Idle State

I was doing some random net reading (the articles are a few years old now) and found that aeroplanes use fibre optic gyroscopes - no moving parts - instead a few lasers and a bunch of optic fibre in a loop / coil. This was news to me. I was thinking that they still used a bunch of motors turning flywheels holding some accelerometers still in a sort of - don't bump that, we may end up landing in Uzbekistan* - way.

http://www.pprune.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-9344.html

Fibre optic gyroscopes compare the time taken for light to travel around the loop in one direction vs the time for the light to travel in the other direction. If the loop is rotating in one direction, the light travels a shorter distance one way than it travels in the other direction. (Even though it is in a 5km loop of optic fibre - the light travels more than 5km in one direction and less than 5km in the other direction). Weird.

Not to be outdone, in the bid to adopt quantum technology, some guys are thinking that they could put quantum gyroscopes in aeroplanes.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn2526

First Officer: Sir, we may or may not be in the South Pacific.
Captain: Well, did the cat drink the vial of poison or not?

Back to the beach.

* There's nothing wrong with landing in Uzbekistan - it's just that my boarding pass said Dubai.

Technorati Tags:
Flying, Idleness, Amusement, Random

My two year old passport is just about full and I've realised why. In the last 7 days I've been to three other countries besides Dubai - racked up about 20 hours and 10000 nautical miles and been through about what must be about 20 security checkpoints.

What I've realised is that this has become normal for me - hence the full passport.

So - frustration with waiting, queueing, being "screened" and flight safety videos abounds.