Tag: TRAVEL

iPhone geeks can now indulge their inner air-traffic controller, thanks to a new app that takes all of the guesswork out of the classic 'Bird-Plane-Superman' trinary. The app, called 'Plane Finder AR,' combines augmented reality with data from virtual radar maps to track commercial planes passing overhead. All you have to do is point your iPhone at an aircraft, snap a photo, and the app will ...

Have you ever dreamed of being an air traffic controller, but your time spent training in a terrorist camp overseas has kept you from passing the background check? Well, now you can monitor thousands of flights in near real-time as they criss-cross the country, thanks to a KML file from Flightwise.com that puts data from the FAA in Google Earth. Each in-air flight is represented by a little plane ...

With flying becoming a luxury, folks want to snag the cheapest fares they can grab. But, as is the American way, they don't always want to do the work required to get the deal. According to USA Today, the new FareCompare 'When-to-Fly' free app sends a push notification whenever the price of a preselected flight route drops below the current lowest fare. For U.S. flights, the price needs to drop ...

Sometimes, planning a flight can be more stressful than actually waiting in the security lines or sitting next to a crying baby on the transatlantic. Sure, there are plenty of travel sites out there, each claiming to deliver the cheapest, easiest flights in the skies. But sifting through the layovers and comparing costs often takes some extensive research, simply due to the confusing way most ...

Walking the entire 1,200 mile length of Britain is no easy feat, but using Google Street View to "travel" the same stretch of land is just plain boring. Matthew Partridge, however, has embarked on this adventure, going pixel by pixel from Land's End to John O'Groats in ten days. Honestly, we'd rather go the actual distance than stare at a screen for 240 hours, but, hey, at least the bright line in ...

Starting today, you'll be able tag where you've been (or where you will be going), update your friends on your travel plans, and actually purchase your tickets all in the same place -- as long as you plan to fly Delta. The airline has opened an online Ticket Window, which lets customers purchase tickets through Facebook. Delta is the first airline to offer such a service through the social ...

Share How far will travelers blindly follow a GPS device? According to The Sydney Morning Herald, an Australian family of four (and their poor pup) followed directions given by their GPS onto a road closed by heavy rainfall and became stranded for three nights in a pickup truck. The family, believe it or not, ignored posted warning signs and turned onto the Darling River Road while traveling ...

If you're like many young students graduating from high school or college, you're probably planning a little time off -- perhaps a trip abroad in that great American tradition of backpacking. But stuffing whatever you happen to have lying around your room into a bag is a terrible idea for such a journey. You'll want to be properly prepared, and, if you're anything like us, that means making sure ...

Dubai, the Las-Vegas-of-the-Middle-East-turned-economic-wasteland, is rejecting full-body scanners at its airports because they "contradict Islam," according to Brigadier Pilot Ahmad Mohammad Bin Thani, who is the head of airport security for Dubai police. Concerned about the "privacy of individuals and their personal freedom," Bin Thani remarked to the Associated Free Press that Dubai will use ...

GPS sheeple have blindly followed their navigation gadgets 400 miles away from their intended destination, to impassible avenues, and even through closed gates and stacks of rocks. But could the devices actually kill their owners? Well, maybe if that owner attempts to listen to 25 of them at once. To investigate the "influence of others onto one's own path of life in an abstract way," artist ...

After decades of failed promises, flying cars may soon crowd the nation's streets and airspaces -- as long as shoppers can afford those $200,000 price tags. The FAA recently approved the Terrifugia Transition two-seater for takeoff, but another company's design may allow even unlicensed consumers to drive and fly, without the federal agency's stringent pilot requirements. Logi AeroSpace's ...

Not content to rule the PC market, Intel is trying to shoehorn its chips into everything it can find. The latest target of the chip giant is the automobile, which it hopes to make truly "smart" by way of processors, sensors and wireless transmitters. At the company's latest Research Day event, it showed off an electric vehicle equipped with cameras and sensors that stop just short of turning it ...

Although a number a major airlines have gone to great pains in offering Wi-Fi connectivity on their flights, few passengers are buying. USA Today says that "some analysts" estimate that on-board Wi-Fi adoption tops out at around 10-percent of a given plane's passengers. We at Switched rely on the Internet to make our coffee, pump our blood and give our poor lives some meaning, so we have no idea ...

If you happen to be looking for a cheap flight on Virgin America this summer, you might want to spend a bit more time on Twitter. The airline, in collaboration with Twitter analytics service Klout, is now offering a free flight to anyone who has serious influence on the micro-blogging site. Klout determines a user's influence by analyzing several variables -- including an individual's followers, ...

Picking a cell phone is hard enough if you don't have to take into consideration your travel habits, especially if those habits take you overseas on a regular basis. The fine folks over at Gadling (a fellow AOL blog) have put together a rather helpful guide to picking the right smart phone for your travel needs. Generally you'll want to make sure you get a phone that supports GSM (any phone ...