Results tagged “airports”

A small prop plane bound for Bakersfield, a Cessna 182 to be exact, crashed shortly after takeoff from Napa County Airport this morning at around 4:30 a.m. The pilot, who was the only person aboard, was killed. That is all.

Back in September, a certain baggage handler by the name of John Emil Victoria, age 21, fucked with the wrong man's luggage. A retired San Francisco police officer checked his custom-made handgun in his luggage, and it disappeared. This led to an undercover sting operation in which two other baggage handlers, Andrew Balamiento and Tauailapalapa Laulu, were also convicted of swiping expensive items from peoples' luggage. Balamiento and Victoria will both serve several months for felony embezzlement and Laulu will serve one month and two years of probation for misdemeanor embezzlement. Phew! You are now safe to check your custom handguns in your luggage again.

Not sure if any of you caught this story in the Weekly this week, but just in case you didn't, and just in case you have kids, make sure to train them in the fine art of screaming as a molester deterrent.

A company that provides a service we never even heard of called the Clear Registered Traveler Program has abruptly gone out of business, KCBS reports. Clear operated special security lanes at 20 airports around the country, including all 3 Bay Area airports, purporting to provide (for a $200 annual membership fee) a pre-screening service for frequent travelers that would allow them to scoot through security as if they were trusted government dignitaries. But as the WSJ puts it, "TSA never was comfortable with the notion of 'trusting' any travelers, so the security benefits of a Clear card boiled down to getting a special lane and some staff to help carry plastic tubs for you." Yeah, no wonder it flopped.

Five Stanford doctoral students are flying to Paris this weekend as finalists in a competition sponsored by Airbus for the best fuel-saving idea for commercial airlines. Their idea is for the passenger jets to fly in formation the way military airplanes and birds do -- something that engineers have known for decades allows for a reduce in drag. They figure that the planes don't even have to leave from the same airports or go to the same destination to take advantage of the idea. Three planes crossing the Atlantic to Europe would just need to time their rendezvous points off the east coast, join formation for the transatlantic trip, and break the formation after they cross the pond. Good luck choreographing that ballet!

So, this is sort of a math problem: Take a $130 million project; sit it on it and discuss for many years; watch costs rise to about $500 million; receive a $70 million chunk in transportation funds from the federal government; apply for $150 million more in federal transportation loans; figure that you can charge riders $12 round trip on top of their BART fare; decide that in a flagging economy it is better to go into deeper debt and add 13,000 jobs; wait five more years, give or take -- and what do you get? An AirTrain-like solution connecting the Coliseum BART station with Oakland Airport.