Parking Lot C: March 2005

Saturday, March 26, 2005

Back to Beantown...

I flew back to school in Boston today (UAX 5770 and UA 526). The flight on the CRJ was unremarkable, as usual, but I was travelling on the same flight as some of my neighbors from across the street, so that was a change. On the ORD-BOS leg, I was in seat 1A of a 737-522. The captain had the infamous Channel 9 on, so as soon as I discovered that, I listened to exclusively ATC chatter for the rest of the flight. Most of it was fairly standard stuff--frequency changes, altitude change requests, and such--, but there were two particularly interesting segments. First, somewhere over western New York state, another 737 passed us fairly close off the port side, and I was able to easily pick it out after getting over my headphones that we had traffic ("United 526, traffic is 737, 11 o'clock"). Secondly, after reading quite a bit about its origins on the airliners.net forum, I finally had the pleasure of hearing BA's "Speedbird" callsign used. Speedbird 213 Heavy (a 777) was lined up for landing at BOS (rwy 4R) just ahead of us, so after hearing the interactions between Boston Approach and Tower and the BA aircraft, I got to hear the tower warn us of wake turbulence from the "777 immediately ahead of you", then take a look at the actual aircraft itself as it taxied towards Terminal E as we were landing.

Saturday, March 19, 2005

The long road home...

So, I flew home (BOS-LNK) for spring break, earlier today, on United. Anyone knowing midwest geography, and United's hub structure will understand the relative strange situation that they put me through today. I connected in Denver, of all places, adding something like 900 miles to the length of my trip. I flew first class, which made up for the 4.5 hour flight on the BOS-DEN leg. Flying in the usual CRJ-200 into LNK, I had a somewhat amusing experience. I went to pull out the standard in-flight airline magazine, and the barf bag (for lack of a better term), happened to come out with it. What struck me as odd was that the bag was from Air Canada. On a Wisconsin Air flight. Operating as United Express. Who knows. More to come.

Monday, March 14, 2005

A blast from the past...

So, I've found that the Facebook (http://www.thefacebook.com) provides some fairly interesting tools for people who have lost track of friends who have moved away during school, or have themselves moved (as I did after 2nd grade). I've been able to get in contact with people I haven't talked to for 12 years (or more, in some cases), simply by running a search for anybody who went to the high school which I would have ended up going to, had I not moved.