Crazy Day Friday

Today was a whirlwind of movement for yours truly. It started off in icy cold Kansas City with the intention of hooking up with a crew in San Francisco to do a checkride on the captain on the way to Los Angeles. My showtime was not too bad but by the time I got to the airport, I was now taking Southwest Airlines to Phoenix then on to Burbank, CA. Arriving in PHX I check my pager only to find I am now going to Oakland, CA. No problem except I had to change to U.S. Airways which just happened to be on the other side of the terminal. 

Fortunately I did not have to go through the TSA goat rope again. The problem was however, I only had 30 minutes for the connection for which I would need too be re-ticketed which I hoped they could do at the gate.

After it was all said and done, I got a seat on the "over-booked" flight to Oakland, listened to a couple of podcasts enroute and hooked up with the crew in Oakland.

This first image is of the coast line just south of San Francisco. The tide was out as indicated by the longer breaking surf. I was hoping to get a shot of Half Moon Bay but the undercast was not going to cooperate.

In light of that I decided to see what I could et out the other side of the airplane. More clouds and a little patch of the Pacific Ocean (sorry about the lens flare). After that it was pretty much clouds and no ground contact.

The third shot was taken when we were on  vectors for the approach into LAX. The sun was just setting and we were flying right through the "golden hour". The clouds had just such a vivid pink tone to them.

Finally, the fourth photo is of LAX while on a right downwind vector to the north runways. At htis point we still had about 25 miles of flying to do even though we were only about 2 1/2 miles north of the airport.

That was pretty much a day-in-the-life of Doug. Hope you all enjoyed.

Catch you next week... Doug