Free Republic

WASHINGTON — Appearing on late-night television in September, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg expressed confidence that airlines would improve their performance after a dismal summer of flight delays and cancellations. “I think it’s going to get better by the holidays,” Buttigieg told the host, James Corden. His prediction did not age well. Until the past few weeks, Buttigieg, 41, had enjoyed a relatively smooth glide as transportation secretary. He has traveled the country promoting the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law, appearing with grateful local leaders to trumpet the money headed their way. But the recent aviation woes present a formidable challenge...

The Andean condor has a wingspan stretching to 10 feet and weighs up to 33 pounds, making it the heaviest soaring bird alive today. For the first time, a team of scientists strapped recording equipment they called “daily diaries” to eight condors in Patagonia to record each wingbeat over more than 250 hours of flight time. ... One bird flew more than five hours, covering more than 100 miles (160 km), without flapping its wings. “Condors are expert pilots — but we just hadn’t expected they would be quite so expert,” “When you see condors circling, they are taking advantage...

In small but politically significant ways, the economy under President Trump has favored regions and constituencies that supported him in 2016. These are the men and women whom Trump called forgotten Americans. The emerging pattern of economic growth reverses a trend that held from the 2008 recession to 2016, in which Democratic-leaning states and counties far outpaced Republican-leaning sections of the country. Now, under a Republican administration, job growth rates in Trump country are rising faster than they are in Democratic America. As the national unemployment rate hovers at just below 4 percent, far more red states than blue states...

Glide United Methodist Church in San Francisco, California, may be on the brink of breaking away from the UMC. The church, as a whole, has systematically distanced itself from the governance and theological beliefs long held by the UMC, and yet has still clung to the title of being a United Methodist congregation, according to Bishop Minerva Carcaño. Bishop Carcaño addressed an open letter to the California-Nevada Conference, outlining issues within Glide that she found to be troubling. She described Glide’s “Sunday Celebrations” as “uplifting concerts,” which “lack the fundamentals of Christian worship.” She went on to write that the congregants don’t want...

A company whose video chat service apparently captured audio of Michael Brown's shooting said Thursday the recording was created at the time the Missouri teenager was killed this month. The revelation from Glide appears to bolster a man's claim that he inadvertently recorded audio of gunfire at the time a police officer shot and killed the 18-year-old Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson on August 9. The video was created at 12:02:14 p.m. that day, Glide said. Brown, who was unarmed, was shot by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson shortly after noon.

MOJAVE, Calif. – Virgin Galactic's space tourism rocket SpaceShipTwo achieved its first solo glide flight Sunday, marking another step in the company's eventual plans to fly paying passengers. SpaceShipTwo was carried aloft by its mothership to an altitude of 45,000 feet and released over the Mojave Desert. After the separation, SpaceShipTwo, manned by two pilots, flew freely for 11 minutes before landing at an airport runway followed by the mothership. The entire test flight lasted about 25 minutes.