airplane

So this month I will have traveled more than 20,000 miles via plane, train and boats to various destinations and various time zones. The iPhone has proven adept and adaptable - so long as you activate the international roaming and data plans - which you have to do in person or via AT&T's operators before you leave the country - as my friend Max found out the hard way.

Anyway, upon landing at each airport the iPhone will find the applicable AT&T network or AT&T compatible network - oftentimes in seconds. But … Read more

Rhino's compilation CD box sets are are not only amazingly consistent; their creative packaging and superb music programming satisfy neophytes and seasoned collectors. Their latest offering from the ever popular Nuggets series, "Love is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-- 1970 " is a trip through the era's psychedelic and ragged glories. You get a healthy dose of greatest hits, gems like the Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit," and Santana's "Evil Ways" mixed with less heralded but truly stellar tunes like Kak's "Lemonaide Kid." I swear I'… Read more

SONOMA, Calif.--NASA awarded $250,000 in prize money this weekend to teams competing to build and fly a small-seat plane that could one day be a prototype for so-called air cars.

The Cafe Foundation, a nonprofit group of flight test engineers, held the NASA-sponsored race of personal aircraft vehicles (PAVs) on Saturday here at the Charles Schultz Sonoma County Airport. Four teams flying small two-seater planes competed against each other in six categories: speed, short takeoff, efficiency, handling, noise and overall best (or the vantage grand prize).

After all of the race data was tallied Saturday, NASA named its … Read more

If airplanes are your large-scale luxury gadget of choice, News.com has a nice big gallery of exciting shots from July's Experimental Aircraft Association show in the skies over Wisconsin.

For a sampling of home-builts, antiques, classics, electrics, war birds, ultralights and rotorcraft, as well as cameos by both NASA and The Beach Boys, you have only to click on the image at left.

Oshkosh... It's not just for overalls anymore.

TUCSON, Ariz.--I've just finished my tours of the PIMA Air and Space Museum and the Arizona Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) facility here, and boy have I seen a lot of airplanes.

I'm visiting the two facilities as part of my Road Trip 2007 around the Southwest. They are basically side by side, and house approximately 300 and 4,300 planes, respectively.

At the Air and Space museum, it's a mix of military, NASA and civilian planes, including an SR-71, the plane that brought the hostages home from Iran in 1981, plus many others.

At AMARG, … Read more

With summer here in the northern hemisphere, many people are packing their bags, grabbing their plane tickets, and hopping a flight for a well-deserved vacation. Once on the plane, most of us face cramped seats, crying babies, and maybe a couple of bags of peanuts (if we're lucky). Most of the time, the promise of the destination is enough for us to deal with a long flight, and if all else fails, there's always the sweeping view of the country from the window seat.

This week, I rediscovered (it's now in version 2.0) a great screensaver … Read more

Boeing has commissioned DesignworksUSA, a subsidiary of BMW, to design the interiors for its wide-bodied fleet of corporate jets.

DesignworksUSA has released drawings (below) of what a Boeing Business Jet 787, also known as the Dreamliner, could look like for its owner, or group of owners.

Is this a hint that we may be going back to the Pan Am glory days of old?

Only for the lucky few.

The Boeing Business Jet 787 holds even fewer people than its 747-8 VIP.

The intimate design reflects the changing needs of frequent corporate fliers who use their jets as a second … Read more

An anonymous zillionaire, apparently from the Middle East (as deduced by photos of in-flight map monitors that show Arabic text and Dubai as an origin point), has tricked out his very own Airbus A380, and it's pretty darn awesome. Nicknamed the Flying Palace, it's equipped with a boardroom, a luxurious cocktail bar, and plenty of space for chilling out.

In fact, if it weren't for the windows, you wouldn't even think it were an airplane.

I'm going to see if we can get our own A380 for Crave. It'd contain, naturally, a luxury Dance Dance Revolution arcade, … Read more

Making retro-style phones seems to be an obsession with some companies, for reasons that continue to baffle us. We've seen updated phones from the 1930s to the 1960s, sometimes with just parts of them available.

But UncommonGoods has taken the concept to its truest form, restoring actual phones with modern wiring, cords and microphones. If you're interested in getting one of them, be aware that availability is limited: Like so many other things, there isn't an abundance of phones that survived the '60s.