Facebook and Twitter....instead....

It was one of those funnily serendipitous things that connect everything together...first of all it started "playing" with XPlane 10....a damned good (understatement!) simulator and I suppose the next best thing to actually owning your own aircraft or holding a pilots license...anyway, flying around with some VOR or VOR navigation I ended up in Shannon --- and yes, I did land the plane.

Then I started wondering what flies out of Shannon now - the Shannon Stop-Over has been gone a very long time - and so I ended up looking for the Shannon departures board. Noticing the BA001 and 003 flights there - London City to JFK via Shannon on the outbound leg on an Airbus A318, I was wondering what that service was like.

Read a few passenger reports and noticed a comment about it being like the Pan Am Lunar Shuttle inside - certainly the photos of the all business-class seating look like it.

Which brings me to a clip of the said Lunar Shuttle from Kubrik's 2001:


Which then got me thinking:

1. The Blue Danube or more correctly An der schönen blauen Donau is a beautiful piece of music perfectly suited to a space docking
2. Kubrik was a genius
3. A.C. Clarke's 2001 is also a piece of genius
4. We had vision in the 1960's of a future where space travel and space-stations might be common place
5. We got Twitter and Facebook instead....

 ....which allows me to write about what we could have had instead of having it....

Flying.

Found this on NPR's website:

Scary Geology: Mountains In Motion

by Robert Krulwich, 12 December 2011

Here's the thing about mountains: You can, if you are totally insane, jump off them. Or, under the right circumstances, they — the mountains — can jump off you.

and a link to the video which is best viewed in HD and full screen...

SENSE OF FLYING from Goovinn on Vimeo.