This story originally aired on May 27, 2017. Traveling on a commercial flight these days can be rough. Perks such as free meals and pillows are long gone. Today, airlines charge for everything from where you sit on the plane to how much legroom you’re allotted. It’s easy to forget there was a time, not too long ago, when passengers dressed up to get on an airplane. 79-year-old Gloria Sferra remembers very well what flying used to be like. She was a stewardess for Pan American Airlines from 1962

This story originally aired on May 27, 2017. There’s a letter on Yulina Bilombele’s dining room table that she cannot read. “Defendant failed to pay the rent and has further failed to vacate and surrender the premises.” Bilombele is a refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo. She’s 80 years old. She does not speak English. She is too frail to work and she does not have the money to pay rent. So, she turns to the man many Congolese refugees in Seattle call: Floribert Mubalama. “They want us

This story originally aired on May 27, 2017. A group of students from the University of Washington is working on a way to create satellites that could stay up indefinitely and fly in a circle over a particular patch of the earth. The results could mean cell phone and internet coverage in disaster areas, along with super-high-resolution images of remote places on the planet. Right now, they’re testing their ideas, which have taken the shape of a 12-pound glider with a 20-foot wingspan attached to

This story originally aired on May 27, 2017. Jesse Hayes’ love of flying began as a kid growing up in Texas. His family had a car but they also had an airplane, which Jesse’s father adored. Jesse says that as an African-American family, that meant that they could literally fly over racism when they went on trips to visit family. The airplane made it possible for Jesse’s family to avoid the things that made traveling difficult for so many people of color in the American South at that time — such

This story originally aired on May 27, 2017. B.J. Listman is one of the elevator operators at the Space Needle. The Space Needle and the Smith Tower, according to B.J, are the only places left in Seattle where there are actually elevator operators. This iconic Seattle landmark has enchanted B.J. since he was a child. “It's kind of funny actually. I have one of those three-foot tall paper Space Needle models, and the model kit had you glued the elevators in place, but I never did because I like

This show originally aired on May 27, 2017. This week on Sound Effect, our theme is "Up in the Air." We open the show by meeting Space Needle elevator operator B.J. Listman gets to see one of the best views in the world every single day for his job. We then talk to UW Earth and space sciences faculty member Robert Winglee who has designed a drone that can fly at an altitude of about 80,000 feet. Next, a conversation with Jesse Hayes, a Boeing engineer and president of the Red Tailed Hawks Flying

This story originally aired on April 30, 2016. Vanessa Davids did most of her military service “inside the wire,” as an Arabic translator on a base in Iraq. Her job called on her to translate audio and video recordings, in hopes of gathering intelligence, foiling attacks and probing enemy action. She translated bomb plots, beheadings, even in some cases child pornography. As a result, she got an intimate, and dark, perspective on human nature.

This story originally aired on February 7, 2015. In 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge was a state-of-the-art engineering achievement, a dramatic suspension design spanning a strait of Puget Sound. Sure, it had a bit of a "bounce," but the engineers all assured the public that was normal . Only a handful of bridge workers seemed truly alarmed. Then one day, on November 7, a storm kicked up 40 mph winds, and the bridge began to contort. Soon its undulations took on a distinctive, twisting-ribbon

As part of Sound Effect’s " What Are the Odds?" e pisode, Dick Stein, 88.5’s man of chance and mystery, shares a few stories from his time spent at poker tables. “Poker players hate to get up from the table, God forbid they should miss that hand that will make them a huge score,” said Stein. “So, we do two things: one, cultivate super human bladder control, and two, when we’re hungry we’ll just order something and eat it at the table.” In these vignettes, Stein talks about some of the unusual

The population of Concrete, Washington in 1938 was about 1,000 people. But one October evening that year, while a famous radio broadcast was frightening a good portion of the population across the country, things in Concrete got even stranger. When Orson Wells broadcast his famous War of the Worlds broadcast on October 30, 1938, if you didn’t tune in at the very beginning, you might not have realized it was a radio play, not actual terrifying news of Martians invading earth. But in Concrete, a