Aviation geekery…

So I’m an aviation geek…

• I get my Aviation pr0n here: airliners.net (thanks Scott)
• I can see how far and where flights will go: gc.kls2.com (your flight path plotted (on the sphere we call earth))
• Discuss goings-on on a multitude of topics at flyertalk.com (thanks Mohit)
• I usually listen to United’s Channel 9 to hear all the geeky stuff that goes on while you’re sitting in 7D wondering why you’re sitting 30 yards from the gate for 25 minutes.

While visiting Scott last weekend I got to see tons of new geeky aviation websites.

My favorite was: flightaware.com

Flight Aware takes actual flight data from your flight and maps it. So, on the SFO-IAD segment that I took to get to Atlanta the flight path in theory would look something like this. In reality it was this:

So in reality the weather is like an obstacle course for pilots. If you ever listen to Channel 9 on United flights you’ll know that pilots are always shuffling around (altitude and heading) to avoid bad weather. As you can see we did a fair bit of hopping around to avoid the bad storms that were going on last week in the mid-west.

UPDATE from Frankfurt: The pilots couldn’t do it without their behind-the-scenes dispatch crew that are their eyes and ears in the sky! And as far as ‘geekery’ – it’s all good in my book!