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John Travolta Filmography
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John Joseph Travolta (born February 18, 1954 in Englewood, New Jersey) is an American actor.
He became famous for his appearance in Saturday Night Fever
and Grease at the height of the disco era, as well as for his portrayal of Vinnie Barbarino on the television sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter. After that, his career more or less slumped until he played Vincent Vega in
Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, for which he received an Academy Award nomination.
Travolta also played a lead role in the panned
http://www.battlefieldearth.com/index.htm Battlefield Earth, in which he plays the leader of a group of aliens that enslave humanity in a bleak future Earth. The film received almost universally negative reviews and did poorly at the box office. Travolta, who is a Scientologist (converted 1975) and idolizes the late L. Ron Hubbard, had hoped that the film would be well-received and be the first in a series of Hubbard film adaptations.
He is married to actress
Kelly Preston and father of two children. Previously he was involved with actress Diana Hyland, who died of breast cancer (reportedly in Travolta's arms).
Travolta is a qualified pilot, and owns five airplanes, including a former Qantas Boeing 707-138. The plane bears the name "Jett Clipper Ella". Pan Am was a large operator of the 707 and used Clipper in their names. The plane is named for his son Jett and daughter Ella. His house in Ocala, Florida has its own runway and taxiway right to the door. In 1993 Travolta successfully performed an emergency landing of a plane with electric trouble at Washington Reagan National Airport.
Travolta has always been accessible to his public and loves to sign autographs.
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AutosHow Pilots and Planespotters Keep Track and Keep in Touch
On August 12, 2008, an Angel Flight Beechcraft Bonanza carrying a cancer patient to treatment at Boston's Dana Farber Cancer Institute crashed in a strip-mall parking lot in Easton, MA, killing all three on board. As the impact took place in the early afternoon mere feet away from shoppers, cell phone videos and eyewitness accounts of the twisted wreckage and badly burned victims flooded local newspaper webpages within minutes.
In spite of all the graphic accounts of the tragedy, the most poignant account of the doomed flight was a single image: a blue-background map with green lettering showing the Beechcraft's flight path. The departure and destination airport codes are shown, with the green line departing from KFOK and heading in the direction of KBOS, sharply curving and then ending just an inch on the screen away from the eventual destination. Like Minard's depiction of Napoleon's disastrous march to Moscow, the flight plan graphic tells the entire story of the doomed Angel Flight, courtesy of FlightAware.
By now, we bet you've heard of FlightAware. In fact, we're pretty sure you've used it, or you've visited a similar site. Whether you were planning an airport pickup, checking to see if a family member's flight arrived safely, or betting on which plane gets to JFK first, your air traffic request was among the two million FlightAware gets every day. Of all those requests, some come from a more dedicated group of 250,000 users who for business, pleasure, or a little of both use FlightAware to track anomalies, celebrities, and sometimes tragedies. A visitor to FlightAware's Discussions page will find conversations about a mystery plane mistakenly labeled as the Concorde, Bruce Springsteen's tour plane, and a Lindbergh-worthy prop-plane flight from Honolulu to Kiribati. After talking with a few of FlightAware's creators, it's no surprise the site attracts a group of plane spotters and pilots who can't get enough of tracking flights. Each member of FlightAware's leadership team holds a pilot's license, and the site began as a labor of love. "That's why we started it," Chief Information Officer David McNett told Wired.com. "Our only intention was to track our own flights. It accidentally turned into a site." One example of how much these guys love planes? The on-hold music at FlightAware headquarters features recordings of air traffic control transmissions. We really wouldn't be surprised if their offices look just like the Admiral's Club at LAX.
So who are these FlightAware junkies, posting on message boards and racing to the airport to get pictures of some rare bird? According to McNett, users have told him they enjoy sitting outside on the patio,
laptops at the ready, tracking each plane that flies overhead. (We assume they're listening to Little Feat on their iTunes and sipping on Coors Light.) Luddites will be glad to know the chatter in the forums is better at predicting delays than any computer software, according to McNett. "We wanted to develop some fancy heuristics for predicting delays," he said. "But software isn't as effective as monitoring the forums."
A little more than half of FlightAware's registered users are pilots, one of whom is Robert Reid of Toronto. Reid is a private pilot and lives close to both Buttonville (YKZ) and Downsview (YZD) airports. He uses FlightAware to track when a particularly interesting plane is taking off or landing, and to follow friends' flights. YZD is used by Bombardier to fly their unfinished ultra-exclusive Global 5000 jets for completion at other locations. "I can click on YZD, and if a Global 5000 files a flight plan, I can catch them on camera departing YZD," Reid told Wired.com. Such a picture is shown below. "I have a friend that owns a Cessna 421 in Torrance California, so I have it on FlightAware Flight Alert. When ever the aircraft files a flight plan, departs, or lands on the flight plan I get an email flight alert." Reid also used LiveATC.net to listen to in-flight communications of a friend's recent trip to West Palm Beach.
For pilots, being able to check in on friends is one of the biggest draws of flight tracking sites "The aviation community -- as disparate as it is -- is pretty tight," McNett said. "Everyone has gone through the same training and the same lessons." The close-knit group gets even tighter after an accident. "I literally have friends involved in aviation all over the world," Reid said. "If there is a midair accident, or something I feel other pilots should be aware of I'll post it. The best way to avoid an accident is to learn from others misfortunes." McNett agrees. "It's easy to empathize when you see an aircraft go down. It's sobering. It feels like a family. Your perspective as a pilot is to learn from it." It's especially moving when survivors and family members participate in the conversation.
Not every participant is an enthusiast. In fact, some depend on the data for their bread and butter. To most business travelers, it probably comes as a surprise that there's commercial use to tracking flights other than seeing if Nelson got to Reagan National in time to present the third quarter sales results to the board meeting. According to Karl Lehenbauer, FlightAware's Chief Technology Officer, one Houston area paramedic saves time, money, and gas by using FlightAware data to find out exactly when to meet air ambulances, eliminating time spent idling at the airport. Another user manages a Fixed Base Operator and uses FlightAware for getting ready to fuel, cater, and hangar incoming aircraft.
Of course, there are also the folks who just track celebrity planes. McNett isn't too concerned about them: if they were truly weirdos, they probably would've just bought a $50 scanner and stalked John Travolta's private 707 long before any internet application came along. "Even if it weren't on the internet, flight plans are all public information," McNett said. Plus, any plane with a blocked tail number won't show on FlightAware. According to McNett, the fact that more celebrities and dignitaries haven't taken advantage of blocking their tail numbers shows that "privacy concerns are overblown." We tend to agree, especially in light of how many celebs use their initials in their tail numbers.
Photos by Robert Reid.
Published: Mon, 01 Sep 2008 12:47:13 GMT - Source: Blog.Wired.Com - Read the article
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