Runways!

Howwdy!

Today I think I'll write a little bit about runways. Runways... are neat. I find that their usefulness is directly proportional to my number of successful takeoffs and successful landings. Barring emergencies, runways are the first and last thing you see in an airplane as you go about the business of repelling the Earth. Have you ever looked out the window of a plane as you pulled onto a runway and seen strange markings or lighting?

...okay, so, maybe you haven't. If you haven't, then right now is your chance to check one out! Actually, let's look at the three (or, more accurately, six) runways I'm using here in C-Stat. <HERE> is a link to a .PDF file of an airport diagram for College Station's Easterwood Field. It may not actually be that interesting... it is, after all, just a map. But I love this stuff so I'll try to translate it and make it neat. So you see the big bold lines? Those are the runways. At the ends of those lines are the runway names. You can see that each runway has two names which are either one or two digits long. We have 34, 16, 10, 28, 4 and 22. Each one of the three "runways" is actually two usable runways. So to specify which way you're facing, you just use the corresponding number. For example- look towards the top of the .PDF for a box that says 'FIELD ELEV 321". The arrow points down to the start of runway 16, and if you were on 16, you would be facing almost directly south, or going from top to bottom on this .PDF. Simple! So now you can tell which runways are which here.

Just for comparison, <HERE> is the same type of diagram for Dallas/Forth Worth International... As you can see... things are more complicated there.

As for real-life pictures, <HERE> is my trusty Easterwood Field and <HERE> is DFW as viewed from Google maps. Craziness.

Oh, by the way, wanna know how to name a runway? Why aren't they named things like, "Archibald," or "Paper Cow?" Well, there is a reason. They do it by standing on a runway with a compass. They take all sorts of measurements to determing which way the runway is lined up magnetically. So maybe it points at exactly 267 degrees. Then they round that to the nearest tenth degree. So that makes 260 in this quick example. Then they drop it to two digits! Runway 26! If the runway pointed at, say, 47 degrees, that rounds to 50, which would just be called Runway 5. And if you realllllly remember your highschool geometry, you might be asking me what happens if a runway points close to north. This means we could call it 0 degrees OR 360 degrees. You would be really smart and really interested in this stuff, and to answer your thoughtful question, I'd tell you that they just call it Runway 36. There's no Runway 0, at least none that I know of...

Well, enough on runways. Care to know how I named this blog? Maybe not, but here ya go. When I was a kid, one of the first sentences (maybe even my first actual sentence) was "That which goes up, must come down." My dad has been a pilot his whole life and taught me to say that phrase with absolutely perfect articulation. I'll have to ask my parents how old I was when this started... I know my dad taught it to my niece when she was just barely starting to speak. I guess there are probably a lot of philosophically significant ideas you could draw from that statement... I dunno. Takeoff is optional; landing is inescapable. I might be willing to grant to you philosophical minds that landings are optional given their inherent dependency (definitionally, relationally and maybe logically) on takeoffs... whatever. There will always be a ratio of exactly 1:1 between takeoffs and landings.

Anyway, that's just a back-story as to how I named the blog. Fun quote time and then I'm done!

"If you push the stick forward, the houses get bigger. If you pull the stick back, they get smaller. That is, unless you keep pulling the stick all the way back, then they get bigger again."

This... is true. Later...