Cooling my heels (just what does that cliche mean, anyway?) at JFK. I miss New York. I don't want to live here again, but I do like visiting.
I mean, look:
That might look a little better if I could get Lightroom to work on my Surface Pro. Time to reinstall it, again.
Some rules of flying:
- Schedule your outbound flights so that delays are inconvenient but not fatal to the purpose of your trip.
- Know that the atmosphere is immense, and airplanes are small. Ground holds happen for very good reasons, all of them about you surviving the flight.
- Charge your phone.
So, yeah, we're on a hold pad for another half hour...
For the next 52 hours, I'll be traveling, for a really horrible reason. I'm not traveling for work, nor really for vacation, though I will admit to enjoying it (in a way my friends don't really understand).
No, I'm trying to keep my American Airlines elite status for another year, because so far in 2015 I have traveled less than in any year of the past 10. So tonight I'm flying to New York, tomorrow to Los Angeles, then back to Chicago on Saturday evening, about 5,500 miles total.
The routing provided not only the best ratio of miles to dollars I could find, but also the chance to fly on American's new A321T and B787-8 airplanes. So far it looks like I'll be in coach on both, as AA3 on a Friday may be one of American's most profitable (read: both premium cabins are paid for rather than upgrades) and the 787 is new enough that lots of dweebs like me are flying on it even if it takes us out of the way. (I'll be taking it on a LAX-DFW segment Saturday afternoon.)
I did bring my real camera, and also I scheduled a full 24 hours in L.A., so this won't be a completely intangible trip. I've also got a couple of books with me. And I really do love flying. So it's not torture, and if I can eke out Platinum for one more year, not pointless.
Next report from New York.
The Economist reports that gun seizures at TSA checkpoints have risen dramatically:
TSA agents discovered 68 firearms in travellers’ carry-on bags. That is the most the agency has ever found in a week. Of them, 61 were loaded, and 25 had a round in the chamber, ready to fire.
The record probably won’t stand for long. The prior high-water mark for intercepted guns was set a month earlier, when TSA agents found 67 firearms. As the Washington Post points out, it’s all part of a steady upward trend that stretches back at least a decade. In 2005, for every 1,000 air travellers, TSA agents discovered an average of less than one gun. In 2015, through the summer, the figure is more than three.
And of course that is just what TSA is catching. In a recent test, agents posing as passengers were able to sneak fake weapons and bombs through airport security 96% of the time. If the TSA agents were as sloppy last week as that exercise suggested, then there weren’t just 68 firearms packed into carry-on bags; there were more like 1,700.
Why are there so many more guns at TSA checkpoints? Possibly because there are so many more guns:
Gun production has more than doubled since President Obama took office, as gun advocates who fear that the president might crack down on the sale of firearms rush out to buy them, either in protest or in fear of future restrictions. But Mr Obama has not been able to persuade Congress to enact new gun-control measures, and so sales have continued to climb unimpeded.
I love living in a 19th-century country, don't you?
First, Pabu Izakaya, early Saturday night (pre-party):
The inscription reads, "One Time, One Place."
Second, yesterday, on approach to Chicago:
That's approximately over Devon Ave., on approach to 27R, as I predicted.
We live in an era of ubiquitous, high-speed connectivity. I'm writing this on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3, with all my current documents synchronized with OneDrive, and six browser tabs open on Chrome...on an airplane over Wyoming.
I love in-flight WiFi. Sometimes. But right now, with three of my browser tabs spinning endlessly while I wait for them to download, and a Microsoft Excel document taking a few minutes to close (because it's uploading changes to OneDrive), I'm just trying to keep things in perspective and not get supremely irritated.
I'd report on my actual throughput, but SpeedTest.net won't even load up here—possibly because GoGo doesn't want me to know precisely whether their service is giving me 300 baud or 1200 baud speeds right now.
Good; my important document has finished downloading.
Update: SpeedTest.net did work, eventually. Sort of. I got a 290 kbps download and a 40 kbps upload, which is about the same as the ADSL I had in 1999.
Now that O'Hare's runway 10R/28L has opened, travelers on flights unlucky enough to land on the new tarmac have reason to be unhappy:
The normal taxi route from new runway 10 Right to the gate follows parts of three taxiways to wind around one runway instead of crossing over it, which would create potential collision risks.
But the taxi route then requires a turn to directly cross a different runway — staying behind planes that are taking off on that runway — followed by another turn, and then another runway to cross over, and a little more taxiing until reaching the core of the airport, where a left or right turn is required, depending on what concourse the plane is assigned.
When American Flight 1333 finally reached the fork in the taxiway requiring a left or right turn near the terminal core, a right turn onto taxiway Bravo would have taken the plane directly to its gate in Terminal 3 on the south end of the terminal buildings. But the Chicago Department of Aviation had closed a portion of Bravo because of Lima Lima construction, said FAA spokesman Tony Molinaro.
So the plane had to hang a left and taxi clockwise all the way around the terminals to reach Gate K5 at the south end of the terminal complex, Molinaro said.
City aviation spokesman Owen Kilmer said short-term pain will lead to "long-term benefits for passengers, including reduced taxi times and a more efficient process for aircraft landing at O'Hare.''
I'm still 2½ hours from landing...I just hope I'm not 3 hours from the gate. (Probably not, as flights from San Francisco tend to use the north corridors and land runway 9L/27R.)
The CBC weighs in on one of this blog's perennial topics:
Going by the sun's position in the sky, Saskatchewan should be on mountain time, the same as Alberta. The border city of Lloydminster gets it right and uses mountain time but the rest of Saskatchewan is effectively on daylight time year round, while the province says it's on standard time.
Lots of places do the same, and some by more than an hour.
And Newfoundland, where the clocks are 30 minutes ahead of the ones in most of Labrador and the rest of the Atlantic time zone, can claim to be in minute-sync with all sorts of places.
The 30-minuters added another one to their list this year.
They also have a listicle of facts about daylight saving time, for those who are not already completely exhausted by this topic.
Seriously, it's like this about 250 days a year:
Posting will be light the next couple of days as I'm back in San Francisco for a convention. More on that later. For now, I'm adjusting to the time change and hoping that tomorrow I have the energy to write about how good dinner was tonight.