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Redesigning the Sky (Wired)

Nearly all US flight delays can be traced to the snarl of jets over New York City. How do you squeeze more efficiency out of an archaic air traffic control system? Redesign the sky. (link) (photo by Jeffrey Milstein)

Inbound JFK. The turns start while you're still in the clouds. Engines howling, flaps down, the plane lurches and dives, jerky as a taxi in Midtown. Seatback upright and tray table locked, you're oblivious to the crowded flight paths around you. But the air above New York City is mapped: a dense and nuanced geography nearly as complicated as the city below.

More than 2 million flights pass over the city every year, most traveling to and from the metropolitan area's three busiest airports: John F. Kennedy, Newark, and LaGuardia. And all that traffic squeezes through a network of aerial routes first laid out for the mail planes of the 1920s. Aircraft are tracked by antiquated, ground-based radar and guided by verbal instructions issued over simplex radios, technology that predates the pocket calculator. The system is extremely safe—no commercial flight has been in a midair collision over the US in 22 years—but, because the Federal Aviation Administration treats each plane as if it were a 2,000-foot-tall, 6- by 6-mile block lumbering through the troposphere, New York is running out of air.

This is a nightmare for New York travelers; delays affect about a third of the area's flights. The problem also ripples out to create a bigger logjam: Because so many aircraft pass through New York's airspace, three-quarters of all holdups nationwide can be traced back to that tangled swath of East Coast sky.

Six years ago, Congress green-lit a plan to solve this problem. The Century of Aviation Reauthorization Act calls for a new system, dubbed NextGen, that uses GPS to create a sort of real-time social network in the skies. In theory, it should give pilots the data they need to route themselves—minus the huge safety cushions.

But NextGen needs some serious hardware: roughly $300,000 in new avionics equipment for every cockpit. That's a lot of peanuts for the struggling airlines. Add to the tab nearly 800 new federally funded ground stations to relay each plane's location and trajectory to every other plane in the sky and—by the time NextGen finally launches in 2025—the price tag could reach $42 billion. In the meantime, the New York-area skies have seen a huge traffic bump over the past two decades—including a 48 percent increase between 1994 and 2004. So the FAA has set out to coax new efficiency from old technology.

To help reorganize this airspace, the FAA called on Mitre, a Beltway R&D firm that works exclusively for the government. Mitre's scientists and mathematicians, in cooperation with some of the region's air traffic controllers, are completely rethinking the flow of aircraft in and out of New York City. Current flight patterns evolved like a rabbit warren, with additions tacked on to an existing architecture. As airports grew busier and airplanes started flying higher and faster, that architecture became increasingly inefficient. The plan, the unfortunately named New York/New Jersey/Philadelphia Metropolitan Area Airspace Redesign, aims to bring order to the air.

How-to Pack an SLR Into a Pocket Cam (Wired)

The best digital cameras are always the biggest. Squeezing in all the good stuff—light sensors and top-quality optics—inevitably results in some bulk. But lugging around a professional-caliber digital single-lens reflex is like pocketing a cantaloupe. The engineers at high-end camera maker Sigma were determined to shrink it all down to something more totable. It wasn't an easy task. Most pocketcams use a light sensor the size of a dime. Sigma chose a chip the size of a Wheat Thin: the same 14-megapixel Foveon the company puts in its top-shelf professional models. Getting enough light onto it would entail a correspondingly bigger lens, and keeping it cool would require plenty of room inside for air circulation. Or at least that's what everyone used to believe. It took Sigma two years to completely rethink the basics of camera design, but with the DP1 the engineers finally crammed the Foveon into a pocketable package. Here's how. (link)

1 // Heat
The DP1's densely packed innards generate a lot of heat, which can degrade the image. To compensate, engineers turned the entire front of the camera body into a metal heat sink.
2 // Lens
The DP1's optical protrusion may look telephoto, but this camera has no zoom. The lens, which extends outward when you power up, has the highly focused task of producing an image circle large enough to bathe the 13.8 x 20.7-mm Foveon chip in light.
3 // Focus
The six pieces of glass that make up the lens must be constantly shifted and adjusted to bring your image into focus. To keep the camera compact, Sigma sourced the smallest mechanical parts available and developed an internal focusing system that moves elements within the lens rather than the barrel itself.
4 // Processing
The Foveon draws more power than your average point-and-shoot, but without the benefit of a big DSLR battery. To save juice, Sigma reduced onboard processing, so the image comes out extremely raw. Pros call it pure.

Infrastructure: Tracking the Future (Metropolis Mag)

On the eve of Barack Obama’s New New Deal, a series of compelling photographs illustrates the divide between repair and renewal, despair and hope. (link)

As a young man, Timo Stammberger would travel Berlin’s subways—on foot—tagging the tunnel walls. “My personal engagement was through graffiti,” the 28-year-old says. He has since changed his medium. Rather than marking the walls with his own presence, he uses a six-by-seven-inch analog camera to capture the specificity of what’s already there. His interest is taxonomic: he is fascinated by the way Stockholm’s deep Tunnelbana is rough-hewn, nearly rustic, while the newer U-Bahn, built in the 1970s in Dortmund, Germany, is regimented and rectilinear; or how the Metropolitano, in Lisbon, Portugal, is capped with barrel vaults, as if the engineers couldn’t help but add a bit of grace, while his home city of Berlin—a place always defined by layers of history—has a varied underground landscape, some¬times neoclassical, sometimes drably functional. “These tunnels are used by so many people every day and are a big part of the infrastructure,” Stammberger says. “But nobody sees them. Their perception is limited. I try to reveal the unseen.”

But if Stammberger’s starting point is discovery, the photographs that result share another quality: a happy-sad mix of civic aspiration and the inevitable decay that follows. Precisely placed lights wash a dirty white wall. An elegant S-curve ends in the entropy of rocks and trash. His images don’t fetishize infrastructure but instead reveal its hard truths: The city begins crumbling as soon as it has been constructed. Beneath every new project lies the rubble of another.

In the United States today, that’s an important insight. Infrastructure is being revealed, in the sense that it’s attracting more attention than it has in decades. But that attention is divided between repair and renewal, despair and hope. The recent I-35 bridge collapse in Minneapolis put a catastrophic face on what engineers had been warning for years: our roads and bridges are rotting faster than they can be repaired. Worse, that acknowledgement comes at a moment when repair isn’t enough. As far below baseline as the schools, trains, planes, and power grids have fallen, the baseline itself is rising. Reducing the out¬put of greenhouse gases necessary to reverse global climate change requires building a new transportation and power system, retrofitting buildings, and re-thinking industrial agriculture. Maintaining our existing infrastructure is a totally insufficient task. We need a new infrastructure.