Your in-flight entertainment

It is Sunday afternoon at about 2:39 central time and according to the nifty in-flight map above me, I am currently somewhere over Iowa. This is my third and final flight of the day, hopefully sometime this evening I will arrive at my hotel in Montreal. As much of a hassle they day has been I have enjoyed it quite a bit. I had to wake up @ 4:30 this morning in order to catch my flight from Durango to Denver, a very uneventful flight as always. I have spent many hours just hangin’ out in DIA and I still think that it is a cool airport. Of course I have always been in the same terminal and have never had to deal with checked baggage, but it has still always been an easy airport for me to get around.

The Denver to Chicago leg of the trip is the one I have been anticipating the most. I get to fly on a Boeing 777, the newest aircraft in the Boeing fleet. The reason I am excited is because of my very geeky obsession with airplanes as a kid. I watched and read just about everything involving the development of that aircraft, its fly-by-wire control systems, it powerful GE engines (each one has more thrust that the Apollo 11 liftoff rocket), and in-seat entertainment systems. I have flown and been in many airports since then but I could never definitively say that I had seen one, and now I get to fly in one! It was everything I thought it could be! It absolutely amazes me the ingenuity if the human race. We can created this massive aluminum tube, stuff hundreds of people and fly them across the country at 600 mph without even breaking a sweat. It seemed like this massive airplane was far easier to fly that the little 25 person turboprop that we have to fly out of Durango. Cool stuff.

As we are leaving Denver the pilot announces that we can expect some mild overcast in Chicago. I like that because I have never seen the city and flying over it should provide some great views. NOPE!! Apparently overcast in Chicago means you cant see 50 feet. I could not even see the end of the wing! And we had to wait in a holding pattern for 30 min, good thing we have another flight to catch! It wasn’t all bad the seats had audio plug to listen to he movies or TV shows on in-seat entertainment screens. I watched the map and listened to the radio communications between all the aircraft and the tower in Chicago. I know its geeky but I enjoyed it we were circling at 9000 Ft because there were a bunch of aircraft flying between 10-16000 reporting slight-moderate icing. OK, well that’s entertaining to me anyway.

My entire experience in Chicago consists of exactly 10 minutes of running between terminals trying to catch the next flight. I have always heard stories of running through the terminals trying to catch your next flight but I never really thought that I happened much. O'Hare is HUGE we had to run forever, I thought we had plenty of time but I had no idea how far we had to go to get to the other side of the airport. Luckly for you I had time to snap a picture and email it to myself without even breaking stride! We barely made it, only to close the door, back out and sit there for 20 min, then get in line for takeoff and wait another 30 min with visibility of about ¼ Mile there was no view to be had. Hopefully Chicago gets another chance to redeem itself in the near future.

This is Steve and Dianne on our scramble to make our connection in O'Hare:


That’s it for now, I can see the ground so I am going to stare out the window for a bit.
I hope you’ve enjoyed the in-flight entertainment as much as I have.

P.S. The pilot just came on and said we are currently @ 31000 Ft flying over the center of the universe, maybe thats only funny to me but I thought it was worth opening the laptop again to write it down.