Posts under ‘General’

NASA has just released the June edition of their Callback newsletter, highlighting safety topics drawn from the ASRS database. This month focuses on communication factors and misunderstandings that can result. They highlight three areas:

The Anticipation factor (pilots hear what they expect to hear, not what is actually said)
The Language factor related to the challenges of [...]

If you are ever passing through Milwaukee’s General Mitchell International Airport with some time to spare, they have an excellent second hand bookstore with a great section on aviation…. Barbara Cushman Rowel was Galen Rowel’s wife and this book is as much a story about her escape from his shadow as it is about a flight she took from Oakland down and around South America and back.

With an acknowledged weakness for books, particularly books related to flying and especially ones with great photography, it wasn’t a struggle to purchase Jim Wark’s ‘America Flying High’ when I came across a second hand copy in my local bookstore.The inscription on the inside front cover caught my eye first of all:”Nick - Happy Birthday on the occasion of your fifteenth birthday, the world is your oyster”Aunt Jane and Uncle Mike clearly picked a great book to illustrate their point and I was a little sad to see that Nick had already decided to pass on this photographic tour of the nation but his loss was my gain and I spent 15 minutes flicking through the pages and then decided to make the purchase so I could really appreciate its content…. In doing a little research online I came across his website, airphotona.com where it mentions that this year Jim was the first recipient of the Epson Aerial Photographer of the Year.In addition to aviation and photography, he has a background in mining engineering and one of the nice things about the book are the passages of text that he uses introduce each section, describing the social and geological forces at work to shape the landscape.

This is a page showing some rather more artistic representations of aircraft in motion over the United States. The researchers took the real time flight data for a 24 hour period and plotted the positions of the aircraft in flight over the US and coming to and from the US. Visually its a very attractive piece, from an aviation perspective you can see the waves of aircraft coming and going as the time zones roll by - well worth a look.Air Traffic As Seen by the FAAThe following flight pattern visualizations are the result of experiments leading to the project Celestial Mechanics by Scott Hessels and Gabriel Dunne.

One very nice feature for pilots is the ability to directly load data from your Garmin or Magellan GPS into Google Earth for review in full 3D glory, you can even share them with other people…Google Earth is one of the latest developments from Google that allows you to zoom in to any point on the globe and view satellite imagery overlaid onto topographically correct 3D landforms…. What makes you think is that this is the satellite coverage they give away for free, one can only wonder at what is available to the various government users!Anyway, besides being a great way to browse the geography of the world, if you upgrade to Google Earth Plus ($20) you can plug your Garmin or Magellan GPS direcly into the system and download your waypoints, routes and tracks for display in Google Earth.