Problems in the air with a new Airbus 320

My flight home last night from DC was on one of Frontier's brand new Airbus 320s. While they didn't have any onboard TV this week, that was not the problem I'm talking about! We had to make an emergency landing in St. Louis because of cabin pressurization problems.

We were wondering if the oxygen masks were going to deploy, or if our eardrums were going to burst! Apparently, the cabin pressure kept climbing after the pressurization controller failed. The captain said it got to 9000 feet of pressure, and the the masks wouldn't have deployed until it reached 14,000 feet. I don't know what the standard pressure is for a normal flight.

The pilot was very professional and got us information quickly and had the plane on the ground in 15 minutes. I can only imagine the coordination that had to happen to get us down that fast! After a 30 minute repair and an hour of paperwork, we safely finished the flight back to Denver.

I still don't really like takeoffs in this new plane. It feels like the plane is a little soft or shifty in the tail.

VISAGE, Air Traffic Control and Google Earth!

Flatirons is doing some VERY cool work with the FAA. One result of this work is a tool called VISAGE, a geospatial visualization and analysis tool that processes data into files that are loaded into Google Earth. These faces of VISAGE provide aeronautical viewing for the FAA legacy En Route system adaptation (ACES) and the modernization effort (ERAM).

You can check out the solution brief here:
http://www.flatironssolutions.com/downloads/VISAGE_Datasheet.pdf

If you are interested in seeing a demo, check out one of the following links:
http://www.flatironssolutions.com/VISAGE/Demos/VISAGE_ACES_Demo_lores.rm
http://www.flatironssolutions.com/VISAGE/Demos/VISAGE_ERAM_Demo_lores.rm

David Megginson's cool new Airport website

David blogged about an issue with Google maps and their use of a mercator projection (a problem if you want to use Google maps in aviation). His post, which was very interesting, also pointed me to a new website he has created: http://www.ourairports.com/.

This is a very cool website for many reasons:

• You can plot where you have been in the world (via aircraft) and get a KML file of it quickly and easily
• You can get search on any airport and get aviation info, accident history, photos and many other facts!
• You can read comments from other members who have visited these airports

Thanks for creating such a useful service/site, David! I plan to use it for all of my trip planning and tracking! Also, if you are interested, you can see all the airports I've been to here:
http://www.ourairports.com/members/shudson310/

Free Fallin'

To celebrate my friend, Lee Martin's, 30th birthday we went indoor skydiving on Saturday. We had both always wanted to go skydiving, but never had the opportunity. Thankfully, Lee's wife found SkyVenture (http://www.skyventurecolorado.com/)!

The indoor skydive was a very non-stress and fun environment. Our "freefall" lasted only 2 minutes per dive, but it was so much fun! An instructor was close by to give direction and correct any balance issues. He also did some tandem stunts to keep it lively.

With the indoor skydiving, you don't have to worry about chute failure or bugs in your teeth, either! We even got a DVD and flight certificate to commemorate the event. I highly recommend it.