And speaking of flying I know we have several aviation enthusiasts that frequent this thread and I've had some inquires, so here's a peak at some of what I do for my day (night?) job when I'm not out in the shop. This will be Part I.
If you have ever noticed some doors at airport terminals that say
"Authorized Personal Only" or words to that effect, here's a peak at what is behind some of them.
We have 3 such rooms at our terminal in Newark. The phones are to connect us with dispatch or flight ops.
These are flight planning rooms where we look the flight plans over, and if it's a long range international flight, pick up an appropriate plotting chart from one of these stacks which gives us worldwide coverage. You'll see more about using these plotting charts later.
At each plotting station we'll compare the flight plan with the navigational charts, plot the flight on a plotting chart, look over the weather, NOTAM's (notices to airmen) etc. We have these handy flight aids under plexi to help determine various aspects of the flight so we don't have to pull out manuals to look up some of the more commonly used information.
There are also computer monitors to view satellite weather photos, radar images and various other flight assist data. Notice all the printer paper on the shelves. For my Sao Paulo flights alone, the flight package often consists of 60 pages or more of material, and that's just for flight down. So much for the "paperless" society we were going to see in the future.
With all the paper work reviewed, we'll then go the aircraft where before each flight, the crew will all gather together and review any special aspects of the flight, what type of weather to expect enroute and on arrival, whether it will be bumpy or smooth, safety concerns etc. This briefing will usually set the "tone" for the flight and has found to be very beneficial.
These are our Business First seats which...
..can be configure to lay flat.
With a pillow and a blanket most anyone really can fall asleep on the plane.
With the crew briefing complete we step into...
... my office. Here we'll preflight the cockpit looking for an aircraft problem before we leave the gate area and also perform a visual check on the exterior of the aircraft. After that we'll set the flight deck up for the flight, enter the appropriate data in the flight computers and do our own briefing about the flight. This picture was taken using a flash, turn off the flash and...
...this is what you'll see. I did my best to keep the camera steady. It's just a little point and shoot camera and with so little light I'm afraid this is the best I could do at the time, but you get the idea. There's a lot of information on those glass panels. This is the forward panel and console...
...the overhead panel above our heads...
...and the IRO's (International Relief Officer) station.
This is a look at just a few of the wire bundles behind some of those panels. I know Rick would love to try and hunt down an intermittent short in one of those!
That concludes Part I. Next I'll take you airborne.
Thomas
Clearly you(we) are not alone in a very unorganized world. Thanks for your understanding and for coming along on the adventure.
LP's and 12" and for many, many years they were organized by BPM (beats per minute) to facilitate mixing. I DJ'd in many clubs in my misspent youth and that was the only way to organize vinyl. They are in a bit of disarray these days since they have been moved a few times without my direct supervision. I hope to get some people started ripping them to MP3 over the winter, quite a bit of them are not available on CD.
