Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Photo: Sonex

A pair of new single-seat airplanes promise a lot of performance for the dollar, offering speeds topping 150 mph for less than $30,000 with engine.

There is, however, some assembly required.

The two single-seater, kit-built planes are aimed squarely at DIY pilots looking for the biggest bang for the buck.

The Onex from Sonex, based in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, is the latest in a long line of inexpensive kit planes offering relatively high performance. The aluminum airplane is capable of aerobatics and manages a 155 mph cruise speed on just 80 horsepower.

An interesting, and attractive, design feature is the foldable wings. They can be folded in minutes and the sporty airplane loaded onto a trailer. The ability to keep your plane at home eliminates parking or hangar costs at the airport and makes maintenance (or long stares of admiration) much easier.

After the first flight a year ago, Sonex recently announced the Federal Aviation Administration has approved the company’s building checklists for the Onex. This gives current and future builders the green light to complete their aircraft in accordance to FAA rules. More than 50 Onex kits have already been shipped to builders.

The second of the new single-seaters got smooth composite lines from the hands of a surfboard maker.

Photo: Aerochia

The Aerochia LT-1 has been in development a few years. The carbon-fiber composite fuselage looks like it might hide a tiny radial engine, but the LT-1 is powered by a two-cylinder, four-stroke HKS engine producing just 60 horsepower. Aerochia expects to get speeds as great as 160 mph from the engine, according to the Experimental Aviation Association.

The LT-1 was designed by a surfboard maker who worked with multi-time Reno air racing champion Darryl Greenamyer on some of the pilot’s most recent composite airplanes. They expect the plane, which has a 21-foot wingspan, to have a maximum weight of less than 800 pounds and burn just three gallons per hour at cruise speed.

The airplane is still in flight testing mode, but the company expects to have the LT-1 at Airventure in Oshkosh, Wisconsin this summer.

The taxi’s waiting, it’s honking its horn, time to go to the airport.

Yes, the passport is in my pocket. I checked five minutes ago.

Of course, the cost of checking again, just one more time, is tiny. Hardly worth discussing with myself. And compared to the cost of being wrong, of missing the flight… go ahead, check again.

And like giving into a toddler every time he whines for ice cream, this is the problem.

The lizard brain seeks constant reassurance. It will wheedle and argue and debate with the rest of your head, pushing for one tiny bit of evidence, some sort of proof that everything will be okay.

Don’t do it.

When you indulge the lizard, it gains power. It doesn’t walk away ashamed, humiliated at its anxiety. Instead, it merely sidesteps and looks for the next thing to worry about, because, ready for this? It’s nice to be reassured.

Developing the reassurance habit is easy to do and hard to kick. The problem is this: there are some ventures where no reassurance is possible. There is important work for you to do where no proof is available.

If you’ve trained the lizard brain that reassurance is forthcoming, it will scream even louder when those projects that don’t come with proof are at hand.

Airline passengers will face the long lines, interminable delays and frustrating backups that come with holiday travel. Through it all, they’ll also have to decide whether to submit to one of the 500-plus x-ray or radio wave scanners found in airports nationwide and wonder about their safety.

Much of the debate surrounding the increasingly common security scanners revolves around their effectiveness and privacy. But the health implications are coming to the fore as the European Union bans x-ray scanners because of health concerns. Many EU nations will instead use millimeter-wave, lower frequency scanners.

Both types use a beam of electromagnetic energy to create an image of a passenger — sans clothing — in an effort to detect weapons and other contraband. Millimeter wave scanners use a portion of the spectrum close to microwaves, while x-ray scanners, of course, use the higher frequency x-ray portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Both devices collect the scattered waves that reflect off the body to create an image.

The dose of radiation from the x-ray scanners is very low. But whether it is low enough to be harmless remains a lingering question.

A recent report by ProPublica and PBS uncovered concerns over the level of radiation passengers are exposed to. Although the dose is very low, the scanners still violate “a longstanding fundamental principle of radiation safety — that humans shouldn’t be x-rayed unless there is a medical benefit,” the report states. There also is the concern that repeated exposure to even low doses of radiation could be a problem.

According to the story, research suggests “anywhere from six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the x-ray backscatter machines,” based on roughly 100 million passengers flying annually. The report also questions why the decision to deploy x-ray scanners was made by the Transportation Security Administration, not the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates drugs and medical devices that can affect public health.

The TSA argues the radiation poses very little threat to human health compared to the security provided by the devices.

“It’s a really, really small amount relative to the security benefit you’re going to get,” Robin Kane, the agency’s assistant administrator for security technology, told ProPublica.

In response to the ProPublica/PBS report, the FDA said the risk of getting cancer is just 1 in 400 million. The agency also clarified several points made in the story.

And as our colleagues at Threat Level noted, Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory analyzed the Rapiscan 1000 x-ray scanner and published the leading and most often-cited study (.pdf) in October 2010. The 49-page report, released in a redacted form, says the machines leak virtually no radiation to TSA staff and nearby passengers and expose the person being scanned to a fraction of the maximum exposure level deemed medically safe.

“You would have to go through the scanner 1,000 times to equate to one medical x-ray,” said Peter Kant, Rapiscan’s executive vice president, summarizing the study. “You get twice as much radiation when eating a banana than when going through the scanner.”

But critics note the mechanical beam’s intensity level has not been published, making it impossible to evaluate the safety claims. Moreover, medical x-ray machines disperse radiation throughout the body, whereas the airport scanners penetrate to about skin level. That means there is a high concentration of radiation on a single organ — the skin.

Questions remain regarding the safety of the scanners and whether such tests were bungled, the manner in which they were placed into widespread use and just how effective they are. There also have been questions about the connection between Rapiscan, which produces the scanners, and former TSA boss Michael Chertoff. Chertoff’s consulting firm had done work for Rapiscan. Both companies deny anything inappropriate occurred.

Beyond the health concerns and the EU ban on x-ray scanners, France and Germany stopped using millimeter wave radio scanners because of numerous false positive results.

According to a separate story about the effectiveness of the scanners, of all the passengers singled out for closer scrutiny after being scanned by millimeter wave machines, pat-down searches revealed more than half of them posed no threat at all. The most mundane things, like sweat and folds in clothing, were among the things contributing to false positives.

Several tests of both types of scanners have shown they are effective at detecting items like guns and knives, but no more so than much cheaper metal detectors already in use. Other tests have shown explosives can be hidden on the body in a manner unlikely to be detected by those monitoring images generated by the scanners.

Passengers do not have a choice whether they are being scanned in a millimeter wave scanner, which resembles a phone booth with glass walls, or an x-ray scanner in which they stand between two large boxes. Airports often have one or the other, but they typically are not used for every security line.

There are roughly 250 x-ray machines and 260 millimeter wave machines in use nationwide. The TSA plans to deploy a total of 1,800 scanners by 2014.

It costs more than a hundred dollars a day to use the wifi at the convention center in Toronto.

A 2 ounce bag of chips at the airport costs $4, the same price a pound costs at the local market.

A three-minute visit to the doctor might cost $250, even though the doctor clearly isn’t making $5000 an hour…

What’s happening is obvious: you’re paying extra to subsidize something else. In order to have a clean lobby or repaired runway or a life-saving but little-used machine on hand, institutions charge some people extra and spread it out over some of their larger costs.

When AT&T first suffered from competition, they accused MCI and others of skimming the cream. They said that a company that sold something like long distance at a reasonable price was taking away their ability to subsidize all the other universal services they offered. They built those services on subsidies.

In the digital age, we get annoyed at these subsidies. That’s because competitors are peeling off the cash cows and selling them separately. A $20 cable for your phone costs a penny or a dollar online–because the person selling it to you doesn’t have to subsidize all the other costs with an expensive add on, right?

It used to be that the only way to collect the money we needed for roads and facilities and other widely used services was to charge a lot for the few things that were seen as extras. Now, though, it’s easier than ever to track actual use, to coordinate consumption with payment. The technology is no longer the problem, it’s our habits that are holding us back.

Simple example: a combination of gas tax and digital toll collection could instantly move the vast percentage of transport cost from society to the individual. Drive more, pay more. There are social implications (it’s a regressive shift) but more important, people would be outraged–the same ones that don’t like paying for a $20 cable(!).

Those that have been subsidized hate having it end, and even those that will save money don’t really like the truth of their consumption so clearly exposed.

When I’m on the bike path riding my truly weird recumbent bicycle, sometimes I pass someone else similarly outfitted. And I wave.

Same thing happens when a pregnant mom meets another at the airport, or when two backpackers encounter each other in a strange city.

Of course, we’re not waving at the other person. We’re waving at ourselves.

When I’m on the bike path riding my truly weird recumbent bicycle, sometimes I pass someone else similarly outfitted. And I wave.

Same thing happens when a pregnant mom meets another at the airport, or when two backpackers encounter each other in a strange city.

Of course, we’re not waving at the other person. We’re waving at ourselves.

Years ago, the authorities decided that a key weapon in the war on terror (sic) would be to make people more afraid.

Two reasons for this: if you make potential bad guys afraid, they might not move up and graduate to become actual bad guys, and second, if something does go wrong (and of course, things always go wrong), at least it looks like you were trying.

And so an infrastructure is built in which photographers are detained, in which expensive scanners that don’t work are installed and in which people believe they are doing their job when they engage in the fear mongering part of the work without paying attention to the actual inspecting and crime fighting part.

At the airport on Thursday, a colleague of mine was detained by two armed police officers because he took a picture (out the observation window!) of a sunset. And when I politely declined to go through the magic scanner, I was put through the regular (inferior?) scanner, detained, carefully searched and basically encourged not to do it again.

Of course, the hard-working folks doing the detaining feel like they’re doing their job. It’s easy to measure. It’s in the manual. It feels like progress. It’s actually a cargo cult, though, the sort of thing an organization does to simulate progress when it’s actually distracting itself from the mission at hand.

Fear can be used as a tactic, but it’s almost never the end goal of marketing. The problem with using it as a tactic is that it’s so easy to do, organizations almost always forget the real point of the exercise.

Jonathan Stark’s community-giving Starbucks Card is no more. At 7 p.m. PT Friday, Starbucks reluctantly pulled the plug on Stark’s pay-it-forward social experiment following allegations of fraud or misuse.

Starbucks made the decision to shut down the communal Jonathan’s Card, already in violation of Starbucks Card program terms, after it came to light that funds were being misappropriated.

Adam Brotman, vice president of digital ventures at Starbucks, phoned Stark earlier Friday evening to inform him that the card would be deactivated. Starbucks, he says, was rooting for the experiment from the sidelines, even though the company’s terms do not permit the use of shared registered cards.

“I’m sad about it, first and foremost, because we were legitimately cheering on this experiment,” Brotman says.

Friday morning, entrepreneur Sam Odio’s “How to use Jonathan’s card to buy yourself an iPad” blog post lit the web on the fire. Some saw the card exploit as an evolution of the experiment; others saw it as theft. Odio even later offered to return the funds. Once the exploit was public, however, Starbucks felt compelled to deactivate the card.

Stark launched Jonathan’s Card on July 14 as a social adaption of the “take a penny, leave a penny” concept. Hundreds of people donated several thousand dollars to the communal coffee project before it was shut down.

The Jonathan’s Card website has been updated with the following message: “We believe this is the start to a bigger more glowing picture. In the last 5 days or so, we’ve received hundreds of stories of people doing small things to brighten a stranger’s day: Paying for the next car at the drive through. Sharing a pick me up with someone who has had a rough time. Charging up a phone card and sharing it with strangers at the airport … So, tonight we lose our barcode. But of course, we never needed it in the first place.”

The @jonathanscard Twitter account, which was previously updating followers with the card’s balance, observed its end with this final tweet: “The next chapter begins jonathanstark.com/card.”