Welcome to Must Read, where we single out the best stories from around the automotive universe and beyond. Today, we have reports from Five Thirty Eight, Portland Press Herald and Make.
Flight Delayed? Your Pilot Really Can Make Up the Time in the Air – Five Thirty Eight
Good news if you fly JFK to LAX, or Boston to LAX, or JFK to San Francisco. Everywhere else, you're probably still screwed if you're stuck on the runway.
I've always been skeptical of this claim, so I decided to check to see if this really happens: Do pilots put the pedal to the metal when their flights are delayed, even if the strategy is more costly because it uses more fuel?
To my surprise, I discovered that pilots do try to make up time in the air, but only for delays that fall into a particular sweet spot.
Vintage Volkswagen bus restorer on a roll in Harpswell – Portland Press Herald
A nice story on some guys in Maine restoring pretty much every rear-engined VW Transporter out there. Happily, they're also making them less slow – for a price.
One of FAS's staple services is replacing the puny, 90-horsepower, air-cooled factory engine with a much more modern version, equipped with such luxuries as turbochargers and electronic fuel injection, increasing not only horsepower but fuel efficiency and engine longevity.
To make the updates feasible, Gagnon sees himself as a "facilitator" who brings years of knowledge and diverse relationships to complete a customer's request.
Crowdfunding the Recovery of a Lost Spacecraft – Make
Crowdfunding for old space stuff. Let's see how this works.
The ISEE-3 probe was launched in 1978. After completing it's original mission—it was the first spacecraft ever to enter a halo orbit at one of the Earth-Sun Lagrangian points—studying the interaction between the Earth's magnetic field and the solar wind, it was repurposed—leaving its halo orbit. The spacecraft was then sent on its way to intercept Comet Giacobini-Zinner in 1985, and then Comet Halley in 1986 as part of the Halley Armada. Afterwards, left in a heliocentric orbit, it was then used for investigations of coronal mass ejections until 1997 when it was decommissioned by NASA.
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