Category: Travel

Our flight was delayed by at least an hour, the United Airlines agent announced, ‘they are working on the APU, the air .. ‘  Auxiliary Power Unit!  chimed some mechanically- minded passengers to help her out. But right after the announcement, she said ‘Don’t go anywhere! The APU has been fixed!’. 

Honeywell invented the APU in the early 1950s.  It is really a gas turbine engine, typically in the tail of the airplane, providing electricity for starting the main engines, enabling the air conditioning, running lighting and flight equipment, and more.

Here are some answers a pilot provided on a message board I found on-line (the questions can be inferred from the answers!).
1. Yes, an aircraft can be operated without an operating APU – it can be a maintenance-deferred item for a certain period of time.
2. Yes, the airport needs to have the following in the event on an inoperable APU :
a. Ground Power Unit (GPU) or land-side power connection – to power the aircraft while the engines are off
b. Air Start Cart to provide pressurized air to start the engine without the APU
3. Yes, engines can be restarted in flight without an APU
4. Yes, the APU is usually turned off on the ground when the aircraft is connected to ground power and it is also turned off in flight
5. Yes, regional jets are somewhat more prone to APU issues

P.S.  Alright, so the USA lost the game against Germany 0-1.  I watched the last 10 minutes or so in the building lobby (and reportedly President Obama took time out to watch the game on Air Force One).   The US team still goes through to the knock-out rounds though, where it will face Belgium on Tuesday.  

It was Bike to Work day here in Denver today.   The Denver Post reports that Denver is second only to San Francisco in its Bike to Work day participants (30,000 to SF’s 40,000). We were skeptical of the 30,000 number reported for Denver, though.  We did not really see more-than-usual bikers out on the street this morning.  Anyway : the idea is that encouraging people to try biking to work one day will result in some of them doing it regularly.  Of course, if one lives far away, one can bike to the nearest bus station or train station, and then bike to work from one’s arrival bus stop or train station.

The guy in front of me in the security line this morning had his Eddie Bauer polo shirt on inside-out.  Hmm. Should I tap him on the shoulder, and tell him? I thought.  I decided to mind my own business and not to.  He was not on a business trip and not likely to embarrass himself too badly, anyway.

Monday is done. Yay!

It’s summer, school is out, and so the airports in Seattle and Denver are full of families traveling everywhere.  Even at 4.30 am this morning, there were lots of cars dropping off passengers, something we do not normally see.

It was warm here in Denver today, with temperatures reaching 88°F/ 31°C.

Traffic was so bad out to Denver airport today that my taxi driver never got to use interstate I-70 the way he normally does.  There were several construction activities and lane closures to deal with.  We ended up driving all the way along 56th Ave that runs parallel to I-70.   My appeal to airport planners : please please please do not build an airport 30 miles out of the city, and not provide mass transit to and from it – a train or a shuttle bus (with a bus lane).  A freeway filled with 10,000 cars does not work anymore.

We are wrapping up Cycle 2 of our system’s testing, but there is no rest for the wicked.  We have a big planning meeting for Cycle 3 tomorrow.  If we were building a Boeing (which we are not, luckily), we have now tested the wings, the fuselage and the engines separately in what is called Cycle 2/ String Testing.

In Cycle 3/ Integration Testing, we will put them all together and see if our ‘airplane’ can actually fly.  So! Can we walk through all the screens from start to finish for an integrated business process with real data, and without stoppages or data errors?   The final cycle, Cycle 4, is called User Acceptance Testing.

Here are pictures from my walk after work in Denver downtown on Tuesday night.

It’s Thursday, and so I get to go home.  As I stepped into the taxi outside the Denver office, it started to rain : big fat splattering drops.  Soon after, hailstones came down with the rain as well.

 

Denver has four major taxi companies operating at the airport.  A fifth one’s application was turned down by the authorities in 2008; the founders sued, the Colorado Supreme Court finally found in their favor, and now Mile High Cab will start operating as well.   Then there are the new digital age taxi business start-ups called Uber and Lyft that operate very differently.   Drivers bring their own cars, are ordered by one’s smartphone with all one’s payment information set up already, enabling the passenger to literally hop in and out of the car without ever needing to deal with cash or a credit card to pay the driver. 

For now I still use the traditional taxi companies when I emerge out of the airport, mostly because there are always cabs available at the taxi stand right there. So the wait time for me is zero.  Yes, on the back-end I have to pay with cash or credit card – not as smooth as it would have been with say, Uber, but that’s OK.  If I had used Uber, I would have more trouble to deal with up front : wait for a little bit, and then be on the look-out for the driver/ his car’s number plate, or tell him exactly where I am.   

 

It’s a little after 10 am here in Denver and I made it into the office.  I got to bed so late on Sunday night that I slept all the way here on the flight from Seattle.   One of those flights where I go ‘Oh, are we landing already?’ as I wake up !

It was a short stay in Denver this week with Monday’s Memorial Day holiday, but I was ready to go home on Thursday nonetheless.  I had to put in long hours to support the second cycle of testing the system that we are building.

As for the new train terminal and 519-room hotel construction project at Denver airport – now estimated to cost $544 million – it is 9 percent over its original $500 million budget.  When additional ‘related’ costs of $128 million are added, the project is 34% over budget.    The project may very well impact other capital plans at the airport, says the Denver Post.   Denver winds play a role in the airport’s runway needs.  When strong winds blow from the west, which is a common occurrence, only two of the six runways may be used for take-offs and landings. A seventh runway would give the airport a third east-west option.  A master plan in 2011 forecast that a seventh runway would be needed as soon as 2015 to avoid flight delays.  The airport capital plan listed it as a “must do” project.  A year later, the runway was delayed, but the airport still budgeted $36.7 million for 2018 to begin construction.

 

There were more warnings of tornadoes in the Denver metro area today, and an hour later, that was followed by a severe thunderstorm with lightning and hail just as I was heading out to the airport.

(Hail damaged six Frontier Airlines aircraft at Denver International Airport on Wednesday, forcing them to cancel some 16 flights.  Wow. I wonder how hard it is to fix a fuselage or wing surface with hail dents in. Surely a hair dryer or letting it stand in the sun will NOT do?).

The little Prius taxi cab I was in took quite a pummeling from the cats-and-dogs-coming-down kind of rain, with some hail mixed in as well .. but thankfully none that would damage an aircraft !

We had some mild excitement this afternoon in the office when severaI of us got tornado alerts on our phones from the National Weather Service, and an announcement by the building management.  So we moved to the elevators and stairwells for 30 mins or so, until the coast (the Denver plains?) was clear.

Later on I walked down to Union Station to check on its remodeling progress.  The work on it still needs a few more months, though, and I could only admire the exterior.

 

Most of the time it’s nice to go and relax and go grab a bite with my colleagues .. but tonight was one of those where it took way too long.  We picked the Yard House, a popular place that offers 200 kinds of beers on tap.  Tonight it was bustling with people. (There’s probably a convention at the Colorado Convention Center going on again).  So what was supposed to be a 15 minute wait turned into a 40 minute wait, and then it took another 30 minutes before we finally had our food on the table.   But hey, I got to get a spectacular panorama picture as we left, and just as the sun was setting.

Monday was a spectacular blue sky day in Seattle.  I postponed my usual Monday morning trip to Denver to Tuesday due to a bad cold.  I think I will be OK to travel tomorrow.  (I see they had snow there in Denver today .. it’s very late for snow!).

P.S.  Here’s a link to Seattle Art Museum’s Deco Japan exhibit to go with the picture below. There’s some pretty cool graphic design posters in there.

My body clock is still shifted toward going to bed early and getting up early, so I went for a walk early in the morning.  (Normally I go to bed late and sleep until I have to get up!). Here are some pictures I took along 14th Street here in downtown Denver.

For the first time this year while I had been in Denver, I left my jacket in the hotel.  The day-time temperatures reached into the 80s (26 °C+) here in Denver on Monday and Tuesday. I’m still a little bleary-eyed from jet lag, but today was already a lot better than Monday!