How does that work? It sounds like some failed million-dollar idea scheme.
Neapolitan style pizza is cooked in under 2 minutes. It’s an 800 degree oven, and will burn the hell out of your pizza if you leave it in 15 seconds too long, but they’re done in under 2 minutes.
I could imagine drive thru customized pizza with pre-cooked (mostly cooked) cheese pizzas that can then be topped with custom toppings and run through a quick blast of heat above and below just to crisp up the crust and cook the toppings.
My terrible idea was from my grandfather. Mid '70s is the time, and he tells me about his great invention, a station wagon with a top that opens, so you can carry tall things. Even though I was little, I knew it was stupid because I owned one of these:
As @Cheesesteak describes, the Neapolitan style is based on a very hot oven, sometimes a 1000°F, and that’s starting with dough. With a thin pre-cooked shell, a hot oven, sauce that’s already hot, a pizza takes less than a minute to cook. It can be delicious, it won’t be the same as a pizza with a freshly cooked shell, but that adds little time when it’s a traditional thin crust.
An airline that carries children on non-stop flights…
There’s actually a food truck around here that does wood fired pizza. (There’s no pictures of the actual truck on their web site, but it’s not a typical food truck; it’s a heavier duty truck with a wood oven in the very back). In my experience the limiting factor seems to be the number of orders that can go in the oven at one time, rather then the cooking time. But that wouldn’t be as much of a problem for a brick and mortar restaurant which would have space for more ovens.
It looks like they’ve pivoted into more of a caterer for large events and have given up the typical food truck biz.
There’s a guy who does that around here. Easy to cater a party with limited over space when it only takes a minute or two to cook a pizza.
Expensive babysitter.
I spin … for no man.
Actually, this is a thing.
There are (or were) “flights to nowhere” for people who just had to enjoy the experience of being trapped in a tin can with no legroom.
Sometimes those are for people who can’t actually afford to fly anywhere. Other times, they’re done as part of helping people overcome a fear of flying.
I have heard of vacations that you would surprise someone with. Ya get on and airplane and go. I suspect they would at least tell you how long, and the climate.
A common issue for folks in the airline biz who’re traveling standby for free is unexpected problems getting on your planned flight.
Just this Friday a pal of mine and his GF went to the hub to catch a flight to Tokyo for a 10-day vacation. The reservations system showed the flight had lots and lots of empty seats. In fact they chose Tokyo as their destination exactly for that reason: certain to get on the flight to get there and nearly certain to get on the flight to come home. Kinda chilly in Tokyo this week, and worse up north on Hokkaido.
The next day I get a text from them. They’re in Rome. The Tokyo flight had lots of empty seats because there was / is a volcano erupting in Russia that required lots of extra fuel to fly around, which in turn required leaving a lot of seats empty to have the weight-carrying capacity for all that fuel. So despite all the empty seats there was no space for hitchhikers like them.
They have lots of sweaters with them and it’s warm & sunny in Rome. Oops. Goes with the territory. Bring layers, lots of layers. And always rain gear.
friend of mine is captain (? - well call it cockpit crew) for a comercial AL… and as LSL mentions, he can fly free (of extremely discounted, I don’t recall) on empty seats all he wants.
he calls it “the walk of humiliation” … when you get all the way to the gate (or sometimes even board the plane) with your whole family behind you, just to be turned down 10 min before taxiing off b/c somebody bought some last minute tickets and made it to the gate.
Only when the plane starts rolling, then he is sure to stay on the flight
oh … meaningless piece of information: during covid he had to “switch over” to fly non-person flights (truck with wings) … and the most ridiculous things he flew was:
- pallets full of bricks
- and live pigs
and IIRC those few on regular “people planes” that were just reconfigured for goods (seats taken out, etc…) - as nobody was allowed to travel
I lived in a small town with a big meat factory where every Thursday afternoon, the pigs to be slaughtered were driven from the train station for a few hundred meters across the main street to the slaughterhouse. I doubt that the smell of pig piss and shit can ever get rid off in a plane.
Sure is, on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Fun fact: UPS actually operated passenger flights for a short time in the 1990s. They had some “quick change” 727s that could be converted between cargo and passenger configuration in a few hours. The seats were on pallets that could be loaded and latched to the floor, IIRC. They flew cargo on weekdays and passengers on the weekends.
its been a couple of years, but IIRC, they were on semi-closed containers that were latched into the seat rails at the corresponding distances … so everything metabolic should have stayed in the container.
This was some sort of hail-mary move from the AL to avoid going bankrupt …I assume they flew “var. cost + x%” to rake in some direly needed cash to pay for plane leasing
During COVID, international passenger air travel crashed. And international air cargo volume exploded as everybody and his sister bought crap on Amazon all day. Plus of course moving all those masks and gowns and later vaccines everywhere.
Lots of airliners, mostly the widebodies, were pressed into service moving cargo on the passenger deck in addition to the normal cargo + luggage carried on the lower deck. The passenger interiors were left in, though in some cases the seats were removed, and more and more so as the pandemic ran longer and longer.
In other cases they quickly invented carriers that could sit on a set of seats making loading not too ridiculously inefficient. For most planes for most cargo, you run out of weight before you run out of cubic feet, so the fact there was space being wasted by galleys, lavs, and sometimes seats still in the cabin didn’t much matter. Those obstacles just made loading more labor intensive.
Some pix: Google Image Search
Bricks seem like such a low-value yet heavy thing to fly in. I wonder why they didn’t just send them via train or cargo ship.
Need bricks fast.