Narita
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Flying Through the Night
Apparently the officials at the Narita, Japan airport want to make sure that after a 10+ hour flight across the Pacific we know where we have landed. The west side of 16R/34L has a really beautiful hedge of plants in the shape of the airport name with an operational clock on it’s southern end. Things…
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The End of an Era
A friend of mine forwarded an email to me today that I thought you might be interested in reading. The message was written by a Boeing 747 captain for Northwest Airlines after his flight from Narita, Japan to Anchorage, Alaska last month. I’m sure that you are aware that a merger is in progress with…
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A Good Day For Contrails
One of the flights on my last trip was from Los Angeles (LAX) to Tokyo (NRT). I had a request from one of my readers for a photo of the cockpit of a Boeing 747-400. Since I was taking the first break I had the chance to take this shot just as we were about…
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Musical Chairs
Our last flight back to Narita’s runway 16R found us landing at sunset with low clouds and gusting winds. That night the weather front passed through the area and cleared out most of the clouds, but kept the winds howling. By 7 am the next morning Narita had switched to runway 34L and FedEx’s flight…
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A Day Off, But Not Really
This leg was a bit easier than usual and was a change to my originally bid pattern. [Oops, I just read that I’m supposed to refer to these series of flights I work as “rotations” now, not patterns – part of the standardization of the two merging airline’s terminology. Oh, the changes just keep rolling…