Blimp racing – how boring 
Now Blimp jousting, you’ve got my eyeballs 
No, a single blimp on the ground that you can just walk up to because you were already at the airport, & they’re kind enough to let you in the gondola for a tour is a treat; only happened once though.
Well, if you’re lucky rich enough to afford one of the expensive tickets to get beamed up into the spaceship it’s really roomy on the inside. 
The colonoscopy is free though.
Apparently with no Sport or Unlimited classes this year though.
I know they were on different topics, but those two messages in conjunction made me laugh out loud on a Sunday morning and I thought that should be preserved
Carry on.
Might wanna stay clear of DFW, if you can:
Thanks. I’m flying there on Thursday for a conference. 
Boing hit with “safety? I think I’ve heard of that”:
Brian
I’m not surprised to see LAX is one of the best airports for on time departures; they benefit from good weather. But I am surprised to see that SFO is the third best. They have frequent issues with fog, and from what I understand the runways are too close together for simultaneous instrument landings when they get fogged in.
Three things drive delays: weather, being a hub with a large fraction of domestic operations vs international, and being a hub that’s extra-heavily concentrated with one airline. LA has good metrics on all those, DFW has bad metrics on all those. DCA the same.
The only reason JFK fares better than nearby LGA or EWR despite them sharing ~identical weather al day every day is the larger international fraction. EWR also has lots more hub carrier concentration than LGA & JFK relatively lack. So EWR almost always wins the prize of the three for shittiest reliability and on-time performance.
Weather is obvious but can you 'splain the reason behind the other two. I would have guessed the other way for a hub, with one airline dominating a given airport they would want to & have the pull to have better on-time performance there.
I think the delays are based on departures, not arrivals. You should be fine getting to the conference, but could be late getting home.
The domestic versus international is pretty easy. A domestic hub consists in effect of a fleet of shuttle-planes that go out & back and out & back and out and back & … all day long. Each plane each time may go to a different out-station, but the majority return to the hub from which they came.
If any one of those airplanes gets late for whatever reason, when they return to the hub they cause up to 3 delays: whatever the airplane was going to fly next, whatever the pilots were going to fly next, and whatever the FAs were going to fly next. As a general rule those 3 assets do not stay together passing through the hub. Some yes; most no.
So worst-case 1 delay begets 3. When those 3 late flights also get back late from their next out-and-back, that creates (worst case) 9 delays, etc. The company could try to build enough slack into the ground times to allow most delays in arriving someplace (hub or spoke) to be absorbed by the slack so the next departure goes off on time anyhow. But especially at the hub end where the total number of gates is limited, that’s cost prohibitive. And over the whole fleet it’d mean making e.g. 5 out & backs per workday instead of 6. Or 4 instead of 5. That’s 18-25% reduction in your factory’s daily productivity. No CFO is going to agree to that.
Compare that with long haul international where the big airplane shows up at the hub once that day, all the inbound crew leaves to go to the hotel or home, the airplane sits around several hours for the propitious departure time to give a useful arrival time for wherever it’s going, then an all fresh crew arrives from the hotel and/or home to operate it. There’s no opportunity to snowball. And the usual ground slack for the airplane due to the nature of long haul, time zone changes, etc., is enough to absorb a lot of delay on the inbound before it affects the outbound.
The hub concentration thing is a bit harder to get; it’s sort of a meta-effect of what I described in my previous post.
Consider some examples. EWR is utterly dominated by UAL, ATL by Delta, and DFW by AA. If e.g. ATL has a bad weather start, or even a late start driven by ripple effects from shit weather last night, that’s going to reverberate significantly all throughout DAL’s system all day. Each of the few departures from ATL that morning belonging to AA, UAL, SWA, Spirit, etc. will also be affected, but as a percentage of their respective daily national operations, it’ll be a tumbling pebble too small to start an avalanche. Meanwhile DAL starts their day with an avalanche. Same thing if EWR or DFW is hit hard: UAL or AA takes it in the shorts, while DAL shrugs and goes about their day, quietly crowing “Sux to be you!! 
”
On any given day in winter or spring or summer, one of the major hubs around the country is going to get clobbered by weather. If a carrier has enough of its daily eggs in that particular basket, well today will be their day to have a systemic mess that at least partially infects their other hubs too. But for the carriers with only small service to the clobbered city, it’s a cough and a sniffle, not a sudden onset 24-hour flu.
Punchline: Pull or clout don’t really determine who suffers delays. It’s operational concentration that causes delays to synergistically cause further delays.
The opposing limit case is what SWA was maybe 30 years years ago. A bunch of airplanes set off from separate airports across the country on separate peregrinations hither and thither. With no real dependency between any two flights. If one plane got off to a bad start, the 6 or 8 segments it would operate that day were all going to be late. But it didn’t matter much since it wasn’t interacting with the rest of SWA’s system. So there was no snowballing. There were customers who changed planes at some cities some times, and they’d be inconvenienced if they missed their connection. But it wasn’t like a hub arrival where getting in significantly late means 2/3rds of your inbound passengers are now facing an outbound disaster.
Over the years SWA has slowly morphed into a mostly hub and spoke system that they refuse to call by that name. Why? The efficiency gains are unbeatable, even at the expense of increased operational brittleness.
Makes total sense when one takes ½ second to actually think about it. Thanks!
Think again. My flight into DFW is an hour late departing. 
There are some very cool space exploration pins here:
Speaking of pins, I picked up this set depicting various Soviet aircraft at an antique store back in 2018:
So I was working from home today when I heard the distinctive snarl of a large piston engined aircraft flying over my house. I was too slow to go outside to see it, but I checked the flight tracking app on my phone to see what it was, and it was a B-25! Specifically, “Maid in the Shade”. Apparently it and their B-17 are in my area this week.
DFW is back after problems with local communications outage but Europe is experiencing delays due to a Cyberattack on Collins Aerospace Boarding system. Fortunately it’s just a boarding system.