Friday, October 28, 2011

Field Trip!

The other day one of my classes met up at the Anchorage Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) to take a tour of the facility.  (An ARTCC controls high altitude traffic during the cruise portion of their flights, and hands the planes off to other facilities as they approach their destination cities.) It was a really cool place and they showed us and told us about a lot of newly implemented innovations such as GPS navigation, radio telemetry, and new radar systems that help keep the air traffic flowing smoothly.  Interestingly, they still use a lot of old-fashioned equipment right alongside the cutting edge stuff - the hardware at their controller workstations is cold war vintage.  Even though it dates back to the '70s and '80s, though, they said that the total downtime of the system in 2011 so far is 9 seconds.  Not too shabby.  I can't wait to get me a Hawaiian shirt and start talking to airplanes!

We weren't allowed to bring phones or cameras since it's a high-security federal facility (we had to go through airport-esque security and everything), but these pictures are from the internet, so we can just pretend.


There are 22 ARTCCs in the USA



Which one do you think is the biggest?


A typical controller workstation with Radar screen, flight strip bay, radio controls, and that stylin' trackball mouse


Controllers work individual sectors of airspace (in the background) while others keep an eye on the "big picture" (foreground)


Anchorage ARTCC from the outside


Saturday, October 15, 2011

It hurts to move. It hurts to sit still.

I just played ultimate frisbee and football for four straight hours.  It was 45 degrees and raining.  Stopping and turning were all but impossible, which means there were a lot of collisions with other players and the ground.  End result: covered in mud, stepped in moose droppings, whole body feels like it got run over by a train.  I can't wait 'til next Saturday!

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Skyping

So Mom just got an ipad for her birthday and I got to Skype with the family after some clandestine text-messaging with Cody to get it all set up.  I was reminded of a time on my mission, right after Christmas, when I was talking to a sister missionary about the experience of Skypeing with her family.  She said it was fun but it might not have been a good idea because "You would think I'd be more mature than this since we haven't talked in six months, but most of the time we were just laughing at eachothers' funny faces on the computer."

Here are some of the fun screenshots from our conversation: (not all of them, of course - I had almost 40 pictures by the time we hung up)













Happy Birthday, Mom!