7 ms·

In Flight

318 points by matsur 11y ago

akhilcacharya 11y ago
Absolutely gorgeous. I love it when these publishers get creative with the medium.
- lqdc13 11y ago
  I agree that it's pretty and the medium really conveys the "cloudy" feeling with the text materializing from whiteness, but I think this is a bad thing for 2 reasons. 1. One of the cores of my cpu is at 100% while viewing the page. 2. It forces others to do the same kind of stuff for people to view it. I think every piece should be on the same level in terms of design. That way the pieces that are better written are going to be recognized more instead of being recognized for flashy javascript. Of course, you cannot ban people from doing flashy things, and if it wasn't for flashy content, graphic novels wouldn't be a thing. Nevertheless, graphic novels are in their own section in a bookstore.
  - skybrian 11y ago
    I think it's inevitable given that all news sites compete for traffic. The NY Times may take the high road, but they still need to compete. If it weren't for the presentation, would you have seen this article?
    - L_Rahman 11y ago
      > The NY Times may take the high road, but they still need to compete. I find this argument intriguing and humorous given that the NYTimes itself set off this article design arms race with their Snowfall piece in late 2012. Unlike the grandparent however, I have come to enjoy the kinds of experiences it has inspired. Using the web to render pure text strikes me as somewhat equivalent to filming a movie with just dialogue and no music. http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...
  - MaulingMonkey 11y ago
    I'm not terribly impressed with the white (#FFFFFF) text on white (#DAECF0) background before I scroll down sufficiently either. I was restoring to text highlighting.
    - comex 11y ago
      I think this is a bug where they didn't test large browser window sizes. At my laptop's maximum window height and my browser's default zoom level, the background doesn't get lighter than #BDDAE1 at the bottom before it transitions, but if I zoom out I can see it fade into unreadability.
      - MaulingMonkey 11y ago
        Ahh, good call - my monitors are absurd. I tried it first on a 2048x1152... but I have that thing rotated sideways, so it's about twice the height of a typical 1080p monitor. Didn't fare much better on my normally rotated 2560x1440, but even then I nearly reach the bottom of the gradient before text colors change. I guess I should just count myself lucky I haven't set up a rotated 4K monitor yet.
  - bsimpson 11y ago
    That's a similar mindset to people who think books are inherently better than movies/TV/games. I prefer to judge a piece of content on its quality, not its medium.
  - conradev 11y ago
    Maybe the CPU being at 100% is intentional, so that it simulates the roar of the engines.
  - kalleboo 11y ago
    > 1. One of the cores of my cpu is at 100% while viewing the page. Interesting. What browser/OS? On Safari on my Mac, the worst it gets is 20% of one core when one of the top/bottom animations are in view, but it drops to nothing when there's just text or one of the other, non-layered animations. And that's on a Retina display
    - lqdc13 11y ago
      Chromium and Firefox on Ubuntu.
erobbins 11y ago
I found this really well written.. captures the magic and puts you in the seat.
imperialdrive 11y ago
WOW - That must have taken a lot of extra time to polish, but totally worth it I hope - I definitely fell into the story with enjoyment. A new generation of writing.
therockspush 11y ago
More interesting waypoints. The SSTIK1 Departure from KSFO has a few good ones: UTOOB, NTELL, AYOOH, EBAYE. http://flightaware.com/resources/airport/KSFO/DP/SSTIK+ONE+(RNAV) http://flightaware.com/resources/airport/KSFO/DP/SSTIK+ONE+(... One that always made us chuckle was a standard routing from London over Belgium, the the Biggin Hill VOR, BIG, the KONAN waypoint, then the Koksy VOR, so the route was BIG KONAN KOK. The eyebrow raiser was called DROWN, and its right between Cuba and the Southern tip of Florida. Not accidental. Little Rock Airport has the ICAO code KLIT. There's heaps of good ones. I used to dispatch international flights. The author pulled back the veil on some esoteric aviation knowledge and still managed to make a good story of it. Good form.
- kzrdude 11y ago
  I'm not a super-fan of the jingoistically named waypoints.
  - Shivetya 11y ago
    its not worse than the naming many give to their languages, tools, and such, in the tech community. light humor sometimes invades work and for that it serves a purpose. I also tend to think a little humor or local flavor improve memorization
- cpcallen 11y ago
  My favourite is the "Looney Tunes Approach" at Portsmouth NH (KPSM): ITAWT, ITAWA, PUDYE, TTATT and IDEED.
ericye16 11y ago
The writing and the interactivity go beautifully hand-in-hand. I hope NYTimes continues doing this type of work.
- sharkweek 11y ago
  You should check out Pitchfork's Cover Story section: http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/ http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/ They do some really cool interactive stories. The VP of product floats around here from time to time as well.
- rconti 11y ago
  And this is probably the worst one they've done. The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek was far, far better.
jamesrom 11y ago
The writing is beautiful. The graphics are really well done, but just don't hold the same magic.
collectodotio 11y ago
As a lover of aviation, I got bit bored reading this.
- markcerqueira 11y ago
  Troll harder, bro.
flashman 11y ago
I'm really interested if anyone knows how the Times is planning to keep this type of content available on long time scales. They can realistically assume that twenty, fifty, a hundred years out people will be reading these articles. These articles are a bit different from maintaining a text archive.
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  I imagine the interactive elements may not render correctly even just 5 years from now.
  - SamReidHughes 11y ago
    What interactive elements? All I saw as part of the content were static images, and newspapers have had those for a long time. There were some other illustrations and animations, kind of like the way some children's books have them interspersed among the text, but none of those were interactive either.
    - poppup 11y ago
      Another poster also referred to the animations as interactive... I guess some people think of animations as interactive.
      - kzrdude 11y ago
        I see animations that are driven by scrolling. Which you can control and scrub backwards and forwards again. So it's got an interactive element.
    - flashman 11y ago
      The Times broadly refers to this kind of storytelling as 'interactive' judging by this 2014 showcase: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/29/us/year-in-interactive-storytelling.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/29/us/year-in-int... I guess the underlying question is how they plan to support these web technologies into the future; what's their long-term technical debt in that sense?
w1ntermute 11y ago
Note that this is an excerpt from the recently released book Skyfaring: http://www.amazon.com/dp/038535181X http://www.amazon.com/dp/038535181X
kijin 11y ago
I wonder why they keep using local & global air pressure-based altitude measurements instead of GPS. Is it just inertia, or does GPS have serious technical limitations when used in an airliner? I can understand relying on airspeed instead of GPS-measured groundspeed, because airspeed is important. But I can't think of a justification for not using true altitudes, especially during takeoff and landing. What happens if the pilots punch in a wrong number for the destination air pressure?
- javert 11y ago
  I wonder how robust the GPS system is. Could an unexpected space phenomenon bring it down? What would happen if a rogue nation started shooting down the satellites? This isn't a real answer. I hope someone with a real answer comes along!
  - tfe 11y ago
    GPS satellites somewhat regularly go in and out of service for various reasons. There are more satellites in the constellation than strictly necessary in order to compensate for this. Information on this is distributed to pilots (in the US) via NOTAMs, and you can use this information to decide whether it's safe to use GPS navigation for your flight. Practically speaking though, aviation GPSs have a function called RAIM that continuously monitors the integrity of the position information and will inform you on a loss of precision. I believe most GPSs also allow predicting RAIM along your time and route of flight to make sure you'll have integrity from takeoff to landing.
  - tanzam75 11y ago
    > I wonder how robust the GPS system is. Could an unexpected space phenomenon bring it down? What would happen if a rogue nation started shooting down the satellites? GPS is not the only system. We currently have about 2.7 global satellite navigation constellations available for use. The American GPS and the Russian GLONASS are both complete. The Chinese Beidou system is about 40% complete. The European Galileo system is about 30% complete. Each system also has about 20% redundancy in the form of on-orbit spares. Dual-system GPS/GLONASS receivers are now nearly everywhere. I was just looking at a phone that has a triple-system GPS/GLONASS/Beidou receiver. In a few years, quad-system receivers will be commonplace. A rogue nation would have to shoot down about 1.9 constellations, or about 60 satellites, before we drop below full coverage. The American, Chinese, and European systems have the same orbital inclination. If a gap opened, any satellite from any of these three systems could theoretically fill that gap. It would take some time to reposition the satellites, though. There is also additional redundancy in the eastern hemisphere. India and Japan have satellites that provide regional coverage. Part of the Chinese system also operates as a regional constellation. At this point, the rogue state is at war with the US, Russia, China, the EU, India, and Japan. They might as well just surrender.
ayushgta 11y ago
It is really interesting how the bottom part of the text fades away progressively. It elicits an emotive reaction to want to scroll further down. Well done! I can't spot any css, fixed divs etc. Thoughts on how that is being done?
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- sfeng 11y ago
  It's done with an opacity transition on the element: https://i.imgur.com/6Wq71pH.png https://i.imgur.com/6Wq71pH.png
  - ayushgta 11y ago
    It is actually an after CSS selector with fixed position and a linear gradient background. Pretty clever! Here is a JS Fiddle which shows just that bit: http://jsfiddle.net/wyx7zogo/ http://jsfiddle.net/wyx7zogo/
- comex 11y ago
  On the other hand, it slightly annoyed me, I guess for a very specific reason, which I'll state in case anyone finds it interesting. I'm nearsighted and wear glasses; as I often do, I was using my laptop with my glasses off, because taking them off moves my default focus point closer and thus lets me focus on nearby objects with less eye strain. However, the result goes a bit too far in the opposite direction and I need to keep the laptop closer to my face than normal to be able to focus on the screen, which means the high-detail center of my field of view covers less of the screen than typical and I have to move my head slightly to shift it. On top of that, when I started reading the article, in an unconscious attempt to focus on the text, I had leaned forward to move my head even closer... And so I had been reading using solely a paragraph or two of space, which happened to be at the bottom of the screen (gently scrolling the trackpad to continue - this is way more precise than using a mouse scroll wheel, by the way)... for the first part of the article; then that space suddenly became half greyed out, and the required head movement to switch to reading higher up was unusual enough to bubble its way into conscious thought. Oh, and I guess it doesn't help that a fade to white at the bottom of the screen is also what the NYTimes paywall does when you've run out of free articles - I have a paid subscription, but sometimes I get logged out. This has happened often enough to cause me to form a mental association between the bottom of a NYTimes article suddenly greying out and the annoying act of logging in. Pretty pedantic complaint, I know.
zenocon 11y ago
It looks great, but be honest: did you really read through the whole story? I got bored pretty quick. The text just lost me..and it seemed to be a neverending css showpiece, which is fine, but I don't think you can disguise that as an interesting news piece for too many scrolls.
- testingonprod 11y ago
  Exactly right. I just ended up skimming it and then skipping to the end.
joblessjunkie 11y ago
On one hand, I'm annoyed because I know that this book excerpt appears in the Times as part of a marketing campaign. On the other hand, this was probably the greatest thing I've read in a long time, so I guess bring on the paid content!
ghshephard 11y ago
I fly about 100,000 miles a year, but this article absolutely brought the wonder of flight, and, in conjunction with the in-situ animation, just pulled me in. I couldn't stop reading for a second. Absolutely wonderful, and brought a lot of the mystique and thrill of flying back. I hope the NYT does more articles like this.
bwooceli 11y ago
Really makes me miss Captain Dave. http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/5607316 http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...
- tfe 11y ago
  For others who might have been curious, the last word on the subject appears from Capn. Aux (another semi-famous pilot/writer) who talked to him in late 2012. He said he was alive and well and may be back in the future. Sadly that doesn't appear to have happened yet. http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/site_notes/flight_level_390_and_capt.php http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/site_notes/flight_leve...
ruddct 11y ago
Fabulous article, elegant design. Nice touch with the NYT logo and a little hiring message console.log'ed: "NYTimes.com: All the code that's fit to printf()"
MichaelGG 11y ago
I started studying to fly when I was 16. Judge preemptively revoked my driver's license, so I figured I'd fly just to show him how petty he was. Up til then, it had just been JetFighter II for me. This article nails it in the opening. I don't remember a whole lot about my first flights (well other than almost hitting a tree - JF2 was mostly carrier landings so I had bad habits). But the feeling of pushing the throttle, watching the marks turn to steaks, and the feeling of holy-shit-I'm-flying -- it's amazing. I recommend getting a first lesson (should be cheap-ish) just to feel that. In nearly 20 years, it's one of the top physical experiences I recall with exhilaration.
- wheaties 11y ago
  Ditto. Every time I take off and I'm at the controls of a plane, it is pure wonderment. Best feeling in the world. One day I will buy but for now I rent. I recommend it to everyone to get their license or even a sports license.
ing33k 11y ago
have they developed a new CMS to produce articles like these ? reminded me of the Apple watch review article by The Verge
gnyman 11y ago
If you find this interesting, you will probably also like the PilotsEYE stuff http://pilotseye.tv/en/ http://pilotseye.tv/en/ They have some content on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENe89j89tBA&index=2&list=PL6frPCZsQeyXccCxt40jeYYvbkxJ_bIxy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENe89j89tBA&index=2&list=PL6...
m-app 11y ago
Was looking up some more info on Maastricht Upper Area Control Center (MUAC) and found [1] this image of a controller in front of a terminal with a Tux sticker on it: http://i.imgur.com/VQFn2hM.jpg http://i.imgur.com/VQFn2hM.jpg Does anyone have an explanation for that? Are they using FOSS at these centers? EDIT: Apparently the stickers aren't on every terminal but at least on more than one, as can be seen in this picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/eurocontrol/5201407322/in/album-72157625452300368/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/eurocontrol/5201407322/in/albu... [1]: http://www.eurocontrol.int/muac http://www.eurocontrol.int/muac

In Flight

318 points by matsur 11y ago

akhilcacharya 11y ago

Absolutely gorgeous. I love it when these publishers get creative with the medium.

lqdc13 11y ago
I agree that it's pretty and the medium really conveys the "cloudy" feeling with the text materializing from whiteness, but I think this is a bad thing for 2 reasons. 1. One of the cores of my cpu is at 100% while viewing the page. 2. It forces others to do the same kind of stuff for people to view it. I think every piece should be on the same level in terms of design. That way the pieces that are better written are going to be recognized more instead of being recognized for flashy javascript. Of course, you cannot ban people from doing flashy things, and if it wasn't for flashy content, graphic novels wouldn't be a thing. Nevertheless, graphic novels are in their own section in a bookstore.
- skybrian 11y ago
  I think it's inevitable given that all news sites compete for traffic. The NY Times may take the high road, but they still need to compete. If it weren't for the presentation, would you have seen this article?
  - L_Rahman 11y ago
    > The NY Times may take the high road, but they still need to compete. I find this argument intriguing and humorous given that the NYTimes itself set off this article design arms race with their Snowfall piece in late 2012. Unlike the grandparent however, I have come to enjoy the kinds of experiences it has inspired. Using the web to render pure text strikes me as somewhat equivalent to filming a movie with just dialogue and no music. http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunnel-creek http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...
- MaulingMonkey 11y ago
  I'm not terribly impressed with the white (#FFFFFF) text on white (#DAECF0) background before I scroll down sufficiently either. I was restoring to text highlighting.
  - comex 11y ago
    I think this is a bug where they didn't test large browser window sizes. At my laptop's maximum window height and my browser's default zoom level, the background doesn't get lighter than #BDDAE1 at the bottom before it transitions, but if I zoom out I can see it fade into unreadability.
    - MaulingMonkey 11y ago
      Ahh, good call - my monitors are absurd. I tried it first on a 2048x1152... but I have that thing rotated sideways, so it's about twice the height of a typical 1080p monitor. Didn't fare much better on my normally rotated 2560x1440, but even then I nearly reach the bottom of the gradient before text colors change. I guess I should just count myself lucky I haven't set up a rotated 4K monitor yet.
- bsimpson 11y ago
  That's a similar mindset to people who think books are inherently better than movies/TV/games. I prefer to judge a piece of content on its quality, not its medium.
- conradev 11y ago
  Maybe the CPU being at 100% is intentional, so that it simulates the roar of the engines.
- kalleboo 11y ago
  > 1. One of the cores of my cpu is at 100% while viewing the page. Interesting. What browser/OS? On Safari on my Mac, the worst it gets is 20% of one core when one of the top/bottom animations are in view, but it drops to nothing when there's just text or one of the other, non-layered animations. And that's on a Retina display
  - lqdc13 11y ago
    Chromium and Firefox on Ubuntu.

erobbins 11y ago

I found this really well written.. captures the magic and puts you in the seat.

imperialdrive 11y ago

WOW - That must have taken a lot of extra time to polish, but totally worth it I hope - I definitely fell into the story with enjoyment. A new generation of writing.

therockspush 11y ago

More interesting waypoints. The SSTIK1 Departure from KSFO has a few good ones: UTOOB, NTELL, AYOOH, EBAYE. http://flightaware.com/resources/airport/KSFO/DP/SSTIK+ONE+(RNAV) http://flightaware.com/resources/airport/KSFO/DP/SSTIK+ONE+(... One that always made us chuckle was a standard routing from London over Belgium, the the Biggin Hill VOR, BIG, the KONAN waypoint, then the Koksy VOR, so the route was BIG KONAN KOK. The eyebrow raiser was called DROWN, and its right between Cuba and the Southern tip of Florida. Not accidental. Little Rock Airport has the ICAO code KLIT. There's heaps of good ones. I used to dispatch international flights. The author pulled back the veil on some esoteric aviation knowledge and still managed to make a good story of it. Good form.

kzrdude 11y ago
I'm not a super-fan of the jingoistically named waypoints.
- Shivetya 11y ago
  its not worse than the naming many give to their languages, tools, and such, in the tech community. light humor sometimes invades work and for that it serves a purpose. I also tend to think a little humor or local flavor improve memorization
cpcallen 11y ago
My favourite is the "Looney Tunes Approach" at Portsmouth NH (KPSM): ITAWT, ITAWA, PUDYE, TTATT and IDEED.

ericye16 11y ago

The writing and the interactivity go beautifully hand-in-hand. I hope NYTimes continues doing this type of work.

sharkweek 11y ago
You should check out Pitchfork's Cover Story section: http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/ http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/ They do some really cool interactive stories. The VP of product floats around here from time to time as well.
rconti 11y ago
And this is probably the worst one they've done. The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek was far, far better.

jamesrom 11y ago

The writing is beautiful. The graphics are really well done, but just don't hold the same magic.

collectodotio 11y ago

As a lover of aviation, I got bit bored reading this.

markcerqueira 11y ago
Troll harder, bro.

flashman 11y ago

I'm really interested if anyone knows how the Times is planning to keep this type of content available on long time scales. They can realistically assume that twenty, fifty, a hundred years out people will be reading these articles. These articles are a bit different from maintaining a text archive.

w1ntermute 11y ago
I imagine the interactive elements may not render correctly even just 5 years from now.
- SamReidHughes 11y ago
  What interactive elements? All I saw as part of the content were static images, and newspapers have had those for a long time. There were some other illustrations and animations, kind of like the way some children's books have them interspersed among the text, but none of those were interactive either.
  - poppup 11y ago
    Another poster also referred to the animations as interactive... I guess some people think of animations as interactive.
    - kzrdude 11y ago
      I see animations that are driven by scrolling. Which you can control and scrub backwards and forwards again. So it's got an interactive element.
  - flashman 11y ago
    The Times broadly refers to this kind of storytelling as 'interactive' judging by this 2014 showcase: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/29/us/year-in-interactive-storytelling.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/29/us/year-in-int... I guess the underlying question is how they plan to support these web technologies into the future; what's their long-term technical debt in that sense?

w1ntermute 11y ago

Note that this is an excerpt from the recently released book Skyfaring: http://www.amazon.com/dp/038535181X http://www.amazon.com/dp/038535181X

kijin 11y ago

I wonder why they keep using local & global air pressure-based altitude measurements instead of GPS. Is it just inertia, or does GPS have serious technical limitations when used in an airliner? I can understand relying on airspeed instead of GPS-measured groundspeed, because airspeed is important. But I can't think of a justification for not using true altitudes, especially during takeoff and landing. What happens if the pilots punch in a wrong number for the destination air pressure?

javert 11y ago
I wonder how robust the GPS system is. Could an unexpected space phenomenon bring it down? What would happen if a rogue nation started shooting down the satellites? This isn't a real answer. I hope someone with a real answer comes along!
- tfe 11y ago
  GPS satellites somewhat regularly go in and out of service for various reasons. There are more satellites in the constellation than strictly necessary in order to compensate for this. Information on this is distributed to pilots (in the US) via NOTAMs, and you can use this information to decide whether it's safe to use GPS navigation for your flight. Practically speaking though, aviation GPSs have a function called RAIM that continuously monitors the integrity of the position information and will inform you on a loss of precision. I believe most GPSs also allow predicting RAIM along your time and route of flight to make sure you'll have integrity from takeoff to landing.
- tanzam75 11y ago
  > I wonder how robust the GPS system is. Could an unexpected space phenomenon bring it down? What would happen if a rogue nation started shooting down the satellites? GPS is not the only system. We currently have about 2.7 global satellite navigation constellations available for use. The American GPS and the Russian GLONASS are both complete. The Chinese Beidou system is about 40% complete. The European Galileo system is about 30% complete. Each system also has about 20% redundancy in the form of on-orbit spares. Dual-system GPS/GLONASS receivers are now nearly everywhere. I was just looking at a phone that has a triple-system GPS/GLONASS/Beidou receiver. In a few years, quad-system receivers will be commonplace. A rogue nation would have to shoot down about 1.9 constellations, or about 60 satellites, before we drop below full coverage. The American, Chinese, and European systems have the same orbital inclination. If a gap opened, any satellite from any of these three systems could theoretically fill that gap. It would take some time to reposition the satellites, though. There is also additional redundancy in the eastern hemisphere. India and Japan have satellites that provide regional coverage. Part of the Chinese system also operates as a regional constellation. At this point, the rogue state is at war with the US, Russia, China, the EU, India, and Japan. They might as well just surrender.

ayushgta 11y ago

It is really interesting how the bottom part of the text fades away progressively. It elicits an emotive reaction to want to scroll further down. Well done! I can't spot any css, fixed divs etc. Thoughts on how that is being done?

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
sfeng 11y ago
It's done with an opacity transition on the element: https://i.imgur.com/6Wq71pH.png https://i.imgur.com/6Wq71pH.png
- ayushgta 11y ago
  It is actually an after CSS selector with fixed position and a linear gradient background. Pretty clever! Here is a JS Fiddle which shows just that bit: http://jsfiddle.net/wyx7zogo/ http://jsfiddle.net/wyx7zogo/
comex 11y ago
On the other hand, it slightly annoyed me, I guess for a very specific reason, which I'll state in case anyone finds it interesting. I'm nearsighted and wear glasses; as I often do, I was using my laptop with my glasses off, because taking them off moves my default focus point closer and thus lets me focus on nearby objects with less eye strain. However, the result goes a bit too far in the opposite direction and I need to keep the laptop closer to my face than normal to be able to focus on the screen, which means the high-detail center of my field of view covers less of the screen than typical and I have to move my head slightly to shift it. On top of that, when I started reading the article, in an unconscious attempt to focus on the text, I had leaned forward to move my head even closer... And so I had been reading using solely a paragraph or two of space, which happened to be at the bottom of the screen (gently scrolling the trackpad to continue - this is way more precise than using a mouse scroll wheel, by the way)... for the first part of the article; then that space suddenly became half greyed out, and the required head movement to switch to reading higher up was unusual enough to bubble its way into conscious thought. Oh, and I guess it doesn't help that a fade to white at the bottom of the screen is also what the NYTimes paywall does when you've run out of free articles - I have a paid subscription, but sometimes I get logged out. This has happened often enough to cause me to form a mental association between the bottom of a NYTimes article suddenly greying out and the annoying act of logging in. Pretty pedantic complaint, I know.

zenocon 11y ago

It looks great, but be honest: did you really read through the whole story? I got bored pretty quick. The text just lost me..and it seemed to be a neverending css showpiece, which is fine, but I don't think you can disguise that as an interesting news piece for too many scrolls.

testingonprod 11y ago
Exactly right. I just ended up skimming it and then skipping to the end.

joblessjunkie 11y ago

On one hand, I'm annoyed because I know that this book excerpt appears in the Times as part of a marketing campaign. On the other hand, this was probably the greatest thing I've read in a long time, so I guess bring on the paid content!

ghshephard 11y ago

I fly about 100,000 miles a year, but this article absolutely brought the wonder of flight, and, in conjunction with the in-situ animation, just pulled me in. I couldn't stop reading for a second. Absolutely wonderful, and brought a lot of the mystique and thrill of flying back. I hope the NYT does more articles like this.

bwooceli 11y ago

Really makes me miss Captain Dave. http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/read.main/5607316 http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/general_aviation/re...

tfe 11y ago
For others who might have been curious, the last word on the subject appears from Capn. Aux (another semi-famous pilot/writer) who talked to him in late 2012. He said he was alive and well and may be back in the future. Sadly that doesn't appear to have happened yet. http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/site_notes/flight_level_390_and_capt.php http://americandigest.org/mt-archives/site_notes/flight_leve...

ruddct 11y ago

Fabulous article, elegant design. Nice touch with the NYT logo and a little hiring message console.log'ed: "NYTimes.com: All the code that's fit to printf()"

MichaelGG 11y ago

I started studying to fly when I was 16. Judge preemptively revoked my driver's license, so I figured I'd fly just to show him how petty he was. Up til then, it had just been JetFighter II for me. This article nails it in the opening. I don't remember a whole lot about my first flights (well other than almost hitting a tree - JF2 was mostly carrier landings so I had bad habits). But the feeling of pushing the throttle, watching the marks turn to steaks, and the feeling of holy-shit-I'm-flying -- it's amazing. I recommend getting a first lesson (should be cheap-ish) just to feel that. In nearly 20 years, it's one of the top physical experiences I recall with exhilaration.

wheaties 11y ago
Ditto. Every time I take off and I'm at the controls of a plane, it is pure wonderment. Best feeling in the world. One day I will buy but for now I rent. I recommend it to everyone to get their license or even a sports license.

ing33k 11y ago

have they developed a new CMS to produce articles like these ? reminded me of the Apple watch review article by The Verge

gnyman 11y ago

If you find this interesting, you will probably also like the PilotsEYE stuff http://pilotseye.tv/en/ http://pilotseye.tv/en/ They have some content on youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENe89j89tBA&index=2&list=PL6frPCZsQeyXccCxt40jeYYvbkxJ_bIxy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENe89j89tBA&index=2&list=PL6...

m-app 11y ago

Was looking up some more info on Maastricht Upper Area Control Center (MUAC) and found [1] this image of a controller in front of a terminal with a Tux sticker on it: http://i.imgur.com/VQFn2hM.jpg http://i.imgur.com/VQFn2hM.jpg Does anyone have an explanation for that? Are they using FOSS at these centers? EDIT: Apparently the stickers aren't on every terminal but at least on more than one, as can be seen in this picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/eurocontrol/5201407322/in/album-72157625452300368/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/eurocontrol/5201407322/in/albu... [1]: http://www.eurocontrol.int/muac http://www.eurocontrol.int/muac