The greatest tour I ever had was at the Smokejumper base in remote WA. At any time when they're open, you're allowed to drop in for a tour and whoever is there that day is obliged to give you one. Even in the height of fire season.
We got to see them pack parachutes, repair gear, coordinate parcel drops - everything. Our guide was a 3 year jumper veteran on summer break from his masters degree in linguistics. It was incredible.
Any org that's proud of what they do should aspire to have public tours.
I've noodled with the idea of starting a "fieldtrips for grownups" group but I feel like a wastewater treatment plant is more likely to open their doors for a group of third graders than a group of thirty somethings.
https://turismoitaipu.com.br/en/
Get the "special tour" which takes you inside the dam. An absolutely incredible spot and incredible achievement. They will take you into a room with a turbine shaft that's mechanically transmitting 700 MW of power.
Source: My father was a 35 year veteran of the fire department in a large city.
It's crazy how even something which feels mediocre so much of the time - fast-food coffee, a budget airline - requires an enormous amount of human effort to pull off reliably.
(And yes, you can dislike Southwest as a corporation and still think things like flight attendant training and plane simulators are cool. Come on folks.)
I won’t be surprised if the people in rooms tasting coffee is also looking for coffee that is too good for one-off but hard to be replicable in the various stores they have.
Quoting Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash:
The franchise and the virus work on the same principle: what thrives in one place will thrive in another. You just have to find a sufficiently virulent business plan, condense it into a three-ring binder ― its DNA ― xerox it, and embed it in the fertile lining of a well-traveled highway, preferably one with a left- turn lane. Then the growth will expand until it runs up against its property lines.
In olden times, you’d wander down to Mom’s Café for a bite to eat and a cup of joe, and you would feel right at home. It worked just fine if you never left your hometown. But if you went to the next town over, everyone would look up and stare at you when you came in the door, and the Blue Plate Special would be something you didn’t recognize. If you did enough traveling, you’d never feel at home anywhere.
But when a businessman from New Jersey goes to Dubuque, he knows he can walk into a McDonald’s and no one will stare at him. He can order without having to look at the menu, and the food will always taste the same. McDonald’s is Home, condensed into a three-ringed binder and xeroxed. “No surprises” is the motto of the franchise ghetto, its Good Housekeeping seal, subliminally blazoned on every sign and logo that make up the curves and grids of light that outline the Basin.
The people of America, who live in the world’s most surprising and terrible country, take comfort in that motto.
I am not sure that's a "sadly". I used to fly a lot and talk to flight crews. Aviation is a ton of crazy schedules and nights away from home (I assume this is well known)
From a family perspective it's bad enough if dads missing from the house for days at a time, much more catastrophic if mom's not around like that.
(A child's relationship with mom vs. dad is very different. Kids need their mom in a very different way that we can't just paper over)
Anyone know what that is?
Perhaps an escape rope for the pilots?
EDIT: Yup, here it is in action: https://www.jetphotos.com/photo/7389569
https://www.aviation-gadgets.com/photo/virgin-australia-boei...
We software people are spoiled with our keyboards and Red Bull :p
I'm envious of your full tour. You got a chance of a lifetime to see everything up close where most of us just get a glimpse if we are lucky.
My guess is all airline NOCs operate 24/7 as flights happen around the clock. Also planes typically don't have much downtime as that loses money so everything has to be a continuous operation.
Cool looking at the pictures of the dashboards. It's nutty to think how much has to be tracked when doing airplane maintenance.