Yesterday I did some traveling around Iraq and got to fly on an Osprey, which is a pretty cool aircraft that you may have seen before, taking off like a helicopter and then doing an in-air shift to fly like a fixed wing aircraft.
From Wikipedia: The V-22 Osprey is a multi-mission, military tiltrotor aircraft with both a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) and short takeoff and landing (STOL) capability. It is designed to perform missions like a conventional helicopter with the long-range, high-speed cruise performance of a turboprop aircraft.
The US Marines in Iraq operate these aircraft. Unlike other planes here these do not need a runway to take off, and the Marines also see no need for air conditioning. Except for the nylon seat you are sitting in, nearly everything in the aircraft is metal and will burn you if you touch it. The back of the aircraft (where people and equipment get onto these planes) remains open and a gunner sits back there while the plane is in flight. Even when you get up very high above the ground the air coming in does not cool down.
Here is the weather from my igoogle page this morning, a cool 108 degrees, nowhere near the high for the day. Most of the time there is sand in the air and the forecast reads "dust," but today it showed "smoke." Usually there is something smoking nearby, but rest assured the town is not on fire, and despite how it feels it's not actually hot enough to cause spontaneous combustion. Except for maybe a forest fire I'm not sure why "smoke" is even an option for the weather report from this site. 
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