The Legacy

Argh! I was originally supposed to have written and posted something here late February (yes, months ago)… but I got caught up in a product release at my day job, then came down with a persistent bronchitis / sore throat / sinus infection / cold thing that went on forever, and now have to prepare for a small conference in Vegas on top of the product release and all the rest (including my six week photo show at the local coffee place).

So I'll keep it brief: yes, I've flown, but just barely. The most memorable flying bits of the past few months were a night VFR flight with John to get my BFR out of the way and to get club-legal and club-current again where we barely managed to avoid being run over by a series of planes (including a very expensive-looking and rather large Legacy Jet) because it seemed Oakland's North Field ground controller simply wasn't listening to what we were telling her (and seemed to have lost the plot completely at one stage), and where we witnessed yet another screamingly-loud and anti-social bizjet departure off runway 27R (with an almost-vertical departure until it throttled right back at a few hundred feet and disappeared into the night towards Alameda). At least it wasn't the Justice Department MD80 bearing down on me this time, even though I could actually (and quite eerily) hear it on-air in the background approaching across the other end of 27R from where we were as Ground kept unerringly routing planes on the ground (and in the air!) towards us as we were sitting there on taxiways charlie and juliet trying to get to and depart from runway 33. We had to take our own evasive action (and flash our lights repeatedly) a couple of times in the ten minutes or so it took to taxi out to the runway and actually depart for San Pablo Bay. All this in an admittedly-busy but tightly-controlled airport ground environment that until a year or two ago always seemed competently and thoughtfully controlled. Oh well.

Argh. It'd be nice to fly again sometime, but work (and the need to keep a job…) keeps getting in the way. I hope to do some more G1000 sim work in the near future, but We Shall See — low-level Java socket and channel programming sounds more likely for the next month or so….