Posts Tagged ‘KORD’

aviation related

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Wired has posted an article on the top ten worst aircraft ever.

It’s funny. All of the sudden, whenever I come across anything on the internet that seems aviation related, I’m all over it. Just today the Sun Times has had their feature on O’Hare delays. The Trib also posted a story on Southwest’s intentions to expand service to Canada, Mexico, Hawaii, and possibly the Caribbean.

I’m now actively scouring for information, and the links on Todd’s My Flight Blog have been super helpful. I’ve yet to load up my Google Reader with lots of flight blogs, but I will get them all in there at some point and keep my eyes open.

It really is amazing that the aviation community is so welcoming and willing to share their experiences.

I’ve also started listening to the Student Pilotcast. I’m halfway through all the episodes and Bill, podcaster and webmaster, does an incredible job of mixing his training reviews with cockpit audio. I tried out a couple other aviation podcasts, but they are a bit above my head at the moment. I don’t speak aviation just yet (although I speak four languages!), but I’m starting to get my bearings on all the lingo.

There is so much out there. How did people do this before the internet?

listening to atc

Monday, June 30th, 2008

While I’m still shopping for schools, (I think Midway Aviators will be the one…), I’ve started listening to ATC, or Air Traffic Control. LiveATC.net offers live streams from control towers, and as geeky as that sounds, I’m enjoying it.

Mostly I’m listening to KDPA (Chicago DuPage) because it’s not too busy. The KORD (O’Hare) ATC is so crazy I can barely track one plane in the mix. But at KDPA I’m beginning to hear the ebb and flow. Everyone reads back the commands so I get to hear most of the it twice, but it seems like the readback is in some sort of shorthand.

It’s pretty cool to be able to listen to the calls and look at the runway map to figure out where folks are landing. I also hear a lot of touch-and-go calls. I like hearing them because I think it means those pilots are in training. I could be completely wrong about that, but that’s my guess.

One thing that I haven’t heard is ground control, which runs on a different frequency. I’m not sure how that interplay works yet.