Some other stuff I’ve seen on the net recently

I haven’t had the time or motivation to write much here lately, but did want to post some links to some of the stuff that I’ve been reading.  This post will be dedicated to the aviation stuff, I may do a similar post for religion and/or politics soon.  I really enjoyed Don Brown’s “Say Again?” column that he did for a number of years for AvWeb (thanx to Don for providing the link to the archives).  Don is a retired air traffic controller out of the Atlanta ARTCC (Atlanta Center).  As a new pilot and then a new instrument student and finally as an instrument-rated pilot, I appreciated Don’s perspective from the other end of the radio.  Don retired from the FAA in 2006 (I believe), but I recently discovered that he continues to write about the aviation industry in his Get the Flick blog.  Some of what he writes is political, too.  He doesn’t have anything good to say about they idea of privatizing ATC (and I have to say I mostly agree with him on that).  Anyway, here are a couple of his recent (or even not-so-recent) posts that you might be interested in.

• Controllers have cure for the energy crisis 
• This is the clearest explanation of the problems with airline delays, to use Don’s line “it’s the runways, stupid”
• More on the same problem 
• This one is about the FAA’s NextGen.  The problems can’t all be solved by new technology, it still requires people and we’ve been losing them on the ATC end of the radio at an alarming rate the last few years due to the FAA’s refusal to bargain in good faith with the controllers.
• And this one, points out that now is the time to fix the FAA before it is too late.

Another blog I’ve  been reading lately is JetWhine.  I loved the picture of the flight crew in this post, he’s right it wasn’t that long ago that flying (not to say anything of military aviation) was seen as a (primarily) male endeavor.  There was also this note about the new Jeppesen VFR+GPS charts.  I can’t wait for these to make it to my part of the country.