Opening Aircraft Windows Make For Some Good Jokes: COTD

One of my favorite forms of vehicular comedy is when the form of media subverts expectations. The 1980 film Airplane! is full of this from start to finish, proving a solid 87 minutes of side-splitting laughter. One of the comedic elements of this movie sort of has a real-life element to it as you can open the cockpit windows of many aircraft. You can even fly a commercial airliner with a flight deck window open and it won’t be as turbulent as you’d expect. Still, our readers went straight to the jokes.

A. Barth started a pun thread:

I hope that somewhere within the FAA there is a person with the job title of ‘Window Regulator’

LarsVargas will make you groan:

There is, but the role has its ups and downs.

For a departure from that subject, today, Robot Turds commented on Trade-In Tuesday with a story about the awesome Chevy Volt:

I have an interesting story related to the First gen Volt. So…. wayyyyyy back in 2006 GM showed off the very first Volt concept, which looked totally different than the final production car. I was pretty excited about it.Back then GM had a blog and a few people like me would comment on it and when the Volt came out they would make frequent posts about it and many times it was Bob Lutz making the posts. He and others would show incremental progress and sometimes post questions and so on.

I didn’t think much about it until one day a few years later I and a few others on the blog got emails. The email asked if we would be interested in seeing the pre-production Volt. I didn’t think it was real until someone from their said yes, it was real, they would pay the plane flight and hotel fees. So I said yes.

So they flew about 50 of us to Detroit. I was picked up in a Escalade and that evening they took us to a huge building filled with concept cars of the past. I got to see the original Buick Y Job, the original Corvair and a million other iconic cars.

The next day they took us to their design center which was a insane, 1950’s, super-modern looking expanse apparently designed by Harley Earl. We toured the design studios for GMC, Cadillac, Chevrolet, and Buck. We saw clay models of cars that would come out in a few years.

We got to meet and talk to Bob Lutz, Ed Welburn and a bunch of their engineers. And then they drove us to the Milford Proving grounds where we got to see the pre-production volt, which was a mule car based on a Cruz. The whole dash was wired up and it had a big red emergency button to cut the thing off. And then we went home.

Two years later we bought a 2 year old, 2011 volt for cheap. I thought the thing was fucking amazing. It was my first EV and it was so much nicer than any car we had ever owned. Very fast, Very comfortable. We drove the car as a commuter-mobile for years. It did exactly what it was meant for: we charged it at home, drove to work, charged at work, drove it home. Used gas whenever we went on trips. It was easy to maintain because you only needed to change the oil every 2 years since it barely ran. At 150,000 miles the battery started to deteriorate and it was clear the battery would need replacement soon. I wanted to replace the battery which would have been $4,000. But my wife wanted a Subaru. Its ok. But that Volt will always hold a special place ion my heart. When GM tries to do something they really can

Here, have some more Airplane!

Finally, Man With A Reliable Jeep understands the Volkswagen Phaeton:

I think we can all agree that the Phaeton was Piëch Volkswagen.

Don’t worry, the typo has been fixed. We love you guys for turning even the smallest things into a good read in the comments.