LA Update
This is my late report on the trip back from LA on Thursday, plus an update on my day in LA on Wednesday.
Update:
1. Apparently the temple with the suspicious red and green lights on Santa Monica Blvd. was the Mormon Temple, not a synagogue. Which explains not only the red and green lights but also the fact that it looked like something out of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
2. I neglected to report that whilst in the Santa Monica Barnes & Noble, I picked up a book called "Gutsy Women," which is a do's and don'ts guide for women traveling alone. I thought it would be inspirational. Instead, it turned out to be depressing -- essentially a guide to how tp lead a paranoid and sheltered life on the road. The tips were things like, "If the concierge says your room number out loud, asked to be transferred to another room." And, "when you first get to your room, prop your door open with your luggage and look in all your closets first before you close the door." Also, "do not hail a cab from in front of the hotel -- call down to the concierge and have them tell you when the cab is there." I couldn't believe it. What would these people think of my tactics? Renting a car from a total stranger, in broad daylight, and toodling around strange towns without a care in world, blackberrying while stopped at traffic lights and on occasion even getting out of the car. Needless to say, I did not buy the book.
Thursday's trip back:
1. I got up at 4:45 a.m. to catch the 8 a.m. flight back to Dulles. At 5 a.m. the Golden Globe nominees were being announced, so all of Los Angeles was awake. It was dark out. The TV told me that the various stars announcing the nominees had all spent the night in a Century City hotel. Do you suppose it was my hotel?
2. Drove to LAX and on the way, I saw the moon setting behind some hills. The moon was very big. I have been told that as the moon sets, it seems to grow bigger because the dust in the atmosphere between us and it distorts the view. The moon seemed very big indeed. It looked like a postcard, behind the mountains with the palm trees silhouetted in front.
I listened to Susan Stamberg on Morning Edition during my 15 minute drive. She was talking about NPR's new Los Angeles production studio.3. The 8 a.m. flight was full, but I got Premiere treatment and was very happy indeed. Also, it was a 777. The trip was superfast -- only 3.5 hours. The reason was the extra fast jet stream that later that day would case the tornado in Newton, Mississippi. We arrived at Dulles 20 minutes early. As I waited in the gate at LAX, I saw the sun rise over the Hollywood Hills. It was beautiful. For a moment the sun and the moon were both up at the same time, and all you could see between them was a line of red mountains and black plam trees.
4. I listened to the flight deck the whole way across, of course. Three unique things happened this time. First, the Indianapolis controllers temporarily lost an airplane. The plane just dropped out of radio contact for a while. The controllers tried several times to raise the airplane, and finally called the plane's "company," (their word, not mine), to see if the company could reach the pilot. No luck. About 10 minutes later, the plane suddenly came back into radio contact. Everyone sounded befuddled. "What happened? What frequency were you on?" Indianapolis said. "We were on this frequency. We don't know what happened -- everything just went silent" the plane said. The made arrangements about what to do if it happened again.
This whole lost plane episode reminded me of the time I went flying with my brother in a very small plane from Chapel Hill, N.C. to Wilmington, N.C., where we wanted to have lunch in the Cotton Exchange. We got lost on the way back and realized that NC all looks the same from the air -- lots of pine trees everywhere and not much else. We tried to find I-40 but we couldn't tell if the roads we were looking at were I-40, or I-95, or I-85. My brother finally navigated home by heading straight west until we found Jordan Lake, which is pretty big, and then we just flew north for a little while at a very low altitude until we found the tiny Chapel Hill airport. That was the same flight where we had landed at Wilmington on only one wheel and wobbled around on the runway trying to get the other wheel down, as a US Airways plane screamed out of the sky above us. AAAAGHHH! Only later did my brother confess that he'd never actually landed that particular airplane before. But that's another story.
The second unique thing was that the controllers in Albuquerque explained to someone, for some reason, that there is one person in the Albuquerque Center responsible for "blending all the incoming streams for the Phoenix approach." They made it sound very cool. This wasn't entirely news to me -- as Faithful Readers will know by now, when a plane travels across the country, it is handed off from one frequency to another by controllers, who are grouped in geographical "centers," such as the Washington Center, the Indianapolis Center, Kansas City Center, etc. On my westbound flight, the centers we went through were Washington, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Minneapolis, Denver (which covers a really large amount of territory), Salt Lake, and Los Angeles. A typical plane goes through about three or four frequencies per center, before being handed off to the next center. On the eastbound flight we went through LA Center (duh), Albuquerque Center, Gallup Center -- then I fell asleep for a while -- Indianapolis, and back to Washington. These centers have nothing to do with airports -- indeed, some of the centers are not even located in an airport. For example, the controllers that bring traffic into England from across the Atlantic call themselves "London Center" but they are physically sitting in a room in Cornwall somewhere.
But I digress. The controllers in the center handle transit traffic generally, and then there are different controllers that handle approach, departure, and ground traffic at particular airports. So the ground controller gets you from your gate to the end of the runway. Then the departure controllers get you ready for take off and keeps you until something like 15,000 feet, and then they pass you off to the first center on your heading. And the same process works in reverse, although it seems that one contacts, say, Dulles approach, about 10 minutes before you land and a lot more than 15,000 feet off the ground. So the only really new thing I learned from this Phoenix person was that the last frequency in the last center before you are handed off to the approach team to land are busy "blending the streams," in other words, positioning a whole bunch of planes coming in from a whole bunch of different frequencies coming from a whole bunch of different directions and getting them lined up to land. Which reminds me, if you ever get the chance, it is really fun to listen to the departure controllers lining up planes to take off, because you can look out your window and see the other planes the controllers are talking too.
I learned some new lingo about that, too -- e.g., if a controller is telling a United plane to wait for another United plane to pass and then follow it down the taxi way, the controller will say "Wait for company traffic and follow." The phrase "company" when used like that appears to mean "let that plane that is owned by the same company that you owns you to go first." So LAX departure told a little plane near us to "wait for the company heavy (that was us) and follow -- hold for takeoff to let heavy wake subside." Big planes create big wakes that can be dangerous for little planes. I think listening to the ground and departure controllers is the most interesting part of all.
The third unique thing on this flight was that a controller in Gallup got all confused and forgot who he'd told to do what. I thought for a moment he might be drunk. He actually called out to a couple of flights and asked the pilots to tell him what his last instructions to them were. He called out to another flight and asked if he'd already told them to descend to flight level 31, etc. It was embarassing. I wouldn't be surprised if the guy was fired. It's kind of hard to hide that kind of screw up, when probably hundreds of planes can hear you, not to mention droves of discerning United passengers glued to the flight deck.
I got back to Dulles, got in my car, turned on All Things Considered, and found that Susan Stamberg was still on NPR talking about the new Los Angeles production studio.
posted by Anonymous @ 9:21 PM
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