Virtyal Residency Day Thirty-Six, Boeing & Jet Fuel

My indefatigable friend Paul Challacombe sent me an article from the Seattle Times to the effect that Boeing had pulled the plug on a new program to provide internet connections via Connexion in flight.

Boeing seems sanguine about the failure to build a customer base. As is often the case with art, but oddly to me, I hadn't expected it so much in business, this corporation was ahead of its time. There seems to be a big social delay factor these days with new ideas, at a time when we need them most and need to apply them even more.

Paul writes, "Perhaps you will see the same ironic twists that I did between this article and your current brainwaves. I particular liked the fact that the technology worked beautifully, but the only thing worth the funding these days in aviation is saving “fuel, fuel, fuel”. The antenna is a drag.

Of course Howard Hughes got the point by obsessing the rivets into an invisible smoothness of aluminum – but then he just wanted to go faster and impress the chicks. But the resulting plane was therefore beautiful too: necessity, extremism, curiosity, excess money and lust being the mothering village of all art.

This whole gag reminds me of the geek who thinks I want to watch a movie on my cellphone, then I explain to his horned-rimmed self why I don’t even have a cellphone.

But then it is also true that a big company can just write it off. Boeing is booming in general. If the technology had been from a smaller tech company, it (the failure to connect so to speak) could have ruined lives. The economy of scale isn’t always just the skin of a snake."

Perhaps once in flight, people just want to escape all the tech for a while.