Numlock News: July 21, 2026 • Craters, Trackflation, Danube

Jul 21, 2026

By Walt Hickey

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A Séance?

Spirit Airlines is in the midst of a bankruptcy, and its assets are being auctioned off. Some of the more interesting things owned by the budget airline were its takeoff and landing slots at La Guardia Airport, which has become an in-demand hub for many other domestic airlines. The Federal Aviation Administration restricts the number of flights at three airports in the U.S. — Reagan in Washington D.C., and JFK and La Guardia in New York — and those rights are valuable and can be sold. Spirit was selling the right to 22 daily departures and landings, good for 11 additional round-trip takeoffs and landings, and those were for the Marine Air Terminal, which is a fascinating art deco facility that plenty of other airlines have coveted. JetBlue won the rights, bidding $58.5 million, which adds 22 slots to their existing 31 slots at LaGuardia. Frontier narrowly lost with a bid of $57.5 million and now will still have just four slots.

Dietrich Knauth, Reuters and Meghna Maharishi, Skift

Trackflation

Teenage runners are posting record-smashing times at track meets that were otherwise inconceivable as recently as a decade ago, a phenomenon that the track world has deemed trackflation. At the New Balance Nationals annual championship meet in June 2025, over 100 kids broke a previous meet record. Track and field has more high school athletes than any other sport in the United States, with 1.1 million competing, beating out basketball’s 900,000. Athletes in middle schools are employing the training and recovery techniques that have been perfected at the pro level over the past few years, and track is not immune from the youth sports boom that has seen parents fork over small fortunes for equipment, training and resources — whether that’s the pricey sneakers that can shave two percent to three percent off a time, or the now favored sodium bicarbonate powder that can boost performance by 1.5 percent.

Brendan I. Koerner, Wired

Hazard Pay

Sinokor Group, which is the largest owner of supertankers in the world, has been offering extra pay for any crew willing to brave the Strait of Hormuz, where commercial ships and the seafarers on them have come under attack in recent weeks. At least 59 commercial ships have been attacked in and around the Persian Gulf since the beginning of the United States’ war with Iran, and getting tankers in and, more importantly, out of there has been a high priority for shipping companies and their customers. The rewards for doing a Hormuz run are considerable: Sinokor has reportedly offered an extra six months’ pay for seafarers willing to risk the Strait and make a return voyage from Saudi Arabia or Iraq to be unloaded in the Gulf of Oman. Captains make $15,000 a month on oil tankers, and a junior sailor might make $1,500 a month; moving a single shipload of oil would be worth millions to shipowners.

Charles Gorrivan, Alex Longley and Stephen Stapczynski, Bloomberg

BAC

In 2017, Utah passed a first-in-the-nation law that reduced the blood alcohol concentration limit for driving from 0.08 to 0.05 grams per deciliter. The fact that no other state followed suit does mean that we had the perfect environment for a pretty solid natural experiment, and the result is significant: A new study in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine found that lowering the limit reduced alcohol-related crash injuries and fatalities by 11 percent or more, after comparing the Utah data with crash data from neighboring states. Alcohol is an increasing factor in crash fatalities and injuries, with alcohol-impaired crash injuries up 25 percent and fatalities up 15 percent.

Jeff Dodge, Colorado State University

Roboumps

Halfway into the MLB season, we have a pretty solid look at how umpires are doing against the robo-umps now assessing the strike zone. According to MLB, umpires have a 95 percent accuracy rate on all called pitches, which the league says is the most accurate ever. But when they do get challenged, an interesting pattern has emerged. Entering this week, umpires under 40 have been overturned 50.1 percent of the time when challenged, umps in their 40s have a 54 percent overturn rate, a 57.2 percent rate for umps 50 and over and a 58.2 percent overturn rate for umps aged 55 and over.

Jared Diamond and Sam Federman, The Wall Street Journal

The Brown Danube

Heatwaves and droughts have brought water levels in major European rivers down to levels not seen in decades. Romania’s state water management agency says that at the Romanian entry point of the Danube, the second-largest river in Europe, the flow was 1,700 cubic meters of water per second. That number is the lowest since 1996. On average in July, it would be 4,700 cubic meters per second. Several ferries and grain barges have cancelled service or are idled, which is bad news for one of Europe’s largest exporters of grain. The good news is that heavy rains upriver may soon improve conditions.

Luiza Ilie, Reuters

Collision

A piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will smash into the lunar surface on August 5, and a new paper from 23 astronomers is calling upon the scientific community to point their telescopes to record it, if possible. The rocket was originally launched in January 2025, sending two landers to the moon for Firefly Aerospace and ispace, but the 10,800-pound upper stage that was meant to burn up on reentry actually entered a weird orbit around the Earth at a similar distance to the moon. At that point, we lost track of it, but it was recently found, and it’s now estimated to slam into the Moon at 2:34 A.M. EDT on August 5 near Einstein Crater at 5,400 miles per hour. It might be hard to see, but it’s worth trying to take a look; NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter will image the site before and after the collision, and South Korea’s Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter will try to catch it hitting the surface.

Claire Cameron, Scientific American

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Numlock News is written each day by Walt Hickey. Email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news. Every post is entirely by a human; SEN corrections or typos to the copy desk at copy@numlock.news. If you enjoy Numlock, tell a friend, word of mouth is the only way that independent publications like this one grow.

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