Global Aviation:Mile-high shower club

[ttaaee]

Three Concordes swooped into Heathrow Airport Friday, joining in a spectacular finale to the era of luxury supersonic jet travel. (http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&e=2&u=/ap/20031024/ap_on_re_eu/farewell_concorde)

[jpatokal]

I thought Kras Air (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kras_Air) was funny enough, but the listing in here takes the cake:

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/col/smith/2003/10/17/askthepilot60/index.html

Would be fun to go up to a Thai travel agent and try to book a ticket on Aviaobshchemash though.

[jpatokal]

Suffering from an acute case of having way too much money on your hands? Here's what one guy fixed that.

http://www.architecturaldigest.com/architects/100/craig_wright/wright_article_022008?currentPage=1
http://www.architecturaldigest.com/architects/100/craig_wright/wright_slideshow_022008
(note: shows both "Before" and "After" photos)

A few choice quotes:
The Sultan of Brunei’s pilot came over to ask if he could have a peek inside, “and at the end of the little tour he said, quite petulantly I thought, ‘I wish our plane looked like this.’ ”

"There’s something about a wide-body plane with 1,000 square feet of floor space that’s addictive, and I just didn’t feel like flying in a little tube of 300 square feet anymore."

“I do it mostly because I enjoy the thrill of it. Because I can do it. I’m just having fun. It’s a toy, you know. It’s a Roman candle—you light it up and it goes off.”

“I keep two strings of ponies in California, and I’ve got one string in France, and I play polo in Argentina but I don’t have my own string there,” he volunteers. “

Wright’s original carpet design was vetoed by the wife. “It was maybe a little too Napoleon III for her—you know, I get a little pretentious now and again, and I think she wanted it a tad more understandable perhaps for her friends,”

A series of lamps in a classic Lalique pattern also had to be executed in resin. “We went through the tortures of hell to get it right.”

Even the table linens Wright had a hand in. “We sent them out to be laundered once, in some remote place like Nepal, and they boiled them,” he recalls with a shudder. “When they came back, they were still beautiful, just much, much smaller—one of the cloths had shrunk eight inches. So then I had to have enough additional ones made so they would never have to be laundered in, shall we say, rustic conditions. So then that led to another problem—to have enough storage space for the extra linens.”

Gotta feel sorry for the poor guy when you've suffering "the tortures of hell" to solve critical problems like that :eek:

[jpatokal]

http://travel.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/travel/article3593887.ece

Fly to New York with Emirates this autumn and you’ll be able to take a hot shower in midair � but it will cost you more than £9,000 and give you a shocking carbon footprint.

The Dubai-based airline will become the first commercial airline in the world to offer showers at 37,000ft when it installs the facility in first-class cabins on its new Airbus A380s.

The service will initially be available on daily flights from Dubai to New York from October 1, but the carrier aims to offer it across the entire fleet of 50 A380s.

Emirates has yet to reveal details of its A380 first-class cabin � built by B/E Aerospace � but it is expected to exceed even the extravagance of Singapore Airlines’s front-end suites, with private cabins, double beds and “a finely crafted dining environment”.

...but is the shower big enough for two? :D

[jpatokal]

...but is the shower big enough for two? :D

Apparently it is:

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/08/08/0804_airbus380/10.htm

Just don't try to squeeze in three :eek: :eek: