Flying Can Be Fun Again

Some airline passengers in the Caribbean, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates, according to trendwatching.com, can begin to anticipate the glamorous experience flying was in years gone by. In Turkey, they'll also meet a new friend, Nely.

     Vacationers touring in Barbados with Virgin Holidays will be able to put their casual flying clothes over their bathing suits and check out of their resort hotels early, because Virgin will pick them up, check their luggage, and take them to the beach. At oceanside, Virgin will provide boarding passes, a locker, beach towels, a showering facility, unlimited refreshments, and an air conditioned lounge area, while every last vacation moment merits a "Wish You Were Here" selfie home.

     Visitors to Singapore's Changi Airport have walked among animatronic, remote-controlled butterflies designed to resemble the Diaethria Anna species. For kids, the airport's five-story playground offers climbing nets, a pole to slide down, and more for use for 50 at a time.

     Before heading into the wild blue yonder from Dubai International Airport, passengers will be exploring the virtual  blue aquarium surrounding them as they walk through a security tunnel to their flights in Terminal 3. To use the tunnel instead of traditional procedures, passengers pre-register at 3D face-scanning kiosks located throughout the airport. Watching the fish is expected to relax and entertain passengers as 80 hidden tunnel cameras scan visitors' faces from different angles. At the end of the tunnel, cleared travelers are sent on their way with a "Have a nice trip" message or a red sign alerts security. Dubai's airports process 80 million passengers now. The tunnel was developed to handle the increased volume of passengers, 124 million, expected by 2020. It should be mentioned that Dubai's virtual aquarium receives the same legal challenges that other facial recognition systems face.

     At Turkey's Istanbul New Airport, a robot named Nely notes the expressions, ages, and genders of passengers before greeting them and making (or not making) small talk. Nely is, of course, travel-functional: booking flights for passengers, relaying information, and providing weather updates. Using AI, facial recognition, emotional analysis based on input from sociologists, voice capability, and a bar code reader, Nely even remembers passengers from previous interactions.

I'm A Little Airplane

Singing children running through fields with arms outstretched, kids flying kites, and youngsters folding paper airplanes all are following in the tradition of inventors around the world who looked up at birds and tried to imitate their ability to fly.

     We know the Greek myth of Icarus whose feather and wax wings melted when he flew too close to the sun. In Renaissance Italy, Leonardo da Vinci, who designed an airplane but lacked an engine to fly it, had such respect for the birds his design mimicked that he bought the caged birds he saw in Florence in order to set them free.

     Birds have inspired the realistic drawings of John James Audubon and the new stylized paintings of Dutch artist, Jeroen Allart. Gardeners plant a mix of trees, shrubs, grasses, vines, and flowers to attract a variety of bird species and to protect them while they feed. Guided by experts from World Birders (worldbirders.com) in the UK, bird watchers, known as birders, travel the globe to see as many species as possible, especially those that are endangered.

     Earthbound people have found ways for birds to help them. As far back as 2200 B.C. there is mention of the Chinese use of trained falcons. Marshaling their birds' speed to fly high, dive onto prey, and kill with beak and sharp talons, hunters have taken to the field with falcons and hawks to procure a wide variety of game birds, hares, and even small deer and wolves.

     During wars, soldiers have used the natural instinct of pigeons to return to a home loft to carry messages that deceived the enemy (Read Double Cross by Ben Macintyre). Today, drones (See The Art of Intelligence by Henry A. Crumpton) and the robotic spy drones that are shaped like hummingbirds seem somewhat like descendants of the homing pigeon.

     Nowadays, kids who send messages in helium-filled balloons follow in the tradition of the French Montgolfier brothers who showed people they could fly by filling a large silk bag with heated air in 1783. Flying balloons drifted at the mercy of wind and air currents until the Brazilian, Alberto Santos-Dumont, powered his dirigible, or airship, with a gasoline engine in 1898. Germans used dirigibles in World War I, and, when the war ended, airships began to carry passengers across the Atlantic Ocean. Famously, the Germans' hydrogen-filled Hindenburg burst into flames in 1937.

    The Pilot and the Little Prince by Peter Sis not only tells young readers 6 to 8 years old about the life of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince, but also covers the early days of aviation. In the years following the brief flight of Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1903, military, passenger, mail, and freight use of airplanes and helicopters has expanded. There have been constant improvements in engines, pilot and flight attendant training, flame resistant plane interiors, safety regulations, and "black boxes" used to determine what went wrong in the case of crashes. All these areas present career opportunities for young people interested in aviation. (Those interested in a career in space, might enjoy my earlier post, "Space Explorers.")

     Understanding the broad appeal of flight, even to those whose career interests are not in aviation, filmmakers have tapped a variety of sources to make Superman movies, tie balloons to a chair to go Up, create a flying suit for Iron Man, and play on national stereotypes in Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. Disney/Pixar's film, Planes, has inspired a line of remote control planes, such as Mattel's Dusty Crophopper.