Climb and Maintain ...

The flying adventures of a software engineer in the Pacific Northwest.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

FAA Humor

To many, the FAA is a love-hate relationship. Never mind that in general, the folks at the FAA will hopefully be helpful, albeit they themselves have to deal with a tremendous government bureaucratic machine. Perhaps we've all read stories about a pilot landing at an airport, and some guy from the FAA opening the door to the FBO for him and saying "Hi, I'm Bob, I'm from the FAA, and I'm here to help."

But, I do think there's a humorous side to the FAA and the airspace system. And that's got to do with intersection and arrival/departure procedure names. Take the following examples from around Las Vegas:
  • In case you don't know where to stay after you land in Las Vegas, maybe the Luxor Two arrival will clue you in. And maybe Grandpa One was created for the lots of older folks in the casinos playing slots...
  • Waypoint names can be fun, too. KSINO, pronounced "casino", says you're almost in Vegas. This one works well with the Luxor Two example above - "Airliner 123, cleared direct KSINO, then Luxor Two arrival"). On the other hand, if we're not satisfied with the generic casino, then Caesar's Palace has a CEASR waypoint (but apparently they are not as cool as Luxor, since they don't have a departure or arrival procedure associated with them). In fact, Luxor must be really cool in the eyes of the FAA, because they get a PIRMD waypoint, too.
  • Casino games: poker is immortalized through the HOLDM intersection and POKRR/CHIPZ waypoints, while blackjack gets a HITME waypoint.

If you have examples from other areas, post them here!

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Here's a bunch. Enjoy your blog.

http://www.airlinepilotforums.com/archive/index.php/t-3147.html

1:28 PM  
Blogger Neil said...

I always liked Logan's "Bosox". : )

6:49 AM  

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