Category: Aviation

Virgin A380 Floor Plans….

As I noted, I flew on Friday night from BOS to LHR. The trip was probably the most uncomfortable I’ve done across the pond. First we got away 90 minutes late, because of a faulty spoiler indicator that had to be replaced. Then the seats proved to be too short in the leg, and the placement of the IFE [in-flight entertainment] equipment meant that even though the nominal pitch was reasonable it was imposible to get comfortable. And then the meal service was slow, and things were pretty bumpy from about 20W to the Irish coast. Bottom line: I got less than an hour’s sleep. Not surprisingly I slept like I log on Saturday night – from about 6pm to 8am!

I’m posting this from the Sun office at 55 King William Street in the City of London, a few yards from The Monument (see right).

I’m off to England this evening for a week: AA108, BOS-LHR, 777-200. Here’s a nice image from Airliners.net.

(I think this is the first time I’ve included third-party Javascript in a blog entry – I wonder how the RSS aggregators will handle it. UPDATE: It doesn’t validate properly according to the W3C tools.)

I was flying home this evening on UAL994, IAD-BOS, B752. It was misty in Boston, with RVR fluctuating betwen 1500 and 5000; traffic was landing on 4L and departing on 9. We’d left PVD on the 070 radial to pick up the BOS 4L localizer, and at MILT we’d gone to BOS TWR and been cleared to land. Less than 2 miles out, at about 500 feet, I heard the following exchange on channel 9:
BOS TWR: Eagle Flight 538, cancel takeoff.
Perplexed voice: Er… Eagle Flight 538 is in the air!
BOS TWR: OK, I must have confused you with… Eagle Flight 538, contact departure.
[With apologies to those who don’t grok aviation jargon.]

Just flew down from Seattle to San Francisco. Due to ATC restrictions at SFO, we left late and had to hold for a couple of orbits at Point Reyes. This gave me the opportunity to listen to one of the best bands you’ve never heard of: Family. English, hippie, musically eclectic. They released a couple of brilliant albums at the end of the 1960s called Family Entertainment and Music From A Doll’s House. A couple more albums followed, but IMHO they never recaptured the genius of those first two. Anyway, those two albums have been released as a double CD, and I have them on my iPod. Listening to Processions and Face In The Cloud while gazing down upon beautiful Point Reyes was delightful. (And the former seemed so apposite – how far I’ve come from the teenager who first listened to that record in my student dorm at Essex University all those years ago.)
Anyway: highly recommended.