail car will be about $3 million for the first batch of 260 but the overall price will drop to about $2.5 million if all 775 are manufactured. Other costs, including design, project management, cost escalation and reserves, account for the rest of the $1 billion.

“If we, as a region, are able to fund the entire project, we will get a lot more for our money,” Oversier said.

BART will pay for the initial 260 cars with $870 million in regional funds from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and the rest from its own budget. The overall plan is for the commission to cover about $2.4 billion with BART paying about $800 million. Neither agency has firm plans for finding those funds, but it’s likely voters would be asked to approve a tax to help foot the bill.

While the cars will be built by a foreign company, BART will follow federal Buy America requirements, which require at least 60 percent of the components in each car to be made in the United States and all assembly to take place domestically. In addition, the transit agency got state legislation passed to allow it to give extra consideration to bidders who exceed the minimum.

But federal law prohibits BART from giving special consideration to companies that promise to manufacture the cars in the Bay Area or California, much to the chagrin of some MTC members, who were given a presentation Wednesday.

“This is Bay Area taxpayers’ money,” said commissioner Scott Haggerty, an Alameda County supervisor, who suggested using the former Nummi plant in Fremont. “It’s really important that these rail cars be built in the Bay Area.”

Oversier said BART is “committed to using the bully pulpit as much as possible to get the jobs in the Bay Area.”

E-mail Michael Cabanatuan at mcabanatuan@sfchronicle.com.

This article appeared on page C – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle on Thursday, 12jan12.

Tags: BART, car fleet, Featured, pilot cars, public transport

Delta Air Lines looking to grab American?

Delta Air Lines aircraft tails

It looks like only time will tell on this subject, but the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, 12jan12, that Delta Air Lines, Inc. might bid to take over the parent company of American Airlines, AMR Corp.  Another firm, TPG Capital, a private equity in Fort Worth, TX is also looking into a bid to take over AMR Corp.

Delta has hired an outside firm, Blackstone Group, as its financial adviser to asses a potential bid for AMR Corp.  Blackstone also helped Delta restructure through bankruptcy back in 2005.  AMR is laden with both high labor costs and heavy debt and any bid for the company is still months away.  AMR was also delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after AMR’s stocks fell below $1.00 a share.  Presently, AMR’s shares are about $.30 each.

Sources told WSJ that TPG Capital would prefer to work with a strategic partner in any possible investment into American Airlines investment and has approached AMR about the interest.

Tags: American Airlines, AMR Corp, Chapter 11, Delta Air Lines

KLM Seatmates

KLM MD-11 Taking Off

Looks like traveling on KLM may soon become more visually appealing according to the airline.  KLM is introducing a brand new way by bringing online social networking into the real world.  USA Today wrote that KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is planning on letting their passengers choose their seats using either Facebook or LinkedIn profiles.

When passengers check in online, they will be able to view other passengers’ profiles and select their seats (possibly for professional networking or a new badge in the mile-high club).  However, making your profile publicly available will be completely optional – so you can avoid the random weirdo or having an annoying person trying to get you to hire them.  This option is expected to be available sometime in 2012.

Along the same lines, Malaysia Airlines is reportedly releasing a ‘check in’ style service on Facebook that lets passengers see if any of their friends are taking the same flight at the same time.

Finally, Alaska Airlines has introduced a Facebook application titled “FlyingSocial with Alaska Airlines.”  This application shows the location of all your listed Facebook friends and how much it would cost to fly to visit them on a specific date. 

The airlines are trying new things with social media, so let’s see what happens next.

Tags: Facebook, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, LinkedIn

Washington DC Time-Lapse

The Huffington Post featured a time-lapse video of Washington, DC that was put together by Andrew Geraci.  Take a look, I think you’ll enjoy it.

From The Huffington Post:

In the coming year, all eyes will be on the nation’s capital. Who will be president? Will Congress ever make a deal on the deficit? Will they fix the crack in the Washington Monument?

Politics aside, Washington, D.C. is a beautiful city, with charming historic buildings punctuated by stately monuments. In this time-lapse video, Andrew Geraci captured the vibrancy of this buzzing, transient city after dark in “District Nights.”

“The main reason I chose to time-lapse DC is that it has some of the most iconic and memorable memorials in the world,” he told HuffPost Travel. “Since not everyone can travel and enjoy these memorials, I wanted to create a piece that really showed-off their beauty, especially at night.”

Geraci, a multimedia producer at The Washington Times, is behind the site The Voder, which seeks to inspire and teach those interested in digital media.

On his YouTube profile, Geraci writes that it took nearly three months to film the sunsets, and he concentrated on buildings and monuments around the National Mall. Throughout the process he was hassled by the police 27 times and received 5 parking tickets. Apparently, there’s some pesky regulation that prohibits photographers from standing in one spot for longer than 5 minutes.

He adds that the greatest difficulty — harassment aside — “is toting around my giant 6-foot metal slider through the city. It usually requires me to carry anywhere from 45 to 60 pounds of gear, all of which make you look like a crazy person when you’re setting it up.”

We think it was worth it.

Tags: Andrew Geraci, DC, Featured, Time-lapse, Washington

How Panic Doomed an Airliner

Jeff Wise writes…

Air France Flight 447 tailwing

http://jeffwise.net/2011/12/07/how-panic-doomed-an-airliner/

On the evening of May 31, 2009, 216 passengers and 12 crew members boarded an Air France Airbus 330 at Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The flight, Air France 447, departed at 7.29pm local time for a scheduled 11-hour flight to Paris. It never arrived. At 7 o’clock the next morning, when the aircraft failed to appear on the radar screens of air traffic controllers in Europe, Air France began to worry, and contacted civil aviation authorities. By 11am, they concluded that their worst fears had been confirmed. AF447 had gone missing somewhere over the vast emptiness of the South Atlantic.

How, in the age of satellite navigation and instantaneous global communication, could a state-of-the art airliner simply vanish? It was a mystery that lasted for two years. Not until earlier this year, when autonomous submersibles located the airliner’s black boxes under more than two miles of water, were the last pieces of the puzzle put together. What doomed the 228 men, women and children aboard Air France 447 was neither weather nor technological failure, but simple human error. Under pressure, human beings can lose their ability to think clearly and to properly execute their training—a well-known failing that has proven all too difficult to eliminate.

Over at Popular Mechanics I’ve got a long piece offering a detailed blow-by-blow account of how one of the co-pilots of the Air France jetliner managed, in the course of just five minutes, to take a perfectly operational airplane from an altitude of nearly seven miles down to impact with the ocean. Here, I’d like to offer a nutshell summary of what happened, and what our understanding implies for the future of air safety.

Air France 447 was operating with three pilots: a captain, who was the most senior crewmember, and two co-pilots. At any given time, two of them were required to be in the cockpit, seated at the pair of seats equipped with controls. Four hours into the flight, the captain went to take a nap, leaving the flying of the plane to the more junior of the co-pilots, Pierre-Cédric Bonin. Sitting beside him was the other co-pilot, David Robert.

The crisis began mere minutes later, when the plane flew into clouds roiling up from a large tropical thunderstorm, and the moisture condensed and froze on the plane’s external air-speed sensors. In response, the autopilot disengaged. For a few minutes, the pilots had no way of knowing how fast they were going, and had to fly the plane by hand—something, crucially, that Bonin had no experience doing at cruise altitude.

The proper thing for Bonin to have done would have been to keep the plane flying level, and to have Robert refer to a relevant checklist to sort out their airspeed problems. Instead, neither man consulted a checklist, and Bonin pulled back on the controls, causing the airplane to climb and lose airspeed. Soon, he had put the plane into an aerodynamic stall, which means that the wings had lost their ability to generate lift. Even with engines at full power, the Airbus began to plummet toward the ocean.

As the severity of their predicament became more and more apparent, the pilots were unable to reason through the cause of their situation. Despite numerous boldfaced clues to the nature of their problem—including a stall-warning alarm that blared 75 times–they were simply baffled. As Robert put it, after the captain had hurried back to the cockpit, “We’ve totally lost control of the plane. We don’t understand at all… We’ve tried everything.”

Psychologists who study performance under pressure are well aware of the phenomenon of “brain freeze,” the inability of the human mind to engage in complex reasoning in the grip of intense fear. It appears that arousal of the amygdala causes a partial shutdown of the frontal cortex, so that it becomes possible to engage only in instinctive or well-learned behaviour.

In the case of Air France 447, it appears that Bonin, in his panic, completely forgot one of the most basic tenets of flight training: when at risk of a stall, never pull back on the controls. Instead, he held back the controls, in a kind of panicked death-grip, all the way down to the ocean. Ironically, if he had simply taken his hands away, the plane would have regained speed and started flying again.

Compounding the problem was a peculiar feature of the Airbus’s cockpit layout. Unlike a Boeing jet, in which one pilot’s movement of the control yoke moves the other pilot’s yoke as well, an Airbus features “asynchronous” controls, meaning that moving one control doesn’t cause the other to move as well. Bonin’s colleagues probably never knew that he had the controls all the way back—perhaps because they never imagined that any certified airline pilot could engage in such a misguided response.

Perhaps the most tragic moment of the entire transcript occurs in the final moments, when Bonin at last tells the others that he has had the controls back the entire time. “No, no, no,” says the captain. But by then it is already too late.

What can we learn from AF447? Above all, the tragedy reinforces an unfortunate truth about air travel that many passengers do not appreciate: that the most dangerous component of a modern commercial jetliner is the brain of the pilot at its controls. The majority of fatal airline accidents (vanishingly rare though they may be) are due to pilot error.

One way that airline manufacturers have tried to work around this problem is to increase the amount of automation, so that planes can largely fly themselves. But this tendency has had an ironic effect: the more pilots rely on automation, the less practiced they are at flying a plane by hand when an emergency requires it.

As a pilot myself, I love taking the controls of an airplane and through it finding a perfect freedom of movement in the sky. I would never want a computer to take that away from me. But the practical reality of moving passengers in perfect safety from point A to point B requires a different perspective. As technology improves, and flight control systems become more sophisticated, the relative inadequacy of we two-legged mammals will only become more apparent. Ultimately, the idea of a relying on a human being in the cockpit may come to seem a sentimentality too expensive to afford.

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Tags: AF447, Air France, Airbus, Jeff Wise, Panic

AT&T All but Gives Up on T-Mobile Merger

As a former customer of AT&T and now a customer of T-Mobile, I find this bit of information a good thing as I’ve been against the merger since it was announced.  AT&T can’t really handle what they have now, so why add more to their plate?

Last ditch effort to focus on DOJ court case

From Ad Week – by Katy Bachman – AT&T looks like it might be ready to give up on its $39 billion proposed acquisition of T-Mobile. Staggering from the Federal Communications Commission’s likely rejection of the deal, AT&T announced on Thanksgiving Day that it has withdrawn its application with the agency. AT&T also said it would take a $4 billion pretax accounting charge, which covers the $3 billion-negotiated break up fee with T-Mobile.

On Tuesday, FCC senior officials said the combination of thetwo companies would significantly diminish competition and ”would result in a massive loss of U.S. jobs and investment. “ Unable toapprove the merger, the FCC’s review was headed for an 

administrative law hearing, a lengthy legal process that would have dragged out the approval procedures beyond the drop-dead date to close the deal with T-Mobile.

AT&T isn’t entirely giving up on the deal. In a last ditch effort, AT&T said it would continue to defend the $39 billion merger in court. The case, brought by the Department of Justice, begins Feb. 13.

“AT&T Inc. and Deutsche Telekom AG are continuing to pursue the sale of Deutsche Telekom’s U.S. wireless assets to AT&T and are taking this step to facilitate the consideration of all options at the FCC and to focus their continuing efforts on obtaining antitrust clearance for the transaction from the Department of Justice either through the litigation pending before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Case No. 1:11-cv-01560 (ESH), or alternate means.  As soon as practical, AT&T Inc. and Deutsche Telekom AG intend to seek the necessary FCC approval,” the company said in a statement.

Public interest groups, which opposed the merger, called AT&T’s move “an act of desperation.”

“It is time for vainglorious managers at AT&T to accept that there is no way that this deal can obtain approval of the FCC and the courts,” said Andrew Schwartzman, svp and policy director for the Media Access Project.

Analysts agree it is time for AT&T to stick a fork in it. “All in all, we view this as a step toward concession,” said a Bernstein Research Report. 

Tags: AT&T, Ma Bell, T-Mobile

One Transportation App To Rule Them All

Mo, a new startup in Munich, is trying to combine the city’s bike shares, car shares, and public transportation system. Pay a yearly fee, use your phone to take whatever kind of transportation you need.

It’s one thing to create a bike or car sharing system, but how do you get people to actually use them? One answer, according to Roman Gebhard, is to reward them. Gebhard, head of the Lunar Europe design agency, in Munich, has helped develop the “Mo System”–the world’s first incentivization scheme for green transport.

Rather than city folk paying separately for car, bike, and public transit, with the Mo System they pay a single fee, and then get rewards, called Mo Miles, when they take more sustainable options. So, for example, users who cycle get miles they can use for subway or bus trips, or for car shares.

“If the weather is good, you use your smartphone to locate the nearest bike spot. If it is not good, you go on another means of transportation, such as car sharing. The more you use public transportation, the more miles you earn, which you can then deduct from the yearly cost,” says Gebhard, who is working with the group Greencity and theUniversity ofWuppertal.

The Mo System has yet to be approved byMunichauthorities, and has yet to persuade car and bike schemes to take part. But Gebhard says the idea would be for Mo members to pay about 350 euros ($483)–the same as an annual public transport pass–and get more options. If users are not part of official bike share schemes, they can install a device on their bikes to measure how far they go.

“What we found out from our research is that even though people like to use bikes and sustainable transport, their needs are very different depending on what they have to do, or what the weather is like. That’s the biggest obstacle for people to go on one system. You have to offer them different options. By combining the systems, you hopefully get people to use bikes and public transport more often,” Gebhard says.

The biggest obstacle to rolling out Mo is to persuade the operators to collaborate, and making sure they are not hurt financially. But Gebhard is confident Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company that already runsMunich’s bike sharing scheme, wants to see Mo get off the ground.

“Their problem at the moment is that the public transport system is filled out. In rush hour, they don’t want additional customers. So they are hoping to get some people to hop on to bikes,” he says. Here’s to Mo-mentum.

Link to the article: http://www.fastcoexist.com/1678748/one-transportation-app-to-rule-them-all

Tags: Mo-mentum, Mobility, Munich, Technology, Transportation