July, 2006

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Mixing with the Big Boys

Tuesday, July 25th, 2006
737 at Lindbergh Field

737 at Lindbergh Field

This past weekend I took Rudy to Comic-con. It is the international convention of people in the comic business, held each year in San Diego. With the success of movies like Batman, The Matrix, Spider-man, Batman Begins, X-Men and so forth, Hollywood has discovered Comic-con. Attendance has exploded. In my later youth (maybe I’m still in that), I was one of only a few kids I knew who read comic books, so I’ve always considered comics a small, niche audience, a strange little subculture. When it was possible to schedule a day to take a look with Rudy (who loves comics like only a ten-year old can) I jumped at it.
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The Longest Nautical Mile

Thursday, July 20th, 2006

Adam was running his laboratory and teaching classes up at Friday Harbor Island Marine Station. That’s on one of the San Juan Islands off of Seattle. Bob and I were curious about taking a long flight, and I checked to see how long it would take. Eight and a half hours each direction, and since I couldn’t be away from home for more than a night it would be seventeen hours of flying in two days.

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Engine Out

Wednesday, July 19th, 2006

Here’s the thing about emergency landings. I don’t expect to have to do one, but I’ve trained to do one, I’ve practice them a number of times, and my training keeps me focused on one question while I am flying: If the engine stops now, where do I put down the plane? A lot of the time that’s an easy answer. Almost all the way to Las Vegas and back I am within gliding distance of a real airport. (Sometimes a private field, sometimes a restricted defense contractor’s field, but there’s always a strip of tarmac down there to put the plane down on.) For a couple short stretches I would have to find a road through the desert, but I have read a few accounts of those landings and they sound possible, like beach landings. Not something I want to try, but something I am confident I am capable of surviving. Click to continue »

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The Trip We Wouldn’t Have Taken

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

Nell has friends, Tom and Marcy, who live up in Sonoma Valley, north of San Francisco. We visited them when Rudy was too small to walk and had a great time. Rudy and I stopped by again when Rudy was around three to go to a wedding in neighboring Napa Valley. We’ve been saying ever since that we should go back. “We should go up to see Marcy in the spring…” would turn to “We should go up to see Marcy in the fall…” and around again to the spring. It’s a long drive (over six hours), but seems too short to use a commercial flight for. (We’d fly from LAX to Oakland and the truth is that between parking, getting through security, renting a car on the other end… we probably would be close to the driving time anyway. It’s an hour and a half in a Southwest 737 and Oakland is still nearly a two hour drive from Sonoma.)
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