Next time you’re stuck at the airport don’t just sit there and be irritated.

Look around. It’s a fair bet you’ll find some great artwork just around the corner.

A few fresh examples:

(Terry Bustamante Idolatry)

From now through mid-August you can see work by Terry Bustamante and Jennifer Hill in an exhibit titled Exploring Other Worlds in the Upper Link Gallery at Tucson International Airport (TUS).

(Jennifer Hill: Muchacha con Mascara de Zorro)

In the Tucson airport’s Lower Link Gallery you’ll find a series of paintings  – architectural landscape interpretations – by Judith Kramer.

(Judith A Kramer: Architectural Forms Series#3)

And over at Denver International Airport (DEN) you’ll find Me Rento Para Soñar (I Rent Myself to Dream) and exhibition of paintings, engravings, sculptures, drawings, ceramics and tridimensional pieces by Mexican artist Alvaro Santiago. The work will be on display through Oct. 15 on the Mezzanine Level Gallery in A Concourse.

If you’ve got time to hang out in Denver, keep in mind that throughout July the city is hosting the 2010 Biennial of the Americas.

Categories: Air Travel, Airports, Art, Exhibits
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(Courtesy Field Museum, via Flickr Creative Commons)

According to a story by Tanya Mohn in the New York Times, Düsseldorf International Airport and seven other airports in Germany are using bees as ‘biodetectives.’  Clues about the air quality around each airport show up in the honey.

“The first batch of this year’s harvested honey from some 200,000 bees was tested in early June…and indicated that toxins were far below official limits…”

That’s good news of course, but here’s my favorite part of the story:

Beekeepers from the local neighborhood club keep the bees. The honey, “Düsseldorf Natural,” is bottled and given away as gifts.

The article describes what sort of substances the honey was tested for (“certain hydrocarbons and heavy metals”) and offers intriguing information about the pros, cons and reliability of biomonitoring – the use of living organisms to test environmental health:

Assessing environmental health using bees as “terrestrial bioindicators“ is a fairly new undertaking, said Jamie Ellis, assistant professor of entomology at the Honey Bee Research and Extension Laboratory, University of Florida in Gainesville. “We all believe it can be done, but translating the results into real-world solutions or answers may be a little premature.” Still, similar work with insects to gauge water quality has long been successful.

You can read the full article here. And you can be sure I’m busy as one of those airport bees trying to figure out how to get some of that Dusseldorf honey for Souvenir Sunday.

Categories: Air Travel, Airports, Health, Technology
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I’ve been getting a lot of guff from aviation museum fans upset that I didn’t include their favorite museum in my recent msnbc.com column – Aviation and space museums that soar.

I was asking for it.  There are close to 600 aviation and space museums in the country. And with room in the column for just six “top” places, I was sure to disappoint many readers. But now that I’ve read the comments and learned about the cool stuff at so many other aviation-related museums, I’ve decided to add Museum Monday to the line-up here at StuckatTheAirport.com.

To kick things off, I’ve chosen the New England Air Museum at Bradley International Airport in Windsor, CT.

Bradley is the airport where about 300 Virgin Atlantic passengers recently spent more than four hours stuck on an airplane when their Newark-bound flight was diverted and I’m sure they would have been much happier if they’d been hanging around this museum instead.

The New England Air Museum is the largest aviation museum in New England and has more than 125 aircraft and a huge collection of engines, instruments, aircraft parts, uniforms and personal memorabilia.

A few highlights in the collection include:

The last remaining four-engine American flying boat, the Sikorsky VS-44A, which was donated to the museum by  actress Maureen O’Hara and restored to its original condition;

A B-29 Bomber;

The Bunce-Curtiss Pusher (1912), the oldest surviving Connecticut-built airplane;

And a Kaman K-225 helicopter, the oldest surviving Kaman-built aircraft.

In addition to the artifacts and aircraft on display, the museum has Open Cockpit days, a flight simulator, special events and theme weeks throughout the summer. For example, the week of July 5^th is Discover Blimps and Balloons Week.

There’s also a speaker program: this past weekend Sergei N. Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev (Prime Minister of the Soviet Union from 1957-1964) gave a lecture about the Cuban Missile Crisis, as viewed from the Kremlin.

Have a favorite aviation or space museum you’d like to see featured on Museum Monday?

Please nominate it in the comments section below. If you have photos to share, all the better!

(New England Air Museum aircraft photos used in this post courtesy Cliff1066 via Flickr Creative Commons. He’s got dozens of other great photos from the museum on his Photostream as well. )

Categories: Airplanes, aviation, Aviation history, Exhibits, Museums
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On Sundays here at StuckatTheAirport.com we look at some of the souvenirs you can buy at airports. Our favorites are the items that are inexpensive (around $10) and a bit offbeat.

Last week, Seattle-based traveler Jon Douglas spotted this tiny Northwest airplane for sale at Raleigh Durham International Airport (RDU).

Northwest Airlines planes are no longer flying, so this is definitely already a collectible. And Douglas was a bit sorry that he didn’t buy this toy when he had the chance.

No worries, Jon! Look what we found for sale in the gift shop at the Future of Flight Aviation Center in Everett, WA:

This cute stuffed NWA toy -

And this tiny NWA keychain that not only flashes red lights but emits take-off sounds when you push a button.

(Keychain courtesy Sandy Ward)

Have you found a great souvenir while you were stuck at the airport ? If it’s under $10, “of” the city or region, or just cool and bit offbeat, please take a photo and send it along. Your souvenir may end up featured on a future edition of Souvenir Sunday.

Categories: Advertising, Souvenir Sunday, Souvenirs
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I don’t have a GPS unit in my car, but I do find myself talking back to the little digital chef that pops up on the screen of my microwave.  So I got a kick out of this Family Matters column from the New York Times in which Bruce Feiler examines the relationships people develop with the voice on their car GPS unit.

I’m linking to the article here because Feiler traces the origin of female voices in automated navigation devices back to airplanes in World War II:

…[W]omen’s voices were used in airplane cockpits because they stood out among the male aviators. “It has nothing to do with acoustics or taste,” said Judy Edworthy, a professor of applied psychologist at the University of Plymouth in England who specializes in “alarms, auditory warnings, beeps and buzzers. They used female voices because they were different,” she said, “and the men were more likely to pay attention to them, particularly in combat situations.

Female voices are still used for warnings in many airplane cockpits and have earned the slang term Bitching Betty among pilots. Patricia Hoyt, who recorded the voice-overs used in many planes, recently revealed herself as Betty in a YouTube video in which she recites common phrases like “auto pilot” and “landing gear.”

Here’s that video.

Categories: Airports, aviation, Aviation history, History
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