Author: Willem

I know we live in the information age, but I am still impressed every other day with the information I can get to with the internet and my smart phone.  Check this out, a run-down from last night.

7.01 pm We have landed at Chicago, in from Pittsburgh. The snow in Chicago has started falling.  I can see that, don’t need the iPhone weather app to tell me that!  But what is the temperature? If it’s not too cold, the snow will melt quickly and not be a big problem for the runway and the aircraft.  Well, it is 34 °F.  Better get out of here before it drops to 30 °F in the next hour or so, though.

7.14 pm  We’re still on the tarmac, waiting for the plane at gate B5 to get de-iced so that it can move and allow us to pull up.  Hmm.  Let me check with United’s app if my flight to Seattle is still scheduled for an on-time departure. Yes.  I can even see where the incoming plane is from (Washington, DC).  It has almost arrived and is scheduled to arrive 9 minutes early, in fact.

8.06 pm  We have gotten to gate B5.  I just have to walk over to gate B10 for the Seattle flight.  Almost time to board.  If I’m lucky I will get upgraded to the big seats in first class.  Have I been?  Yes! .. the upgrade list that used to be classified information available only the sometimes-surly ground personnel, is now available to everyone (to obsessively check every 3 minutes if you feel you have to?). That’s me in seat 3E on the Upgrade List.  (Later, before we departed, the guy across the aisle in 3B made a fuss when he discovered his seat’s overhead light was not working.  ‘I need it to read, my Kindle is not backlit!’, he complained to the stewardess. I knew exactly what was going to happen next : ‘Will I be so kind to consider trading seats with him?’ she asked.  ‘Alright, then’ I said (thinking : Good Grief, the way that guy is carrying on, they’re going to hold the @#$% flight to call Maintenance to get it fixed. Can’t let that happen).

8.30 pm  Our turn to get some de-icing done.  It has actually stopped snowing and is raining now, so we should be in good shape for getting out.

8.45 pm  We’re getting pushed back from the gate. Four hours to Seattle, and 1,720 miles for an 11 pm Pacific Time arrival, two time zones away from Chicago’s Central Time.

And what is the weather like in Seattle?  I forgot to check before we left in Chicago.  This flight does not have in-flight internet, so I will have to wait until we land to know – which was perfectly OK.  It was great to be headed home to the Pacific Northwest, far, far away from the Northeast which was about to be pummeled with the blizzard of the century.

I was the passenger in my colleague’s rental car to the airport, so I could take a few pictures on the way out.  It looks like my connection in Chicago is still good (without delays due to the large weather system forming in the northeast).

I’m in Pennsylvania, in the Pittsburgh area again for a few days.  Moon is just north of Pittsburgh airport, and Mars is where the hotel is.  It’s a 40 min drive to the hotel.   There is snow on the ground but the roads are clear of snow and ice.  Just watch out on the turns for iced surfaces !

P.S.  So the black birds (Ravens) won the Superbowl, and no word from officials at the Superdome and its energy company, Entergy, as to what caused the 34 minute black-out. A circuit breaker worked as designed, but why did the circuits become overloaded?  ‘It’s NOT Beyoncé’s fault*’ says James L. Kirtley Jr., professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

*Beyoncé and her dancers put on a dazzling, hologram-assisted halftime show on a lit-up LCD-like stage floor.

We completed our ‘blueprinting’ phase workshops in for our project today.  Weather wise, the light snow of the last few days gave way to freezing rain* in the Salt Lake City area. There was so much of the stuff that the airport was closed for a few hours after a JetBlue plane skidded after landing (no injuries, and it stayed on the runway).  It also made for a slow and treacherous drive out to the airport from Ogden.

*[From Wikipedia] Freezing rain is made entirely of liquid droplets. The raindrops become super-cooled while passing through a sub-freezing layer of air many hundreds of feet above the surface, and then freeze upon impact with any object they encounter. The resulting ice, called glaze, can accumulate to a thickness of several centimeters.

I am in Ogden for a last trip for now (but will probably come back in March).  Here are some pictures from today.  It is a little warmer than last Monday, but still well below freezing at night.

As the first class flyers were boarding in Salt Lake City on Thursday night for our flight to Seattle, a guy was let on board with a Great Dane service dog.  I was in coach and we all thought ‘Well, this will be interesting : to see where the dog goes’. Turned out the guy had a whole set of three bulkhead seats in coach to himself, so that there was room for the dog to lie on the floor at his feet. This would NOT have worked with a full flight!    Then as we approached Seattle, the pilot warned that it was  foggy – and that he may have to do a touch-and-go landing if the fog was a lot thicker than they had anticipated.  We could even have ended up at Portland airport 120 miles south.   But all went well – even though the runway appeared suddenly out of nowhere – and so we landed and taxied to the gate.