Apparently the flight was unprofitable:
"The historical financial performance of the route and its future outlook given the global economic climate and high oil prices has resulted in a decision by American to cancel its New Delhi-Chicago O'Hare service," the airline said in a memo to American managers.
The last flight to leave for India from Chicago will be on Feb. 28, while the last return flight from India to Chicago will be on March 1.
The flight from New Delhi to Chicago had been problematic during winter and early spring. The flight would often arrive at O'Hare earlier than 5 a.m., the time that O'Hare's customs agents start work, stranding passengers on the plane for an additional half hour to an hour.
Oddly, AA292 is scheduled to arrive in Chicago at 5am, so the possibility of it arriving before Customs opened must have occurred to someone. This unfortunate schedule probably comes from Delhi's odd penchant for launching international flights at midnight. AA292 takes off at 00:55 IST, about an hour before Cathay's flight to Hong Kong and two hours before a British Airways flight to London. The takeoff time certainly isn't dictated by the O'Hare arrival slot, as O'Hare, to my knowledge, doesn't require reservations between 11pm and 6am.
The forecast for Chicago today calls for 13°C temperatures and sunny skies. This is the normal high temperature April 10th, not January 10th—that would be -1°C—and would be only a bit shy of the record (16°C).
Don't worry, January will arrive this weekend. The same forecast calls for -9°C Friday night.
Via Gulliver, a Chinese company has built a 30-story hotel in Hunan Province from prefabricated, energy-efficient parts:
From Next Big Future:
The buildings are five times more energy efficient in operation and use about 6 times less cement.
They plan to build one hundred and fifty 30-story apartment building, hotel, office plans using the new system. They have started building a 1.33-million-square meter “NO.1 Sustainable Building Factory” and it will be able to produce 10 million square meters of mass produced skyscrapers each year. The 30 story building is 17,000 m² so the factory can produce about 500 of the 30 story building each year and many more factories will be built.
It did take a while to build the parts that they assembled at the building site, of course. But even then, the building cost 2/3 less than similar buildings to construct.
This looks a lot like a shot from last February:
It's still cool. And it's only about five minutes old.
It suggests, however, that I might want to rent a really cool lens sometime. I used the same equipment (Canon 7D, 200mm), but shot hand-held at ISO-400, f/5.6 at 1/1000, then developed it differently than the one from 11 months ago. I also shot this one raw instead of as JPEG, which gave me a lot more flexibility in post.
Mostly, though, we have clear skies and a full moon, so what more reason do I need?
The Red Rooster, Chicago:
Canon 7D, 37mm, ISO-400, f/5.6 at 1/60, here.
Via Strange Maps, malts.com has a free handy whisky chart everyone should bring to Duke of Perth this week:
Via Microsoft guru Raymond Chen, news that tourists continually block traffic outside Abbey Road Studios:
Apparently the studio also has a webcam.
The famous zebra crossing is here.
The Paris Observatory has announced a leap second between June 30th and July 1st this year:
A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2012. The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be:
2012 June 30, 23h 59m 59s
2012 June 30, 23h 59m 60s
2012 July 1, 0h 0m 0s
... Leap seconds can be introduced in UTC at the end of the months of December
or June, depending on the [available rotation data].
Leap seconds occur from time to time because the earth's rotation on its axis doesn't stay exactly the same from year to year. Most years it loses about half a second; the last couple of years it hasn't lost as much, so the last leap second came just before 1 January 2009. Eventually, the earth will stop rotating on its axis relative to the sun, in much the same way the moon rotates once on its axis every time it orbits the earth. You've been warned.
This has an interesting side effect, by the way: UTC is now 34 seconds behind the earth, so clocks on things like orbiting satellites—think GPS—have "incorrect" values. Your hand-held GPS receiver will probably be a second slow after June 30th. Your computer, if it syncs up to an authoritative time service, won't.
A couple of us have come to Brown Deer, Wis., to work with a vendor on an upcoming software release. (Brown Deer is about 160 km north of Chicago.) The vendor has been über-cooperative, the trip up (for me, anyway) took less than two hours, and we're getting everything done we weren't able to do from our respective offices in other states.
Two of the guys are from Texas, one is from Delhi, and I'm from the Greatest City in North America. So the only thing we're having any difficulty negotiating is food.
At lunch today we scouted Google Maps rigorously for anything other than Applebee's, and found the only place better within a 20-minute drive: Olive Garden. Between discussing the project and other stuff about work, we decided that Brown Deer is a food desert. So tonight, after scanning Yelp and getting other recommendations, we're heading into downtown Milwaukee for some real food.
Unfortunately, that means tomorrow night we'll have Applebee's. But at least we'll make the effort.