Fly Me Friendly

As some of you may know, I’ve been pretty busy over the past couple of weeks working on a new hush-hush project. Well, the wraps finally came off the other night at a soft-launch so now I can tell you all about it.

For those of you who’ve just joined the blog, I get to spend a bit of time flying a 737-800 simulator and writing stories about it. The simulator is run by Flight Experience Melbourne and is well worth the visit if you’ve never been. Simply put, it’s one of the coolest ways the general public can experience being a commercial airliner pilot.

The owners of Flight Experience wanted to create a commercial blog to help spread the word about what they’re getting up to with the simulator, their merchandise and lots more. They were looking for someone who could set up a blog and run it for them. Someone who understood the aviation world, knew the simulator and could string together some acceptable prose.

Lucky me, eh? :)

So we sorted out the agreement, set up a space and got to work. I loaded the blog engine (WordPress, of course), hunted down a good theme (Atahualpa), came up with the design, built the header image and started loading content based on the information Carlo, Deb and the Flight Experience team provided.

The result can be found at Experience This! and it’s well worth checking out.

Certainly it’s early days but we’ve got some great plans for new content, including biographies of the Flight Experience instructors, merchandise reviews (I get to watch lots of aviation DVDs – neat! :) and lots lots more.

So head on over and check out the blog, sign up to the RSS feed and keep up with what’s new.

Given I’ve been involved in flying adventures for quite some time before I started this blog, I’ve wound up with a number of entries about flying over on my regular blog. I decided to split off my flying related activities to this site, including my photos, as I wanted to have everything flight related in its own space.

So, now that it’s up and running, I’m going to start copying my early flying related stories into this blog. Not sure how these will appear in the RSS feed but what the heck – at least I’ll wind up with everything together. Apologies for any confusion this may cause.

EDIT: And we’re done – about a day later and I’ve loaded a stack of back entries from the old blog over to here. Now all my flying related posts are in one place and the RSS feed didn’t get all stuffed up either.

Thanks to a mention on Aviatrix’s blog I’ve found the blog of a flight dispatcher, the person on the ground who helps coordinate all the action on the ground. We’ve all seen the stories from the pilots and the cabin crew, but what about the poor folk on the ground who have to turn the aircraft around ASAP and get it back in the air earning money?

The aircraft has to be cleaned, catering have to remove the “used” stuff and put in the fresh meals & drinks, toilet tanks drained, drinking water refilled, gas tanks topped off and baggage taken off & put on. Whew – that’s a lot to happen in less than an hour (when the aircraft is on the ground, it’s not just not earning, it’s actually costing a LOT of money).

Check out The Dispatcher’s Diaries for an insight into an aspect of airline life that we may just take for granted.

This post marks the start of my aviation related blogging. I actually started this blog in 2008 but had a number of aviation related posts on my other blog. While they’re all still there, I’ve also put copies of them here so all my flying related information is in one spot.

So, eventually as you work through all these posts you’ll get to 2008 and find my original first post. Don’t get confused, it’s where I really started this blog as opposed to these entries that are “post-dated.”

Of course, I’ve been having flying related adventures for decades earlier than this point, let alone when I actually started the blog, but if I get around to blogging about them, it’ll be as a “reminiscence” and not back-dated like these early entries are.

Confused? Just wait ’til we get time travel sorted out and you’ll *really* get confused.