11 thoughts on “Back From Colorado”

1. Refueling is a good idea. Glad to see your pilot thinks ahead. 🙂

   Still, if you ripped out the lower deck and mid-section of an Airbus A-380 and put in extra fuel tanks, you wouldn’t have to refuel and could make the trip in one go, although you might have to wait till 2025 to get a ticket and it might be a bit pricey.

2. Massive TFR over LA basin as our Imperial Master visits the plebs. You’re lucky you can land anywhere in So Cal at all.

3. In the last 5-10 years, I have found airline travel has become more and more frustrating. More often than not you simply will not be able to get there from here even with ticket in hand.

   I don’t know why this is – quite often it’s weather…and bad weather in Nebraska seems to thwart my flight from Boston to North Carolina because my a/c comes from Omaha.

   And I find airline people just about as surly and unapproachable and miserable as Motor Vehicle Department types.

   It just seems to suck.

   Horribly.

4. The approach to San Diego is one of the more…interesting…approaches in US commercial aviation. It’s a higher glideslope than normal, so you see more go-arounds than typical; the reason the glideslope is high is because of the slope of the ground under the final approach path, so you end up flying nearly constant altitude AGL (like, 500 ft) for most of the approach, including right over the south end of Balboa Park and parts of downtown; and it’s a relatively short runway, so the airplanes tend to brake heavily once the wheels are planted. Perfectly safe, but it’s not uncommon to see armrest death grips or rosary beads being deployed by the uninitiated.

   1. Yes, it was an interesting approach. I think it was only the second time I’ve ever flown in there (I’ve been there many times, but I almost always drive, because it doesn’t make much sense to fly there from LA). I wasn’t really concerned, because I know that they do it many times a day safely.

      It was really strange. We’d just gotten to Vegas, and the plane started to make a long slow turn to the right, and then was heading back east toward the canyon — I could see Lake Meade and the dam again on the right. I was just on the verge of hitting the button to ask a flight attendant what the hell was going on when the captain broke in with the announcement about LAX being shut down, and having SD as their backup, as we didn’t have enough fuel to loiter over Nevada.

      1. Hmmm…surprised that they didn’t just go into McCarran, given that you were already right there, unless they thought they might have to bus you back to LAX – much easier to do that from SD. Depending on the airline, Ontario or John Wayne would also have been more typical than SD, unless both of them were within the TFR. Ain’t our Dear^H^H^H^H POTUS great?

         1. That’s what I was thinking, too. I was looking down at McCarran as I thought it, but then I decided that SD would be a lot closer to home if we had to bus trip it. And I couldn’t figure out why not Burbank or Ontario or OC.

            1. And actually, now that I think about it, I don’t know what other regional airports American flies into (it was an Eagle flight), so maybe SD was the closest with their own facilities.

            2. Oh, American Eagle! I was thinking it was probably Southwest (which would be my go-to airline for getting to Denver), which goes to Ontario, Burbank, LAX, and John Wayne.

               But that reflects my biases – I find SWA just about the only tolerable airline going, because they aren’t pretentious about what they are: they get you there with a minimum of fuss and a minimum of holier-than-thou attitude. Plus freedom from the nutty service charges just about every other airline has adopted, bags fly free, and no change fees.

            3. I’ll just say that I have a lot of miles on American…

5. I thought the NOTAM was only for yesterday. However it affected not just LAX. There were 11 airports closed by it.

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