I just found a few more reasons never to set foot in another airplane. In August of 2006, a cargo flight enroute to Minneapolis from Calgary slammed headfirst into a fast moving lightning and hail storm, at 35000 feet. The resulting damage looks intense, with the cockpit windows mostly cracked and the radome of the airliner blown apart. After partially losing electricity and radar, the pilots declared an emergency, returning to Calgary in what is reported as an uneventful landing. How the pilots landed this thing I’ll never know.

See more: Hail storm at 35000 feet

A recent American Airlines flight from Washington bound to Dallas/Fort Worth had to make an unscheduled landing in Nashville earlier this week due to strong smell of burning matches within the cabin. As the plane was evacuated and the passengers questioned, one of them admitted to striking the matches in order to cover up their body odor, which they said was due to a medical condition. Seems it’s perfectly legal to bring soft matches aboard an aircraft you just aren’t allowed to light them. If only it were illegal to pass gas in a pressurized cabin 35,000 feet in the air.

Read more: Flatulence and matches forces plane to land

Why we’re all not in flying cars yet, I’ll never know, but, I know one thing, if you’re filthy stinking rich you can be. The Moller M400X Skycar prototype, which has demonstrated it’s hovering abilities many times at the Moller facilities is now up for auction via eBay. The Skycar is of course a prototype and can’t really ‘fly’ yet, but, hey, if you’re rich enough to buy it, you should be rich enough to continue developing this amazing piece of aviation history. Current bidding is around the $2 million mark with estimates at $4 million for a final sale and yes, you do have to complete a background check as this thing is most certainly considered a weapon.

Watch video of the M400X hovering after the jump..

Read more of ”Moller M400X Skycar prototype up for sale on eBay“

Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne are the creators behind art project Celestial Mechanics, a brilliant experiment plotting FAA data, parsing it using the Processing programming environment, then compositing the resulting frames with Adobe After Effects and/or Maya. Resulting are beautiful and flowing animations displaying the flight patterns of commercial aircraft throughout the United States as flight upon flight arrives and departs America’s airports. Celestial Mechanics have been on display at many trade shows and conventions around the world, most recently at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria.

Read more: Digital visualizations of US flight patterns