Engineering Archives - Tony Ward Studio

The FAA’s Challenges: The State of Air Travel in America

passenger jet in flight out of Philadelphia International airport — Photo: Tony Ward, Copyright 2025

The FAA’s Challenges and the State of Air Travel in America

Is It Safe to Fly?

In recent months, a series of high-profile incidents involving passenger flights in the United States has raised concerns about the safety of air travel. From near-misses on runways to mid-air mechanical failures, these events have left many wondering: Is flying still as safe as it once was? And could these incidents be linked to the upheaval within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in recent years, including the mass firings of federal workers during the Trump administration?

The FAA, the agency responsible for regulating and overseeing civil aviation, has faced significant challenges in recent years. During the Trump administration, the federal workforce experienced widespread disruptions, including hiring freezes, budget cuts, and the dismissal of key personnel. Critics argue that these actions may have weakened the FAA’s ability to maintain its rigorous safety standards. While the FAA has long been a global leader in aviation safety, the loss of experienced staff and institutional knowledge could have created gaps in oversight and enforcement.

Since then, the FAA has struggled to rebuild its workforce and address systemic issues. A 2023 report by the Department of Transportation’s Office of Inspector General highlighted staffing shortages and outdated technology as ongoing concerns. These challenges have coincided with a surge in air travel demand as the industry rebounds from the COVID-19 pandemic. The combination of increased traffic and strained resources has put additional pressure on an already overburdened system.

Despite these issues, aviation experts emphasize that flying remains one of the safest modes of transportation. The U.S. commercial aviation industry has not experienced a fatal crash involving a major airline since 2009, a testament to the robust safety protocols still in place. However, the recent spate of incidents—such as runway incursions, engine failures, and near-collisions—has sparked debate about whether the system is being pushed to its limits.

So, is it safe to fly? The answer, for now, is yes—but with caveats. While the FAA and airlines continue to prioritize safety, the agency must address its internal challenges to maintain public confidence. This includes investing in modernizing its systems, hiring and training more air traffic controllers, and ensuring that safety regulations keep pace with the growing complexity of air travel.

For passengers, the best course of action is to stay informed and vigilant. While the odds of being involved in a serious aviation incident remain extremely low, the recent events serve as a reminder that safety is a shared responsibility. As the FAA works to address its shortcomings, travelers can take comfort in knowing that the aviation industry’s commitment to safety remains unwavering—even in the face of mounting challenges.

In the end, the skies are still safe, but the margin for error may be shrinking. The question is whether the FAA can rise to the occasion before another crisis forces its hand.

Passenger jet in flight — Photo: Tony Ward, Copyright 2025

Skateboarding: From Sidewalks to Skate Parks

Venice Beach Skate Park Los Angeles California — Skate Park, Venice Beach. Photo: Tony Ward, Copyright 2024

From Sidewalks to Skate Parks

The History of Skateboarding and Its Evolution in Venice Beach

Skateboarding, a sport born from surfing’s spirit of rebellion and freedom, has traveled a remarkable journey from its humble beginnings in the 1950s to the cultural phenomenon we know today. Few places are as central to this journey as Venice Beach, California—a mecca for skateboarding culture and innovation. The story of skateboarding, and its evolution in Venice Beach, is a tale of creativity, persistence, and community.

Skateboarding began in California during the 1950s when surfers, looking for a way to replicate the sensation of riding waves on land, attached roller-skate wheels to wooden planks. Dubbed “sidewalk surfing,” the activity quickly gained traction, particularly in Southern California, where the laid-back surf culture thrived.

By the 1970s, advancements like urethane wheels and specialized boards transformed skateboarding into a legitimate sport. This era saw the rise of legendary figures such as the Zephyr Skate Team, or the “Z-Boys,” who hailed from the Venice Beach and Santa Monica area. Using the empty swimming pools of the drought-stricken region, they pioneered vert skating and pushed the limits of what was possible on a skateboard.

The Venice Beach skate park at dusk — Venice Beach Skate Park at Dusk. Photo: Tony Ward, Copyright 2024

Venice Beach, with its bohemian vibe and gritty streets, became the epicenter of skateboarding culture in the 1970s. The Z-Boys, led by icons like Tony Alva and Stacy Peralta, used the neighborhood’s urban landscape as their canvas, redefining skateboarding as not just a sport but an art form. Their influence helped popularize skateboarding globally, and Venice Beach became a pilgrimage site for skaters worldwide.

However, as skateboarding grew in popularity, challenges emerged. Public spaces once used for skating, like parking lots and empty pools, became harder to access due to legal restrictions and gentrification. By the late 1980s, skaters in Venice Beach were advocating for dedicated spaces where they could practice their craft without interference.

The journey to establish the Venice Beach Skate Park was a community-driven effort. Local skaters, activists, and community members united to demand a safe, legal space for skateboarding. Politicians, initially skeptical, eventually recognized the cultural and economic value of skateboarding in Venice Beach.

After years of lobbying and planning, the Venice Beach Skate Park was completed in 2009. Located steps from the Pacific Ocean, the 16,000-square-foot park features bowls, ramps, and rails that pay homage to the area’s skateboarding legacy. It was designed to echo the curves of the waves and the pools where the Z-Boys first made history.

Today, the Venice Beach Skate Park stands as a testament to the enduring spirit of skateboarding. It is a symbol of the sport’s evolution from counterculture activity to global phenomenon and a reminder of the power of community collaboration.

Skateboarding has come a long way from its origins, but Venice Beach remains its beating heart—a place where the art of motion, rebellion, and creativity continues to inspire future generations.

Bob Shell: Robots and Evolution

AI image of robot on factory floor — AI generated image.

Robots and Evolution

Throughout history innovations have been resisted.
There is the possibly apocryphal story that one of the Egyptian pharaohs issued an edict banning steam powered chariots because the noise frightened the horses.
In verifiable history, in the late 1700s a Frenchman named Jacquard invented an automatic loom. Amazingly for its time, it used punchcards to control the mechanism. The automatic loom quickly supplanted weavers, because it could produce fabric far faster and cheaper. The weavers’ guilds objected. Many of the weavers broke into automated factories and threw their wooden shoes into the looms to shut them down. Those wooden shoes were called sabot, thus we get the word sabotage.

In the early 1900s there was resistance to automobiles, largely by carriage makers, buggy whip makers, draft horse breeders, etc. In England, under pressure from these groups, Parliament passed a law saying that any motorcar must be preceded on the road by a man waving a red flag. That law persisted until 1918, when it was finally realized how impractical it was.
In my own case, I was in the magazine business from the early 1980s. I watched the transitions as new technologies made former jobs redundant. Initially I wrote my articles on a typewriter and mailed them in to the magazine, where a typesetter retyped them on a device that wrote them onto the offset plates used to print the magazine. Photos to accompany my articles had to be made on film and the film had to be developed and printed, a laborious process.

I got my first computer in 1986. It was a Heathkit/Zenith that arrived in kit form. I was happily surprised when it worked after I assembled it. It had no hard drive, just ran on the old big floppy disks. The monitor had a black screen on which orange letters appeared as I typed. I wrote my first book on that computer. It worked for text, but could not handle images. My printer was a Kyocera dot matrix device that used long rolls of paper. I mailed my finished articles on floppy disks along with a hard copy and my photographs. Later, I upgraded to a Windows computer and bought a Nikon scanner to scan negatives and color slides. But I still sent my images in on physical media, floppies at first, later CDs.

I won’t go into more detail about the transition. I’ll only say that our typesetters lost their jobs, along with the repro camera operators, but new jobs were created operating the Mac computers used to lay out the magazines. Staff numbers went down, but only slightly, and the new jobs paid well. Of course, printed magazines have pretty much vanished today, gone on the Internet or out of business entirely. Since I don’t have Internet access, my choices of magazines has been severely limited, and those print magazines that survive are mostly priced out of my range. I subscribed to Rolling Stone since the 1960s, but when it jumped to sixty dollars a year I had to drop it. I used to get Professional Photographer, but that’s now only available to Professional Photographers of America members. I used to be a member, even wrote for the magazine, but membership would be useless to me now. I haven’t had a camera in my hands for seventeen years. I was reminded of these transitions by the dockworkers’ strike. One of their demands is protection from automation. They’re just like the weavers. Resisting the advance of technology is futile, it can’t be stopped. Rather than try to stop it we must adapt to it.

In the late 1990s, I’ve forgotten the exact year, on one of my trips to Japan, I toured a fully automated Canon camera factory. It was the size of a football field, but in the entire factory that churned out hundreds of cameras an hour there were only four humans. Dressed in white jumpsuits, they walked around with clipboards writing down readings from gauges.
Robot forklifts ran around the floors following yellow stripes on the floor picking up pallets of parts and carrying them to the big machines assembling the parts into cameras. The factory operated 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Robots don’t need coffee breaks, food, sleep, medical insurance, etc. That is the future. Human manual labor is disappearing, and the speed is advancing. Rather than trying to stop or slow it down, we humans must learn the present jobs automation cannot do or new jobs that technology is creating.

About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 17th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia.

On September 16, 2024 Shell’s release date got moved up six years due to new “mixed charges” law to February 2, 2030. It was 2036.

To read additional articles by Bob Shell link here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/bob-shell-ufo-nonsense/

Bob Shell: UFO Nonsense

AI illustration of a UFO landing in a desert in California

UFO Nonsense

On Friday night, August 23, 2024 News Nation aired a one-hour special program about Lue Elizondo and repeated the program Sunday night. Elizondo is a former US intelligence officer who headed a top secret government program to study UAP, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, what everyone else calls UFOs.

In the program, Elizondo made numerous claims: UAP are real, the US government has retrieved some of them for study and reverse engineering, they’re abducting people and implanting ‘things’ in them, etc. This is all stuff students of UFOs have been studying for ages.

This may have been news to many people, but it was old hat to those of us who have actually studied the UFO phenomenon. I first started studying UFOs in the late 1960s (yeah, I’m old!). My first paid writing gig was writing a column on UFOs for Gnostica News, a new-age publication produced by Llewellyn in the early 1970s. It was edited by P. E. I. Bonewits, author of the book ‘Real Magic.’ He gave me free rein to write what I chose.

I’d inherited my interest in UFOs from my father, Jim Shell, a news anchor at WSLS TV in Roanoke, Virginia. He’d reported seriously on UFO phenomena in Virginia, particularly a UFO ‘flap’ in Wytheville, Virginia, that lasted for several years. After interviewing many eyewitnesses, he’d realized that something real and important was happening.

My interest in UFOs continued for years. While living in Washington, DC, and working for the Smithsonian Institution in the late 1960s I spent time hanging around the NICAP offices (National Investigions Committee on Aerial Phenomena ), studying some some of their files and their extensive library of books about UFOs and other paranormal phenomena. I met and talked with Don Keyhoe, the Director. It is a well-known fact that the CIA infiltrated and destroyed NICAP.

In the mid 1990s I researched the infamous Alien Autopsy film and coauthored the 1996 book ‘Beyond Roswell.’ (My name is not on the cover of the book due to contractual issues, but I am credited as coauthor inside the book. I was Editor in Chief of Shutterbug magazine at the time, the world’s largest circulation photography magazine, and was asked to keep my UFO activities sub rosa.) That book is still considered essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the UFO phenomenon and the Roswell event in 1947. My late friend Stan Friedman said it was the best book ever written about Roswell. It is out of print now, but still readily available on Amazon.

When the book came out I was interviewed by Art Bell on Coast To Coast AM (that interview can be found on the Internet), by Ollie North on his radio show, and was flown to Paris to appear on a two-hour TV special program on TF-1, the main French TV network. I was also a speaker at UFO conferences worldwide. So I know this subject inside-out.

My main criticism of the Elizondo program is that they didn’t do any research into the history of the phenomena they discussed. If they had, they would have known of the work of Dr. Roger Leir. In the 1990s Dr. Leir surgically removed many ‘alien implants’ from abductees. At least one was analyzed. It was metal, and the isotope ratios were not those of any metal found on Earth. It was absolutely extraterrestrial. Dr. Leir’s work and the book he wrote about it seems to have been forgotten. I knew Roger, and I believe he was an honest investigator studying a highly unusual phenomenon.

None of Elizondo’s revelations is anything new. My only criticism is that he and the people who produced the program about him didn’t do their homework. If they had, they’d have added some historical context. Lue Elizondo appears to be just what he claims to be, an insider who believes people have a right to know what’s going on behind the scenes of secret government programs that are breaking the law by not briefing Congress on what they are doing, and what they’ve discovered.

Angry Congressmen have demanded full disclosure, and have passed laws to force it. But, as Elizondo says, ‘religious fundamentalists’ within the Pentagon will do anything to block full disclosure. These paranoid idiots believe UFOs are made and controlled by demons.

Jacques Vallee and Graham Hancock have pretty firmly established that the UFO phenomenon goes back beyond written history and is behind much myth, legend, and folklore. Human encounters with these ‘aliens’ probably predate modern humans.

I had the honor of interviewing Col. Philip Corso not long before his death. Like Elizondo, his credentials were impeccable. He said that he was the man at the Pentagon entrusted with the Roswell debris, and his job was to turn it over, a little at a time, to US industries for reverse engineering. He wrote a book, ‘The Day After. Roswell,’ in which he divulged much, but he told me and other interviewers, “What crashed at Roswell was not a spaceship. It was a time machine.” Perhaps the ‘aliens’ are us from some distant future, or others from some disant past. One NASA scientist claims there is evidence of an ancient prehuman civilization.

Whatever the truth, we deserve to know it.

The Elizondo program was followed by a totally ridiculous program in which Dr. Michio Kaku showed his abysmal unfamiliarity with the subject and Seth Shostak, head of SETI, showed that he has his head firmly buried in the sand. His insistence that advanced alien civilizations would use radio to communicate is absurd. It’s like looking for smoke signals in outer space. As Arthur C. Clarke said, any advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. With all due respect to Seth, I believe SETI is a waste of time and resources. The ‘aliens’ are already here.

About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 15th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read additional articles by Bob Shell, click here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/bob-shell-nasas-nazis-and-alternative-physics/

Bob Shell: Nasa’s Nazis and Alternative Physics

AI illustration of Oak Ridge National Laboratory regarding an article about alternative physics — AI Illustration of Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Nasa’s Nazis and Alternative Physics

A physicist friend who used to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory recently sent me a truly amazing book. It’s titled ‘The Philosophers’ Stone: Alchemy and the Secret Research for Exotic Matter’ by Joseph P. Farrell.

The book gets off to a very slow start, and I almost put it aside and didn’t finish reading it, but on page 99 it really takes off and gets to it’s real meat close to the end.

Did you know that strands of DNA are superconductors at biological temperatures? From my background in biology I know that it’s been known for some time that nerve signals in animals move faster than can be accounted for by the standard models of chemical signalling across synaptic gaps, but no one had proposed a model to explain it, so the phenomenon was swept under the carpet and ignored.

Superconduction by DNA solves the question of this phenomenon neatly. Superconduction is the movement of electrical current at maximum speed with no resistance, no production of heat. Normal superconduction occurs only at very low temperatures, and the requirement to keep the systems at these very low temperatures has limited the practical use of superconductors.

I’d heard of the Nazi Glock (‘Bell’) device somewhere before, but knew nothing about it. Farrell has investigated it in depth. The Bell was a device with a nonconductive bell-shaped ceramic outer shell and two rotating drums inside. It was some two meters tall with a hook on top to allow it to be lifted and moved. The two drums contained small amounts of mercury. As the drums spun, the mercury spread out into a thin film on their inner surfaces. Whether the drums were concentric or one atop the other is unclear from available information. The drums rotated in opposite directions at very high speed. This created a field of some sort around the device that could be deadly to people who got too close. Dr. Huburtus Strughold, the doctor associated with the project tested it on concentration camp inmates to determine the effects on humans at various distances from the Bell. (Later he became NASA’s director of space medicine! NASA’s history is full of Nazis! From von Braun on down!)

The device lost weight, as well when the drums were spinning.

Ancient Indian texts describe vimenas, flying machines, using spinning rings of mercury to produce lift. Apparently the Nazi scientists were inspired by this. They were seeking new propulsion systems.

Toward the end of the book, Farrell goes into alternate theories of physics proposed by Pascual Jordan and Burkhart Heim, two neglected physicists who have been ignored by today’s physicists because they were committed Nazis.

In my 2019 book ‘Cosmic Dance’ I proposed quantum time. Jordan worked on quantization of spacetime! He was onto this in the 1940’s!! I though the idea was mine, sigh!

Jordan believed that the constants of physics were not fixed, as most physicists believed then, and still believe today. He theorized that those constants varied over time. He believed that the Earth’s gravity varied over time. This variation in gravity was, he believed, because the Earth’s mass had varied over time. He attributed this variation to torsion caused by the Earth’s rotation. I find this idea intriguing, because I proposed in ‘Cosmic Dance’ that the reason dinosaur footprints were all too shallow might be due to lower gravity back then. The animals weighed much less than they’d weigh today.

Heim developed the Unified Field Theory that Einstein was unable to develop, using only six dimensions, not the twenty or more demanded by string theory.

Heim lost his eyesight, arms, and most of his hearing as a result of one of his experiments in developing his theory. Undaunted by this, he continued working until his death many years later in 2001.

There is a well-known photograph of Adolf Hitler leaning over to study a map as he plans the invasion of France. In the photo with him is Hermann Goring and Baron Jesco von Puttkamer, Hitler’s personal Adjutant and representative of the Kreigsmarine, the German wartime navy.

What did Puttkamer do after the war? He worked for NASA in some unspecified job and was listed as a ‘consultant’ to Gene Roddenberry on Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation!

Anyway, I think you’d find this book as exciting and fascinating as I did.

Farrell refers to another book that I somehow missed in my UFO research: ‘UFOs and Anti-Gravity: Piece for a Jigsaw’ by Leonard Cramp. It was published in 1966 and reprinted in 1996 and goes into Heim’s research in detail. Now that I know about this book I’ll have to get a copy.

NASA was aware of all the Nazi research on antigravity and unusual methods of propulsion, and Paperclipped many of the Nazi scientists involved to work for them.

If the doors of US government secrecy are ever thrown open, some very nasty stuff will come out.

About The Author: Bob Shell is a professional photographer, author, former editor in chief of Shutterbug Magazine and veteran contributor to this blog. He is currently serving a 35 year sentence for involuntary manslaughter for the death of Marion Franklin, one of his former models. He is serving the 15th year of his sentence at Pocahontas State Correctional Facility, Virginia. To read additional articles by Bob Shell, click here: https://tonywardstudio.com/blog/bob-shell-is-there-a-fifth-force-of-nature/