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.

posted by Fred Gay @ 14:19