As someone who earns a living as one of those guys with a cranial on a flight deck, I concur. I wouldn't have wanted to get within 30 feet of that thing. I saw Boeing's plane up close at the Pax River air museum, and it is terrifying.

Eh, yeah, a bird can put a hole in a leading edge, maybe take out a few fuel lines, hydraulic lines, etc, maybe kill the engine through the loss of those lines, and you might lose flight control surfaces even (unlikely due to the placement of those lines aft) but the structural integrity of the wing itself? There is…

I'd make you a video of me fixing airplanes, but it's basically just a few hours of me swearing and bleeding.

Geese will take out an engine just dandy, but there is literally no way a goose, or even multiple geese, is going to break a wing. They are exceptionally strong. And frankly, that turbulence would maybe be moderate as far as the airframe is concerned. It would definitely handle a lot more than that. If people were…

Volcanic ash is one of the worst things that can happen to an aircraft. It is composed of millions upon millions of tiny little pieces of jagged glass, rock, and metals, all of which is highly acidic and corrosive. It is responsible for the near-crash of at least one large airliner and has caused untold number of…

I got pulled over once in Patuxent River, MD while driving an olive-green, camo'd up M1156 (up-armored HMMWV), for - most improbably - speeding. The cop asked for my license, registration and proof of insurance. The HMMWV did not have license plates, and is most certainly not insured. I was in uniform, and so handed…

I think it was Ansel Adams who said, "The world's best camera is the one you have with you." My $1500 worth of DSLR is absolutely bloody useless if I can't take a picture with it! I always have my cellphone on me, though :/.

I am forever explaining to people why megapixels matter very little in a camera, especially nowadays. Few people believe that the 16mp camera in their galaxy S5 can't take as good a picture as my 12mp Olympus XZ-2 can (photographer's ability notwithstanding!), especially at night. Maybe some day they'll learn.

I dare you to do the same in one of my E-2C Hawkeyes... most cramped plane ever

Looks like Takata already took those airbags.

Basically it was dying and he had to say to his children, "I'm sorry, Timmy, but the Sunfire has had a long life, and now it's going to live in a big sunny ranch... mmm, ranch..." And the rest is history.

My God, it's like the Swedish flag vomited all over the inside of that car.

Zomg FLAT CRANK!!!!!!

The best part is, that's probably not even the weirdest thing they did that day. This is Siberia we're talkin' about.

Radar blisters aren't clear glass ;).

Fair enough - guess I never thought about that. The plane I work on has no fewer than six independent navigation systems in it, so I don't think about having to DR that often.

Are these overall numbers, or numbers per capita? The two different numbers tell different, but equally interesting stories about their countries.

I don't know what's weirder: that their passengers are willing to disembark and fuck around in metal-starts-snapping cold, or that their airliners have bombardier stations in the nose.

Now, if only we had things that generated huge amounts of energy without creating huge amounts of CO2 in the process...

Electricity does not take the path of least resistance. It will take all paths to ground simultaneously, but with a current inversely proportional to the amount of resistance to ground presented. If you have two paths to ground, one having a 100 ohm resistance and one having a one ohm resistance, 99% of the…