Tag Archives: aircraft

Not-so-Final Destination: Landing at the Wrong Airport

Airplane landing at sunset.“Uh, ladies and gentlemen, this is the flight deck. Thank you for choosing Airborne Airways, where your destination is always up in the air. If you’ll look out your window, you’ll see…well, we’re hoping you can tell us. Anything look familiar?”

Yes, it’s preposterous, embarrassing and more than a little dangerous, but flight crews touch down at the wrong airfield or runway more often than you might think. Which raises the question: If GPS navigation can direct any idiot with a car to his or her destination, how can a trained flight crew with state-of-the-art navigation screw up so badly? In other words…

How Can a Plane Land at the Wrong Airport?

Tesla: A mind to light the world

Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla

Thomas Edison has long enjoyed the incandescent light of public admiration and textbook domination while Nikola Tesla, the scientist and inventor who pioneered the alternating current that truly powers the modern world, has unjustly languished as a footnote in scientific history. Farsighted, quirky, driven and brilliant, Tesla frequently leapfrogged ahead of his contemporaries to the next step, and the next.

Over the course of his long career, Tesla registered over 111 American patents and around 300 patents worldwide, including radio and alternating current. He designed the Niagara Falls power station that provided electricity to most of the northeastern United States. But his loyalty to his first loves, science and progress, cost him his fame, his fortune and, some argue, his sanity. These are just a few of the …

10 Reasons Why Tesla is a Scientific God