7.00am Tuesday 5/19 (1.0 hours) – 824LB
Today was a good day for landings. Much better than Sunday, which was pretty shite. John wants to use the next lesson to head out to refresh maneuvers. Getting close to the first solo flight now.
9.00am Sunday 5/17 (1.0 hours) – 824LB
More landing practice. It’s been a case of two steps forward, one step back. Today was the step back. For some reason the worse days tend to be on the Sundays, and the better days are the early hours of weekday mornings – which is kind of weird because I’m so not a morning person. Flaring was all over the place for some reason and it wasn’t clicking like it did for the last two lessons.
There were a few interesting moments in the pattern when the tower momentarily ‘lost the flick’ of what was going on and spooked a bunch of people out. Interestingly, I totally stumbled across an awesome video shot by the student pilot of another Cessna 172 SP that was flying the pattern with us that day (N501SC), and it turns out that I was flying in the slot in front of him for a few circuits.
On one of the circuits I even got a critique of my flying from him as we were both on a long final and he was watching me from behind. We were high (definitely two white VASI lights), and we were also flying the full length of final at 65 knots for separation. Despite my unstabilized approach, I thought the video was pretty cool:
“Ok, I don’t see where is our traffic.”
“He’s way too high.”
“Oh he’s… eh.”
“And he’s flying, I don’t think he’s landing.”
“I think so, I think they’re coming in from the high side.”
“He’s climbing! … He’s gonna go around. … I don’t think they’re attempting to land.”
“Number one, cleared for the option 31, 4 Lima Bravo.”
“Maybe they’re doing a short field landing where you purposely come in a bit steeper.” (Alas, we were not!)
I find that listening to the comms takes up a huge amount of my mental bandwidth and if I tune it in and there’s a lot of comms traffic (as there was during downwind), I get sloppy with the flying, and of course if I tune it out, I miss radio calls (which you can hear when tower calls me number 1 and John had to jump in to respond – we had already been cleared as number 3 so I wasn’t listening for a further clearance call). You can hear both instructors (John and Mark) also jumping in during the periods of confusion during crosswind and downwind.
7.00am Friday 5/15 (1.0 hours) – 824LB
Second day with a few decent landings to start off with, but I seem to get worse the more I do in a row. Fatigue?
John introduced me to power off landings today as well. They are basically short approaches simulating an engine failure when you’re roughly abeam the numbers on downwind. Some differences to a normal landing:
Slipping is a bit of a weird sensation that I’ll need to get used to.
6.30am Wednesday 5/13 (1.1 hours) – 824LB
Missed last Sunday’s lessons due to thunderstorms at DFW, through which I was transiting. After boarding the plane, we were notified of a ground stop due to thunderstorms in the vicinity. No personnel could work out in the open while there was lightning nearby, so basically we couldn’t load catering, luggage, or refuel. I was listening to DFW Ground and Tower on my iPhone’s LiveATC app for the hour or so we were delayed (which caused me to misconnect) and the usually busy frequencies were eerily quiet.
I also pushed Tuesday’s lesson to Wednesday because work was holding an early all hands to welcome in Zander as Exec Chairman.
Today, the landings finally clicked, like John said they would. First three landings of the day were good. Then the next few were not so good. But I know now what I need to look out for – not rounding out too soon, and not flaring too late when I sense the aircraft dropping, and then not flaring too quickly when I sense the aircraft dropping.
7.00am Thursday 5/7 (1.2 hours) – 824LB – Winds 4kts – Skattered clouds at 1500′
The club just got three new planes – two of them are C172SPs with G1000s, so that will make scheduling a plane easier. They also had to get a new cash register drawer to store the new keys. When you check out a plane on the computer, the drawer automatically pops open so you can fish out the key, but today it wouldn’t give it up so I was left twiddling my thumbs for 20 minutes until someone came along and helped.
We had to cancel Tuesday’s lesson because John had a flat car battery and couldn’t make it up on time. Despite my protestations, John decided to comp this lesson because of the last minute cancellation. He’s really a stand-up guy. (Also, I better not cancel last minute myself and expect a hall pass either.)
As for the lesson, it was take off and landing practice today. First time taking off on runway 13. Then the winds changed and we switched back to 31.
Still having trouble nailing the flare.
9.30am Sunday 5/3 (1.1 hours) – 824LB – Winds 4kts – Skattered clouds at 1500′ – Visibility 6 SM – 14°C
Landing pattern practice. The landing flare is still giving me a bit of problems. Gradually figuring out the right rudder and aileron inputs for the round-out but suffering from pilot-induced oscillations. I need to:
Well it looked like a good day to practice pattern work – skies clear and wind calm. But at 600 feet the wind went from calm to 22 knots, which was enough for John to call quits on the lesson only three landings in. Only 0.7 hours on the Hobbs tach. The landings were ok, but still having trouble with radio calls.
A few planes struggled to land this morning – several go arounds, and one plane managed to overshoot the tarmac and end up in the dirt. Hopefully Sunday I can get some real practice in.
9.00am Sunday 4/26 (1.1 hours) – 824LB – Winds 4kts – Sky Clear – Visibility 30 SM – 17°C
This was the first flight where we had a passenger. A colleague was visiting from Dublin office and he rode in the backseat today while we did our lesson. Interestingly, the extra weight made a noticeable difference in the way the plane handled.
Palo Alto airport finally reopened after completing a phase of runway maintenance, and the Sunday morning weather was great for flying. Unfortunately, everyone else had the same idea and the place was the busiest I’ve seen so far. The line up area was full and the radio chatter was almost non-stop. After I completed the run up, I switched over to tower and was about to request clearance to depart when I heard “824 Lima Bravo, Palo Alto Tower, hold short at runway 31”.
I was confused. I hadn’t even contacted the tower yet and he was clearing me up to the runway. I looked at John and gestured I had no idea what was going on. He looked a bit puzzled too. He took over the comms. “Ok, we didn’t call for take off yet, but we’re ready and will take it, 8 Lima Bravo.”
The tower realized he’d made a mistake and quickly corrected himself. “Correction. 2704 November, hold short at runway 31.” Then after it was read back, “824 Lima Bravo, you’re number 2.” And then only seconds later the departure queue was 5 deep.
We headed out to the coastal training area. This was the first lesson I’d had in almost two weeks, and it was immediately apparent I was rusty. John taught me the last two basic maneuvers I needed to know – power-on stalls (which are pretty straight forward) and emergency descents (which are also pretty straight forward). John had me practice a transition to slow flight (I drifted off my heading) and steep turns (which I really struggled with – the extra weight was throwing me off). We did a simulated engine failure as well, which was sloppy. So, lots of things I need to work on.
On the way back to the airport, the skies around the airport were a zoo. As I was focusing on flying the plane, I was vaguely aware of the stream of radio chatter in the background, but it all kind of washed over me. Apparently there were people missing radio calls and stepping on each other. Once we were on final, things were better. My landing was… passable.
Looks like we’ll be heading out to east bay to practice ground reference maneuvers in the not too distant future.
I gotta say, I find the HBO TV series Silicon Valley absolutely hilarious, but I wonder how many people outside of the Valley understand all the jokes?
The thing is, with a lot of the stuff on the show that seems exaggerated… that shit actually happens IRL. And, being a Valley lawyer, I found this exchange on the last episode priceless where the lawyer is listing out all the “boilerplate” things Pied Piper is being sued for:
Ron LaFlamme: “…breach of non-solicitation and the hiring of someone named Donald Dunn.”
Richard: “That’s Jared. We call him Jared.”
Ron: “Changing his name to get out of it. Clever, but irrelevant…”
And then in an example of how stuff seems exaggerated but it’s not:
“We’re going to have to lawyer up.”
“Waaaait. Aren’t you our lawyer?”
“I’m not a litigator. That’s what you need.”
“Another lawyer. Really?”
“Lawyers, Richie. You don’t wanna mess around here.”
In recounting this exchange, one reviewer observed how LaFlamme “immediately distances himself from the hard work of the lawsuit,” but the truth is, that’s exactly what a corporate lawyer in the Valley (and outside the Valley for that matter), would say.
And in season 1 there’s a scene where Jared (the biz dev guy) creates a scrum board to manage the team’s projects. A couple weeks later, I walk into a meeting room at work, and the biz dev guys had put up a scrum board on the wall. (I then printed out the picture below and stuck it on their board. They took it in good humor.)
It’s never great when you’re scheduled to fly and the METAR prints “OVC 010” and doesn’t change when you get to the airport despite the forecasts (that’s overcast skies at 1000 feet, which is no good when you’re a student pilot flying VFR). Fittingly, we did a ground lesson on weather instead.
I learned about Synopses, area forecasts, TAFs, AIRMETs, SIGMETs, pireps, MOS, and a litany of weather abbreviations.
I also learned about weather systems and the explanation for why San Francisco is so cold and foggy. The reasoning goes something like this: warm air rises and denser colder air tends to move in to take its place. Especially in summer, the inland Central Valley heats up a fair amount relative to the coastal waters (which are quite cold as they tend to flow down from the arctic). This draws in a mass of cold air from the ocean, but it typically is blocked by the coastal range of hills that extends up and down the west coast. The bay inlet that the Golden Gate Bridge spans is the only sea level break in the hill range for hundreds of miles in either direction, so the cold air and mist pours in through that opening and swamps the city in its trademark summer foggy coldness. When the temperature imbalance is too much, the mist can roll over the hills, but that’s relatively rare and explains why the peninsula can be so sunny when San Francisco is not.
6.30am Friday 4/17 (1.2 hours) – 501SC – Winds Calm – Sky Clear – Visibility 10 SM – 10°C
I don’t normally fly on Fridays, but John had a student that had a Thursday check ride so we had to push. Apparently the student had been trying to schedule a check ride since February but it kept getting cancelled due to weather. He finally got to take it and passed.
We started a half hour earlier than usual today because I needed to get to work to take care of a transaction that was signing.
The airport is pretty quiet at dawn, so much so that I was cleared to taxi to runway 31 “at my discretion”. There are two routes to the runway from the flying club – via the hangar side (left) and via the terminal side (right). I got to pick today as it seemed there wasn’t any ground traffic.
Today was landing practice. John let me do 8 of them – I think all but one or two were unassisted. I had a string of decent ones, then a couple of terrible ones, then finished with a couple of ok ones.
PAO is doing runway maintenance works over the next couple weeks and also refreshing the paintwork. They are halfway through the repainting because it looked like a lot of the markings had been wiped off, including the demarcation line on 31, which threw me off on the first couple of landings. They also had switched the VASI lights off so I only had my eyes to rely on to figure out if I was on glide path.
I know what a good landing feels like now but, on average, I’m still hunting around a bit at each stage — timing when to idle and glide in (I keep thinking I’m too low when I’m not), when to start the round out (I kind of get this) and, most of all, how quickly to flare. I have a tendency to balloon after yanking back too quickly after the round out (especially when I see the plane’s shadow swoop in). Then, after the plane settles, I don’t flare enough and bump down hard.
Also, on my final landing, for some reason I pushed the yoke forward after the back wheels had touched down, which is always a no-no when landing.
I’ve gotten the hang of pattern work mostly now. Need to work on stabilizing the cruise downwind when levelling off at the 800′ pattern altitude — I get a bit confused when I’m turning into the crosswind or downwind leg, I hit the pattern altitude, and then I need to respond to the tower if they clear me for the option at the same time. The sequence is: hit pattern altitude, use yoke to set level pitch attitude, wait until speed picks up, reduce power to 2200rpm and trim. Steer the plane while doing it and monitor comms.
There wasn’t any traffic in the pattern today, but John said if there was, we’d extend downwind by slowing down – reducing power to 1600rpm, applying full flaps at under 85 knots, adjusting pitch to hold altitude, and then bumping the power back up to ~1900rpm to maintain pattern altitude at 65 knots. We’d then maintain that speed through the rest of the pattern.
This weekend John wants to teach me the last two maneuvers — power on stalls and emergency descents, then we can head out to Central Valley to do some ground reference maneuvers.
1.00pm Sunday 4/12 (1.3 hours) – 2407N – Winds 3kts – Sky Clear – Visibility 30 SM – 25°C
After a false start earlier this week, Spring seems to be in full swing and the METAR for Palo Alto was showing near perfect conditions. A light 3 knot wind, 25 degrees, and a clear sky. I usually fly 501SC or 824LB, but one of those had been grounded for some maintenance issue and the other was booked, so I had 2407N today. I’ve gotten my preflighting down to about 15-20 minutes and the routine is slowly beginning to stick in my mind.
John turned up at 1.30pm. I did a few of the radio calls, but I’m still having trouble hearing ATC and remembering what they say when they shoot off a whole list of information in about 3 seconds. The climb out was slightly turbulent – John mentioned it was due to a temperature inversion. A 3 knot wind near ground level colliding with a 14 knot wind at a higher altitude made for a choppy transition. Once we were above 2500 feet, though, the ride smoothed out.
Out by the coastal area, John asked me to do a transition to slow flight, which I hadn’t been expecting for this lesson, but after a few seconds of hesitation, the procedure came back to me. I was rushing the pitch up a bit too much at the start instead of waiting for airspeed to start falling past Vg, thereby gaining too much altitude. It probably was the warmer weather, but the stall speed of 47 knots I was used to was not the stall speed today, so I was holding the speed at 47 quite steadily feeling a little proud of myself when John said, “I don’t hear the stall horn.” Which was reinforcement that stall is a function of angle of attack – not airspeed, and today the first indication of stall angle was at a slower airspeed.
Next up, John made me do a few steep turns. I was having trouble getting the right “picture” out of the windscreen and lost 200 feet on my first attempt. I had a tendency to let the nose dip and would have to wrench back on the yoke, creating a sinking roller coaster feeling. I had a couple more attempts which were better, but still subpar. I also needed better speed control entering into the turn – 95 knots and stabilized flight.
Next we practiced the approach to landing stall. It was ok.
As we were climbing back up to 4500 feet, John yanked out the throttle. Engine failure. I started to run through the checklist calmly. A little too calmly. I needed to have the initial response done in a 10 second burst – turn away from bad terrain while pitching for glide speed. 7-up flow. Then identify a good landing spot. I picked a nearby field while completely ignoring Half Moon Bay airport which was borderline in range. It might have been more comfortably in range had I pitched for glide speed quicker.
“Have you landed at Half Moon Bay yet?” John asked. I said no, and he dialed it into the GPS. Then he changed his mind since the winds weren’t to his liking. He yanked out the throttle again.
I made another attempt at a steep turn and the last one turned out pretty decently.
It was then time to head home, and by that time we had moved North up the coast more than we usually did. I’m normally quite decent with spatial awareness around the Bay Area – my favorite seat on commercial flights is by the window and I have flown over the Bay Area countless times. However, today I managed to mistake the San Mateo bridge for the Dumbarton bridge. John made me feel better when he recounted that on one of his first solos he mistook SFO for SQL, and only realized it when a 747 flew overhead! (Though for some reason, I was having trouble picking out traffic today as well.)
Weekends are busy around PAO so we worked into the traffic pattern. I sorted out flying the landing pattern pretty well when there’s no one ahead of me, but when I’m second, third or fourth for landing and need to extend downwind, I’m still at a bit of a loss about how to set flaps and power. It’s much easier on the early morning weekday flights when the airspace is pretty quiet.
I did two unassisted landings which came down a little hard (need to flare up a bit more at the end when I see the ground rushing up), but at least now I have 4 of them under my belt.
Back on the ground, we spent a few minutes talking about inoperative equipment and minimunm equipment lists. He asked me to walk him through the regs and I had barely gotten a couple sentences out when he said, “Even the lawyer gets it wrong!” (Which I maintain I didn’t really… he just didn’t let me finish.)
It was still a nice day and I had a little time to burn, so after seeing a Quora post about the nearby Duck Pond being a good place to watch planes coming into land, I drove over, dialed in PAO Tower on my iPhone and watched planes take off and landing. I’m starting to get the hang of the range of radio calls that PAO Tower makes, but this is probably going to be the biggest struggle for me. I’m the sort of person who finds it difficult to talk and drive at the same time when too many things are happening on the road… and this is after having 15 years of driving experience.
I started flying lessons a few weeks ago and am going to blog about it when time permits since I find that recounting what happened helps to reinforce the learning.
I’m flying out of Palo Alto airport (PAO) and training on Cessna 172SPs with G1000s. Apparently PAO is one of the busiest single runway general aviation airports in America and the skies around it are also pretty crowded. SFO of course is a huge presence, but there’s also San Carlos (SQL – surely an IATA code that’s a nod to its tech surroundings), Moffett Field, SJC, Half Moon Bay and Reid-Hillview. On the other side of the bay, there’s Oakland, Hayward and a bunch more airfields.
I normally fly a couple early mornings before work and on the weekend. The weather is generally great on the peninsula but the issue is that it can get quite windy and sometimes there’s low cloud cover in the morning.
This is something that I’ve wanted to do for a long time – it’s overwhelming at first, but a lot of fun!
Wow, has it been another year already? This blog is now celebrating its 17th birthday! (Yes, I am aware of the lack of recent content on it…)
It’s the holiday season in the Bay Area again, which means that things are quiet around here. Quieter than Thanksgiving, because the people that haven’t returned home for Christmas are out vacationing elsewhere. A couple of friends kindly invited me to dinner on Christmas Eve, thereby saving me from an evening of solitude, but otherwise everyone else has gone (including my other half, who has fled nine time zones away). I took a walk around the Dish — a six kilometer running track on the Stanford campus that passes by a radio telescope — and it was the most deserted I’ve ever seen it. Interestingly, there were an unusually large number of solo walkers, like me, out to clear their heads in the crisp winter air. It’s been the perfect time to reflect on the year that’s been, and to start planning for the year ahead.
One of the things I realized is that I haven’t written on this blog for a long time. All year, in fact. There hasn’t been a good reason for this, other than what I can only chalk up to a lack of motivation. Motivation strikes at the most random times, though.
America might be the only country in the world which does not require private companies to give employees annual leave (or paid time off, as they call it here). This includes national holidays — it’s perfectly legal for a company to give employees no leave and require them to work on Christmas Day. Companies don’t do this, of course, but the result is a patchwork of company policies. Some give 10 days, some give 25. Some companies give more leave to employees who have been with them longer. Apparently Facebook gives 21 days, which is a strange number. It was explained to me that when the company was being formed, the advice was that “3 weeks” is the industry standard for leave, which the people in charge at the time interpreted as 21 days, rather than 15 business days. The legality of giving no leave at all has led to the globally unique policy of some companies choosing to give “unlimited” leave — something that Netflix pioneered. This policy lets employees take as much leave as they want (and still get paid for that time off). This is subject to the caveat that the employee still has to be able to perform their job adequately. The notion is, at first blush, highly attractive to employees as it theoretically permits them a lot of flexibility to take leave whenever it makes sense. If there’s a slow period at the end of the year, you can take more time off instead of twiddling your thumbs because you ran out of leave earlier in the year.
However, it’s not all altruistic. For one, companies with unlimited leave do not have to track or accrue leave. If you had an entitlement to 20 days of leave, and only took 15 days, then typically those 5 days would rollover to the following year, or you would be paid out for those days. Of course, there’s no rollover concept when an unlimited leave policy is in play, so not only is it one less thing for the HR department to track, but the company doesn’t have an accrued liability sitting on books. More curious, however, is the innate cultural aversion that more than a few Americans seem to have to taking leave. It’s something that helps an unlimited policy to work… in the company’s favor.
On one end of the spectrum, you have European-style leave where 30 days is the norm and everyone is pens down for the whole month of August. America is on the other end of the spectrum. From my anecdotal experience, it’s common for people not to take their allotted leave, and when people do go away, it’s usually for no more than a week. People occasionally take two weeks off. Three weeks is almost unheard of. I have always thought that Australia strikes a happy and reasonable balance: 20 days, with a standard business shutdown during the Christmas-New Year period that allows people to take 3 full weeks off. Although it’s not always possible, that is the balance that I try to maintain. December is the financial year end in America so while things sometimes get quieter, more often than not there’s actually a flurry of activity as people try to close deals by December 31. There generally aren’t company-wide shutdowns between Christmas and New Year, and people do actually do work in between (myself included, this year).
The other thing is that the line between work and vacation is completely blurred these days. While I think it’s important to unplug from time to time (and there’s no better way to do that than going to a place without net access), it’s also quite stressful returning from a week or two away to an inbox with over a thousand emails waiting and trying to play catchup as the emails continue to flow in. (Perhaps even nominally more stressful than not taking the leave in the first place!) As a result, I normally use spare hours — time in transit or a quiet moment at night — to read through emails and respond to the easy ones. Happily, as is the norm in Silicon Valley, most of my internal clients prefer to communicate via email instead of the phone, so things are generally capable of being handled remotely even with a volatile travel schedule. I just came back from a trip to Brazil where I spent a few hours working out of the offices of one of our law firms — it was raining in São Paulo, I had been on the go for too many days in the row, and I didn’t feel like sightseeing that day. I cleared out a good number of emails while a never-ending stream of waitstaff plied me with baskets of warm pão de queijo. When my host came to pick me up, I actually felt quite good. I realize that I took a break from my vacation to do some work and felt good about it and maybe that’s a bit perverse, but hey. Whatever works, right?
Anyway, on to the main reason for this post. If you know me, you know I like traveling and I like flying. It doesn’t cost a lot, due to the great American pre-occupation with trying to get people to sign up to new credit cards. The biggest constraint is time, and so I’ve adapted to taking short, but intense trips throughout the year. I like my job, but it is certainly not a 40 hour a week job (actually, I can’t remember ever working a 40-hour 5-day week). The world is a huge place, and if I only confined myself to taking one overseas trip a year, I’m not seeing very much of it. I guess the dining analogy is that I prefer the 12 bite-sized course tasting menu over the two pound tomahawk steak. I took stock of where I’ve been this year on a map:
That’s 150,000 miles of flying, 54 segments, 30 airports, and 13 countries (including 4 new ones). I used to write a post whenever I finished a major trip, but for some reason I stopped doing that. So, in lieu of that, and while I still have my random burst of motivation, here is a rundown of a couple of the fancy parts of the trips I’ve been on this year that have been funded primarily by credit card sign up bonuses and the exploitation of promotions.
Returning Home from Home, the Long Way (Jan)
Sydney to San Francisco, via Dubai and London
Flights in late December and early January between San Francisco and Sydney are ridiculously expensive. United has a monopoly over the only non-stop route between the two cities, and you can forget about trying to redeem a flight on miles. This leads me to finding rather… roundabout ways to get from point A to point B. The routing in January was Sydney – Dubai – London – Los Angeles – San Francisco. I normally would head back via Asia, which is relatively shorter, but when I found award availability in the first class cabin of Qantas’ flagship route, QF1, I jumped on it. QF1 is also known as the kangaroo route because it connects Mother England with its former colony with one hop in Dubai. QF1 is flown by an A380. Quick notes:
Qantas A380 – First Class, Seat 2A – QF1 (SYD-DXB-LHR)
To get back from London, I booked a flight on one of American Airlines’ new 777-300s. The business class cabins in the new 777s is a world apart from the old cabins.
Around the World in a Weekend (Apr)
Tokyo via Frankfurt
Airline miles are a terrible long-term investment. They don’t make interest, and they get eaten away by inflation when airlines raise redemption rates. Hence the motto, “earn and burn”. Earning is important, but using those points is arguably even more important.
When United announced it would be nearly doubling the price of some of its awards early this year, it was time to burn some miles. The routing rules for United awards are somewhat quirky, and a shorter route is not necessarily cheaper. It has for a long time been possible to fly to Asia via Europe for the same number of miles as a direct flight to Asia. Why would you want to do this? For me, I wanted to try Lufthansa’s first class experience – it’s probably the best out of all the European carriers. Lufthansa operates three different first class cabin configurations. A small number of 747-400s and Airbuses have “old first class”. The newer 747-8s have “new first class”, as do the A380s. The A380s are slightly different in that they have separate urinals in the lavatories. A number of 747-400s have a completely different configuration – each seat comes with a separate bed. I found a route, SEA-FRA-NRT, that would allow me to experience both the new first class, and the variant with the bed. As a bonus, since I would be transiting through FRA, I would have the chance to go through the famous Lufthansa First Class Terminal.
Lufthansa A330-300 – First Class, Seat 2K – LH491 (SEA-FRA)
FRA – Lufthansa First Class Terminal (Lounge)
The Lufthansa First Class Terminal is called a terminal rather than a lounge because it’s a completely separate building with its own check-in facility and boarding “gate.” Given this fact, even though I was only transiting through Frankfurt, upon landing I needed to clear immigration, exit the main terminal, and walk over to the FCT.
At the reception area, my passport was taken from me and I was ushered through security and into the main lounge. “We’ll get you checked in. Just relax inside and I’ll come and find you with your boarding pass.”
The Lufthansa FCT is outrageous. It has a bar with a lot of drinks. A lot. The drinks menu has 4 pages of different types of whiskey alone. It has a water bar with a lot of bottled water. A lot. About 30-40 different types. It has a candy bar with dozens of different types in meter-high jars. It has a cigar room, with a humidor full of different cigars. The cigar menu includes descriptions such as, “Not to be recommended for [the] newcomer,” and “A real good smoke.” The cigar room has its own bar. It has shower rooms with bathtubs, featuring the famous Lufthansa rubber ducky that you can take home with you. It has a buffet area with buzzsaws for slicing ham. It has à la carte dining. It has private nap rooms with dimming lights, pillows and blankets. It has a seating area that’s well supplied with snacks and servers who continually ensure you always have a drink in hand. All these things kept me occupied for hours.
When it was time to leave, I was escorted downstairs where an immigration official stamped my passport (it all felt very informal) and then deposited in a car for transfer directly to the aircraft. I rode in a Mercedes, but Porsches form part of the fleet too. I was driven to the foot of the waiting 747. Boarding was by jetbridge, so we needed to take an elevator up from the tarmac to the bridge. I took my driver up on her offer to snap some photos of me in front of the plane. She escorted me to the plane door and handed me off to the cabin crew.
Lufthansa B747-400 – First Class, Seats 82H & 84H – LH740 (FRA-KIX-NRT)
Simona & Uli’s Wedding (Jun)
Lake Como and Sagno
In late 2013, AA was running a promotion that allowed members without status to qualify for top tier status by flying 30k miles in 90 days. I think it was intended to be a targeted offer, but it accidentally was made available to everyone. After a little bit of gentle persuasion, I managed to convince my better half to go for it and she ended up qualifying. We used the systemwide upgrades that AA gives its Executive Platinum members to book a business class flight to Milan, where we then rented a car to drive up to Lake Como.
This wedding was unique in that it was being held in two countries. Guests were bussed across the border to Switzerland for the ceremony and a post-ceremony lunch. The reception was then held in the town of Lenno on the shores of Lake Como. Beautiful wedding, but the first couple days in Italy were a bit of a blur for me (the jet lag really kicked my ass).
Six Weeks in Ireland (Jul – Aug)
Ireland, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Austria
Work opened up a new office in Dublin this year, so I went to Ireland for six weeks on a business trip to help set up some legal stuff for it. I actually didn’t know it at the time I made the booking, but AA was running a summer promotion on paid business class fares to Europe (25k bonus miles), so I ended up accruing over 50k miles from that one roundtrip ticket.
Dublin was a great experience (and there are so many U.S. tech companies there!). It was incredibly tiring, but rewarding. Long hours at work, but I had weekends to myself and took every opportunity to travel. About 4pm on one Friday, I found myself booking a 6pm train up to Belfast, two award nights at the Radisson Blu Belfast (holders of the Club Carlson credit card get one free night which each award booking), and a “Game of Thrones” bus tour that visited various locations where the TV series was shot along the Antrim Coast. My impromptu trip also unintentionally coincided with the 12 July parades, where the unionists march around all the towns in the face of the nationalists — an event which has been volatile in the past (something which I only learned after the fact).
Another weekend, I flew to Scotland and stayed with a friend who showed me around Glasgow and Edinburgh.
My parents also took the opportunity to fly in from Sydney to visit. They basically dumped their bags off at my apartment and went traveling around Europe. We spent a couple weekends traveling together — a car trip through various parts of the rest of Ireland (Galway, Cliffs of Moher, Cork, various castles, etc.), a random trip to Longyearbyen (see below), and a relaxing visit to Austria, where we had the opportunity to stay at the newly opened Park Hyatt Vienna.
Park Hyatt Vienna – Park Suite
Construction for the Park Hyatt Vienna had only been completed two months before we arrived, and it was situated in a building that used to be a bank. It was a gorgeous building, and one of its unique features was that they had built the pool underground in what used to be the old bank vault. The floor of the pool had been with lined with gilded tiles, which alluded to the gold bars that might have been stored there in times past. I had gained top tier Hyatt status as a result of a status match challenge earlier in the year. (Meeting the challenge required me to do my first mattress run, which involved making a trip up to Sacramento one Friday night…) One of the benefits of that status was a free upgrade to a suite and free breakfasts. The suite was very well built, and was a great place to chill out in between the sightseeing. Breakfasts were in what used to be the cashier’s hall – a beautiful space with a soaring ceiling and stately decorations.
The Park Hyatt is very centrally located and only about a hundred meters from the nearest U-Bahn station.
Three Weekends in Hong Kong (Sep, Oct, Nov)
Hong Kong and Macau
AA opened a new DFW-HKG route serviced by their new 777-300s and were selling flights originating from SFO very cheaply at the start of the year (sub-$700). Given that SFO-DFW is pretty much the opposite direction to HKG, you have a route that makes for good mileage run material. When you combined this with the ability to use systemwide upgrades, you suddenly had a whole bunch of mileage runners trying to get in on the deal. On one of my flights, the upgrade list was 50 people deep! Susanne followed me for the first run, and we actually made into a proper holiday, staying in Hong Kong for three nights — one at the Conrad Hong Kong, and two at a friends’ place. (I admit that I may be starting to lose perspective as to what constitutes a “proper holiday.”)
We took a daytrip to Macau. I hadn’t been to Macau for almost 10 years, and I was astounded at how much it had grown as a gaming hub. The statistics show that it does much more gambling turnover than Vegas, and you just need to talk through the Venetian Macau to understand why. The Venetian is at least 4x the size of its Vegas counterpart, and the gaming floor was still packed — despite it being the middle of the afternoon and the table limits being eye-wateringly high.
Back in Hong Kong, we missed the Occupy Central protests by about 5 days (the Conrad is in Admiralty, one of the main protest sites), but on my second run there, my friend took me to the Central and Mong Kok sites. We also had the opportunity to have yum cha at Tim Ho Wan — famous for being perhaps the most affordable single Michelin starred restaurant in the world (three of us had a very full meal for only US$15 per person).
And, of course, traveling through HKG also means the opportunity to use Cathay Pacific’s The Wing lounge.
HKG – Cathay Pacific “The Wing” Lounge
Situated to the immediate left when you clear immigration, the first thing you see when you enter The Wing is a bar with several bottles of champagne on ice, and a row of glasses. There is a full bar at the back of the lounge, or you can take a seat wait for a server to come around for your drinks order. The dining area offers pretty good à la carte dining and a pretty decent buffet spread. However, for me the standout feature of The Wing is the cabanas – private rooms that offer a daybed, a shower with three nozzles (an overhead rain shower, a detachable shower head, and a waterfall shower), a large bathtub, and a workspace. All tastefully and cleanly designed. Easily the nicest “shower facility” out of all the airport lounges in the world.
I also took trips to Longyearbyen, Brazil and Peru but I have run out of time for writing.
The last time I did this was for 2012, which means I skipped last year, but here’s the list for the past year.
Sydney, Australia
Frankfurt, Germany†
Tokyo, Japan
Milan, Italy†
Lake Como, Italy*
Sagno, Switzerland†
Dublin, Ireland*
Belfast, Northern Ireland
Antrim Coast, Northern Ireland†
Glasgow, Scotland
Edinburgh, Scotland†
Galway, Ireland
Cork, Ireland*
Longyearbyen, Norway
Vienna, Austria
Salzburg, Austria†
Hong Kong, China*
Macau, China†
Chicago, IL
Praia do Forte, Brazil
Arembepe, Brazil†
Salvador, Brazil†
Lima, Peru
Paracas, Peru†
Nazca, Peru†
São Paulo, Brazil
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Phoenix, AZ (well, in a couple days’ time)
All places had overnight visits, unless marked with †.
* Multiple entries, non-consecutive days.
† Daytrip only.
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stuloh I guess people waiting for the Apple Store on Twitter should be grateful Twitter is still online.
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