New Florence. New Renaissance.

20 from 20: West Coast on the East Coast

This is the 16th post in a series of 20 highlights from the Acrobatics during the crisis, Analyst Cam, Burning Platform,Technology and my Passion and other series I ran last year. 

While most of the other series involved video footage, one only profiled images posted on Instagram.

As she wrote in the Passion series, my wife Margaret is a packing pro - as in lots of activities on a day trip. Over the last few months, on weekends, she has used it to great advantage navigating all the lockdowns. We have gone up and down the West Coast of Florida mostly between Cedar Key and Marco Island - roughly 300 miles of Gulf coastline.

They have been day trips, with masks and distancing precautions. Most were one gas tank trips. FL roads are excellent, and access to many of these places costs only a parking ticket. One of the best investments we made was annual memberships to local museums and botanical gardens. They have opened up access to many other places with their reciprocal arrangements.

Most folks think of Florida as Orlando or Miami. The West Coast of the state is way better - not that I am biased. Some of the places here are still rustic, some are swanky, most offer plenty of history, almost all of them have stunning scenery with the water in the Gulf, in springs, lakes and rivers.

Come visit the West Coast of FL in 2021! In the meantime, enjoy this gallery of 10 photos from each visit.

Caladesi Island

Cassadaga

Cedar Key

Christmas

Clearwater Beach

Crystal River

Dunedin

Eureka Springs

Ft Myers

Ft Myers - Edison and Ford Estate

Gainesville

more Gainesville

Key West

Lake Apopka

Naples

Oldsmar

Osprey

Plant City

Punta Gorda - Babcock Ranch

Ruskin

Sanibel Island

Safety Harbor

Safety Harbor

Sarasota - Celery Fields

Sarasota - Ringling Museum

Sarasota - more Ringling Museum

Sarasota - even more Ringling Museum

Sarasota - Selby Gardens

Sarasota - more Selby Gardens

Sarasota - Tibbals miniature circus

St. Petersburg - Christmas 

St. Petersburg - Dali Museum

St. Petersburg - Edge District

St. Petersburg - James Museum

St. Petersburg - New Pier

St. Petersburg - Sawgrass Lake Park

Tampa - Channel A

Tampa - Cypress Point

Tampa - Historic District

Tampa - Lettuce Leaf Park

Tampa - River Walk

Tampa - River Walk at Christmas

Tampa - Upper Tampa Bay

Tarpon Springs

Thonotosassa

Thonotosassa - Hillsborough River State Park

Tierra Verde

Treasure Island

Venice

West Coast on the East Coast

Many of my readers have been following along with 4 series of blogs/videos I have run over the course of the pandemic - Acrobatics during the crisis, Analyst Cam, Burning Platform, and Technology and my Passion.

There is a fifth series which has mostly shown up on Instagram and in my notes squirreled away on Google Drive. As she wrote in the Passion series, my wife Margaret is a packing pro - as in lots of activities on a day trip. Over the last few months, on weekends, she has used it to great advantage navigating all the lockdowns. We have gone up and down the West Coast of Florida mostly between Cedar Key and Marco Island - roughly 300 miles of Gulf coastline. A couple of destinations like Christmas (yes!) and Gainesville, are a bit inland. (Some of these posts are pre-pandemic.)

They have been mostly day trips, with masks and distancing precautions. Our roads are excellent, and access to many of these places costs only a parking ticket. One of the best investments we made was annual memberships to local museums and botanical gardens. They have opened up access to many other places with their reciprocal arrangements.

Most folks think of Florida as Orlando or Miami. The West Coast of the state is way better - not that I am biased. Some of the places here are still rustic, some are swanky, most offer plenty of history, almost all of them have stunning scenery with the water in the Gulf, in springs, lakes and rivers.

Come visit when you are comfortable getting on the road again. In the meantime, enjoy 10 photos from each visit. I will be happy to share my notes when you are ready. And many more photos.

In the meantime, I think I will donate a copy of my photos and notes to a time capsule of the pandemic of 2020. Hopefully, in posterity, someone will find them and contrast them to all the doom and gloom they will read about this year in the media clippings.

Caladesi Island

Cassadaga

Cedar Key

Christmas

Clearwater Beach

Crystal River

Dunedin

Eureka Springs

Ft Myers

Ft Myers - Edison and Ford Estate

Gainesville

more Gainesville

Key West

Lake Apopka

Naples

Oldsmar

Osprey

Plant City

Punta Gorda - Babcock Ranch

Ruskin

Sanibel Island

Safety Harbor

Safety Harbor

Sarasota - Celery Fields

Sarasota - Ringling Museum

Sarasota - more Ringling Museum

Sarasota - even more Ringling Museum

Sarasota - Selby Gardens

Sarasota - more Selby Gardens

Sarasota - Tibbals miniature circus

St. Petersburg - Christmas 

St. Petersburg - Dali Museum

St. Petersburg - Edge District

St. Petersburg - James Museum

St. Petersburg - New Pier

St. Petersburg - more of the Pier

St. Petersburg - Sawgrass Lake Park

St. Petersburg - Sunken Gardens

Tampa - Channel A

Tampa - Cypress Point

Tampa - Historic District

Tampa - Lettuce Leaf Park

Tampa - River Walk

Tampa - Upper Tampa Bay

Tarpon Springs

Thonotosassa

Thonotosassa - Hillsborough River State Park

Tierra Verde

Treasure Island

Venice

Snow Park in Florida!

Snowcat Ridge – the one-of-a-kind alpine snow park – will feature a massive snow tubing hill, Alpine Village and a ten thousand square foot snow-covered arctic igloo.

The snow tubing hill will be 60-feet-tall and 400-feet-long, with a magic carpet lift that will whisk riders and their snow tubes to the top of the hill. Guests can ride in a single, tandem, or 6-person family tube to slide down the snow-covered slope.

ABC Action News

 

Back to the Future - Supersonic flight

Built out of carbon fiber, the sleek white and black craft resembles a fighter jet more than a passenger transport. The 71-foot XB-1 will start making its first flights early next year, reaching a speed of Mach 1.3 before going even faster as testing progresses. If all goes well, Boom will turn its focus in late 2021 to completing the design of its first commercial plane, dubbed Overture.

The 199-foot Overture will get the blood of businesspeople and travel enthusiasts pumping as they picture a thrombosis-free future. The jet will carry 65 to 88 passengers, with roomy seats on either side of the plane separated by a walkway, meaning everyone gets a window and an aisle seat, ideally at business-class prices.

BusinessWeek

 

Fello'fly

In the animal world, migrating geese have been benefiting from the flight technique of wake-energy retrieval—or surfing the air upwash of a leader bird—since time immemorial. And the benefits are obvious: free lift means staying aloft for longer distances with a lot less energy expenditure—pragmatic reasons that persuaded Airbus engineers to take a closer look at applying the same technique to aircraft to help airlines reduce fuel consumption.

At Airbus, this demonstrator project is called fello’fly. But while initial flight tests have yielded the prospect of 5-10% fuel savings per trip, many have wondered: how can two aircraft fly sufficiently close together to safely carry out a fello’fly operation?

Airbus

 

 

The disappearing hotel shower curtain

While hotel bathroom showers used to have curtains, sliding glass doors, or doors that swing outwards, what guests often find now is a shower with a half curve of glass only, or a shower head and drain that are completely open to the rest of the room. Tom Parker, director of boutique hospitality design firm Fettle, says the designs he sees the most often are crittal doors—big panes of clear glass with black frames, which can be used to either fully enclose or partially enclose a space—or "small openings with no door."

Smaller doors give the illusion of a larger room. “The ones that I've worked on, they just make the bathroom feel a bit brighter and a little bit more spacious,” says Strauss.

A physical barrier, no matter how small, also eliminates the need for shower curtains, which can get pretty icky. “Shower curtains, especially cloth curtains, are more likely to trap bacteria than shower glass,” says DeBoer “Frameless shower doors offer less chance of mold build-up [and] are easier to clean.”

CN Traveler

Here are some design ideas from Fontana

 

Airplanes and global warming

But when Stettler and his team analyzed flight data they obtained of Japan airspace, they found that most contrail warming was caused by just 2 percent of flights. And most of those flights originated in the late afternoon—because as the sun goes down, cooling can no longer offset the warming.

“And the warming effect persists throughout the evening, into the night.”

But what if the contrails that contribute the most to warming could be eliminated? Such a change could be achieved if aircraft avoided flying in the thin layers of humidity where contrails form.

“By changing the altitude only by a couple of thousand feet, either up or down, it would no longer form a contrail. And so what we found in this study was that by changing the altitude of less than 2 percent of flights, we could actually get rid of just under 60 percent of the warming effect due to contrails.”

Scientific American

Image credit

 

Bell rethinks the helicopter tail rotor

Sinusas said his team chose the four-fan array because a single larger electric rotor would be heavier and less responsive, with more sluggish changes in speed. Smaller electric fans are also quieter, which was the primary motivation for developing the system. “Noise has always been there, but it really hasn’t been a priority to reduce it until recently,” he added. “We’re at the point where locations are banning helicopter flights because of the noise levels, and that prompted us to ask how we can solve this.”

Converting the tail rotor to an all-electric system solves other problems. It improves stability because the rotors don’t need to be constantly in motion, unlike a conventional tail rotor. The pilot can actually turn the fans off in forward flight, as the vertical fin they’re embedded within stabilizes the aircraft. (Conventional tail rotors are only needed for hovering and low-speed flight, but they run constantly because of the link to the main engine.) Also, because the system is fly-by-wire, meaning controlled electrically rather than through mechanical linkages, the computer can control the fans. This can potentially eliminate the need for the pilot to have to use the pedals at all. An automated version of the EDAT would thus be a form of autopilot.

Finally, the system will help with the current rush toward the electrification of aircraft, particularly air taxis being developed by Bell and dozens of other companies. “It’s certainly a stepping stone toward electrification, and easier than doing it with a full aircraft with a completely new powertrain,” Sinusas noted. It also should be easier to certify than a fresh helicopter design—less than a year versus several years—because only the anti-torque system is changing and being electrified.

Wired

Bunk beds in the sky

Dubbed the “Economy Skynest,” the new cabin section is the culmination of input from hundreds of passengers and three years of research and development at Air New Zealand’s Auckland Hangar 22 innovation center.

The Economy Skynest will consist of a mini sleeper cabin with three bunks on each side of a narrow aisle plus a stepladder to access the two top beds on either side. Details are still scant, but it should be located somewhere in the coach cabin and each bed should be over 58 cm wide (22.8 inches) and 200 cm long (78.7 inches) long. Passengers who book a bed can expect a full-size pillow, sheets, a blanket, ear plugs and privacy curtains as well as lighting options designed to help travelers sleep. The airline is still exploring options like putting in reading lights, air nozzles and personal USB outlets. Passengers would still fly in normal economy seats, but be able to use the Skynest to sleep during some portion of the flight.

Forbes

 

Air Taxis evolve

One scenario presented by German manufacturers Volocopter is air taxi ports build around the city. Air taxis would arrive on landing platforms built on VoloPorts, where travellers can get checked in quickly and board their ride.

But air taxis are being developed for a future where such ports are obsolete, being able to pick passengers with ease from carparks and other spaces.

For that to happen, technology will have to catch up, greatly shrinking the wingspan of many of these vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft to fit safely into these urban spaces.

Slash Gear