Irony thy name is Flight Attendant

Randall Wulff, a flight attendant for Air New Zealand was fired for sitting down on the job.

The airline felt Wulff could not be “relied on to follow safety procedures.” You see, Wulff sat down during turbulence.

As vice-president of flight attendant union FARSA in March 2008, he issued a statement that urged flight attendants to “take the precaution of sitting down when a plane’s seatbelt light was showing.” So he sat down over Vancouver in April 2008 during turbulence and got fired. Now the airline owes him $10,000 and his job back.

How exactly is it an Air New Zealand safety procedure that the flight attendant is exempt from being safely buckled in?

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  • German Smuggler Sentenced in Australia

    George’s Point of View

    The exchange rate is always changing. Investors and travelers always keep their eye on the rates because day to day, it can make quite a difference on how much jingle you have in your pocket. For the rest of the world, exchange rates are not something one much notices unless the price of certain goods out of a particular location suddenly go up due to one or another international factors. So I wonder if the fiduciary value of the Australian gecko and skink has skyrocketed in Germany.

    Who knew Germany had a market for Australian reptiles?

    Apparently Hans Kurt Kubus had an inside track or perhaps had corralled the Australian reptile market. Although he’s no Bernie Madoff, nor even Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (notorious Nigerian who attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound jet), Hans Kurt Kubus has a special brand of notoriety. He will go down in the history books as the gentleman caught smuggling 44 live lizards in his underwear (although one might normally not call someone with reptiles in his underwear a gentleman. He is more likely to found in psychological therapy somewhere for zoophilia.) Mr Kubus was caught at the airport. One can only envision an embarrassing moment. Fortunately for the lizards (or perhaps fortunately for Kobus’s unmentionables), the reptiles were contained in a package and not running loose on his person. One can only imagine the psychological damage to the lizards.

    The world will now remember Hans Kurt Kubus as the German who collects reptiles who was caught red-handed (red-panted?) at Christchurch International Airport last December.

    For two counts (trading in exploited species and hunting protected wildlife), Kobus has been jailed for 14 weeks, must pay $3,540 NZ, and will shortly be deported to Germany.

    Protection of the species is only one factor. One can only imagine a worst-case scenario of Germany potentially awash in geckos (although climate-impaired for German winters), the kudzu of the lizarding world– to the detriment of the naturally occurring species. No doubt, Germans are thankful the scourge has been nipped in the bud. Or at least briefly amused.

    The lizards have been valued at $2,000 euros each.

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    Tracking Down #MH370 or Physics of an Air Space Game of Marco Polo


    The guessing/math triangulating the path of Inmarsat’s pings was the only thing experts seemed to agree on regarding to pinning down the location of Malaysia Airlines flight 370. Yet at the location, at least, the location according to the data laying out the path according to Inmarsat’s analysis, nothing was found in the recent search of the ocean floor off the coast of Australia. The engineers and mathematicians involved may have done their best but the guess seems to have been faulty or otherwise off somehow. If you will pardon the circular reasoning, if only we knew how it was off, we would know how it was off.

    Investigators have come up with two maps that can be drawn based on the ping data, based on the speed. The variation is due to considerations of the pings which do not indicate the speed or direction the plane was moving, but only the probable distance between plane and satellite. See Inmarsat’s global representation …

    Inmarsatglobe

    However, there is opposition to the Inmarsat calculations which is presented by * Michael Exner (founder of the American Mobile Satellite Corporation) **Duncan Steel(physicist and visiting scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center) and satellite technology consultant ***Tim Farrar which presents other data that should be considered. See the Dopplar shift jpg…

    dopplarshift

    My pragmatic response to these experts is a major simplification: just that the plane did not disappear into a textbook, under textbook conditions. The pings occurred in a real atmosphere, with atmospheric variations that were not and possibly could not have been taken into account. Not only are the speed, direction and height of the aircraft factors that must be taken into account, but also the quality of the atmosphere, density, weather, etc, plus factors that a non-mathmatical, non-scientist like myself would not even know how to bring into the picture. In this search at least, the untested math used is as vulnerable as statistics is to presenting a defective or imprecise representation, or a representation which would only be true under certain conditions.

    For further study on this, * Michael Exner, the Atlantic Official Explanation article, input from physicist **Duncan Steele (who calculates “a uniform ring radius based on the aircraft-satellite range given the elevation angle and the satellite’s altitude, and the latitude of the sub-satellite point, the aircraft being taken to be at the same latitude in this simplified geometry; and satellite consultant***Tim Farrar.

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