paktor132

A ton of speedup in the bag checking process could be obtained by upgrading the kiosks for a snappier and simpler UI/UX.

-Swipe credit or frequent flyer card

[WAIT]

-Enter the airport identifier you are going to

[WAIT WHILE I PULL OUT MY PHONE TO LOOK UP AIRPORT IDENTIFIER]

[WAIT WHILE COMPUTER THINKS ON THIS]

-Is this your flight?

[WAIT]

-Do you want to choose seats?

[If you haven't done this online, hoo boy are you in for five minutes of frustration]

-Do you want to check bags?

[WAIT]

-Are you active duty military?

[WAIT]

-Can you confirm that you have removed all lithium-ion batteries from your checked luggage?

[WAIT]

-Federal law prohibits the following long list of dangerous items. Can you confirm that you have none of these?

[WAIT]

-How many bags do you want to check?

[WAIT]

[God help you if you have a nonstandard item here, eg skis+boots, which the airline will only charge you for one bag for, but will require two baggage tickets]

-Printing your bag tags.

[VERY LONG WAIT]

[20% CHANCE THE PRINTER SHITS THE BED]

-Please affix the tags to your bags in a way that makes perfect sense only if you do this frequently

[NON-FREQUENT FLYERS ADD 5 MINUTES TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO AFFIX THE TAG TO THE LUGGAGE]

[LONG WAIT TO HAND BAG TO EMPLOYEE]

Employee: You did it wrong, do it again.

I fly United a lot, maybe people on other airlines have more hope

Also, just to clarify my verbiage on the ground instructor bit, not at all saying that you couldn't do all the other aviation ones too (and you should, they were all a blast to get) and more...just that ground instructor is one you should specifically look into because it is relatively little-known, is straightforward and cheap to get for people like us who clearly find tests easy, and offers a fair amount of practical benefits (advanced ground instructor can teach ground for ANY part 61 rating, also you don't have to retake FOI if you ever go for CFI...flight schools in my area will absolutely hire someone on a ground instructor cert alone). No intent meant to cast any aspersions or to minimize any accomplishments!

Aviation - private pilot airplane single engine land; instrument rating airplane; complex, high performance, and tailwheel endorsements; part 107 remote pilot; DC flight restricted zone; instrument ground instructor (this might be a good one for you, just take the FOI and then AGI or IGI written tests and visit your local FSDO to get the cert issued). Considering getting my commercial, multiengine, and CFI certs

Maritime - master 100 tons inland / mate near coastal plus a bunch of random crap the USCG throws on there if you get those (need to renew these this year); American Sailing Association 101, 103, 104

Scuba - just the useful ones here cause I have a whole wallet memorializing money flushed down the drain: rescue diver, ice diver, solo diver, drysuit, open circuit advanced nitrox/deco procedures, 45m helitrox closed circuit rebreather w/deco, certified Poseidon regulator+rebreather repair technician (though the big thing I learned was just to send my gear to pros working with this stuff every day). Currently my big focus is training up to take the 60m normoxic trimix rebreather course in the fall

Radio - general class ham (failed the extra by like two questions, in my defense I had only studied for general), restricted radiotelephone operator (literally just a cash payment, needed this once for a flight I had planned to Canada)

Other - authorized to perform marriages, motorcycle endorsement on driver's license, certified analytics professional (took the test on a whim and passed, it's since lapsed but I might see if they'll let me re-up it), notary public (lapsed), have thought about doing PMP since I'd be good to go on experience reqs

I started an EMT course a while back but I dropped out after realizing I was never going to be able to remain at all proficient. I'm like this with my aviation instrument rating as well, I keep legally current with it but I am pretty cautious about relying on proficiency since I'm not flying multiple times a week

Probably some others I'm forgetting but these are the big ones! I remain really impressed with your list, you've come up with some good ones...will have to think on whether I need to pursue some of them myself :-)

https://www.nmra.org/education/achievement-program offers 11 levels of certification for people like us who have a profound need for external validation. My certification list overlaps with yours about 60% but Certified Parliamentarian is next level, my hat is off to you

Dr. Harry C. Beaver, MD, obstetrics and gynecology in Gainesville, Virginia: https://health.usnews.com/doctors/harry-beaver-784569

My flying ebbs and flows with life, seasons, weather, etc...since I'll often go a few months without flying, I found OA checkouts were a great way of knocking the rust off. I would study up on the knowledge, and then the ~1 hour of flight time with an instructor for the annual OA checkout was enough for me to get comfortable again. (I never felt like I needed to spend flight time preparing for the OA checkouts.) And the OA checkout could also count as a flight review. So I guess the bottom line is that for me, I could always roll an OA checkout into time when I'd want to be flying with an instructor anyway.

I never got charged more for OA than the published rental rates...but all the places where I did my checkouts had me fill out one extra sheet of paper so that an OA checkout also counted as a checkout for their own insurance rules. So if I was flying with a place a lot, I'd just do the checkout there and buy block time from them and rent under their non-OA policy. Basically, OA was great for everywhere other than one's local FBO, for which it was still typically a better deal to just rent under the terms of their standard non-OA policy.

Renter's insurance would be a tough sell for a lot of people; my local FBO already required it so I was good to go. (My local FBO is great, but they're also the only place I know that does dry rentals where you're not insured by their policy...weird, I know)

I was an OA customer. I loved the service but it had a lot of friction in the process. One of those things that would have worked perfectly if it had been widely adopted, but the fact that I always seemed to be their only OA customer always gave the experience more friction than it needed to have.

I started using OA because my local FBO required that I have renter's insurance and I needed a flight review anyway, so the barriers to entry were really low for me. I drove an extra half hour and did my flight review and all of a sudden I had OA privileges.

OA was great for taking trips as a renter. I could call around to all the area OA FBOs and someone always had a plane free and was always willing to waive the daily fees as long as I put, say, six hours on the plane. I never had anyone hassle me about getting another checkout. (To be fair, I was often flying out of the DC FRZ, so I think everyone figured I was good to go on local airspace procedures.)

I hadn't realized the diversity of avionics until I flew OA. I had one very memorable flight where, while about to preflight, I started chatting with an instructor. "Where are you off to?" When I told him Rhode Island (~400 nm trip), he visibly started and then gasped, "in that?!" I said, shakily, "yeah......" and then after a long awkward pause he said, "well, uh, I guess there's no reason you can't..." Took me 10 minutes of sitting in the cockpit wondering why I couldn't find the nav radio to realize there was no nav radio! That C150 was so small that after takeoff I put my feet on the copilot's rudder pedals, which worked out well since I had to fly the plane in a slight slip anyway because the fuel tanks didn't drain evenly. So there I was, stretched out across this tiny cockpit, navigating by highway over Connecticut, when ATC asked me to relay to one of the commuter turboprops that was having electrical issues. Me! In my C150 with nothing but a barely working COM1! You get the picture. The other plane got where it needed to be. I had a hundred hours at the time. I learned so much on that trip... especially how much more I had to learn.

Back to OA. I was trying to finish my instrument rating and had a shit experience with Dulles Aviation (now closed) at HEF. A shame since that's where I learned to fly back in 2002. On what I hoped would be my final xc before checkride prep, the instructor was fine until I had to ask clearance delivery to spell the departure procedure and from then on he SCREAMED at me the whole flight. Couldn't focus. Flew like shit. Mode C off by 300 feet the whole flight. Every approach, even after reminding ATC of the discrepancy: "Low altitude alert, check altitude IMMEDIATELY." My confidence was shattered. I needed a break. I went back to OA. Started renting from New Kent Aviation in Richmond because they accepted my OA checkouts. It was a long drive but they were amazing. I got my complex and high performance endorsements there so I could get checked out in bigger and better planes. At the end of those endorsements the instructor said, "well you're good to fly the 172RG, and you flew those instrument approaches so well, I'm signing you off for that checkride too." Passed it. Probably wouldn't have happened for a long time if I hadn't had the flexibility to try different places until I found an instructor and school that worked for me.

I dropped out of OA for a couple of years and devoted my flying effort to learning how to do aerobatics and fly tailwheels from the inimitable Marianne Buckley at VKX. Best money I've spent in aviation, perhaps ever. She's retired now. Good for her, too bad for the rest of us.

I returned to OA in 2018. I flew a few more times out of the OA FBOs at FDK and ESN. It was always a hassle because the paperwork was never quite right. I couldn't get anyone to respond to emails sent to the "crew" support email address for OA. In the past Rod Rakic would personally handle any problems that came up and he did so quickly and efficiently. The customer experience was great. By 2018 I was always dealing with a succession of people and I always felt that taking my money in exchange for putting me in a cockpit was way down their list of priorities.

I'm sorry to see OA go but I'm not surprised. It was a great idea that just didn't get the legs it needed. I hope one day something like it comes back around. Thanks, Rod, for the great times you enabled for me.

Sounds like you encountered a SuperAWOS system. When flying, you click the mic three times for weather and runway information, four times for a radio check, and then somewhere around 5-6 clicks you can get the weather/runway information read to you in Chinese. It works great for weather and such, though it doesn't provide any services for separating you from other aircraft.

The SuperAWOS systems are made by a company called Potomac Aviation: https://potomac-aviation.com. David, the head of the company and owner/operator of Potomac Airfield (VKX) is an entertaining guy, his main website is trippy as hell: http://potomac-airfield.com.

Yes, one of the many little details that BSG did really well.

Given how the distortion sounds, the Fleet apparently uses single sideband (SSB) modulation for its radios. Amplitude modulation has a carrier and two sidebands; SSB suppresses the carrier and keeps only one of the sidebands (USB = upper side band, LSB = lower side band). That way, the transmitter uses bandwidth and power more efficiently. The downside is that it's harder to receive and there are some distortions. A good explanation of why there are those distortions: https://ham.stackexchange.com/a/392

Cool video showing SSB distortions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcX2Pdg35Co

I'm willing to believe that CEO pay reflects poor governance practices to some degree, but this study fails to prove anything. As a simple alternative explanation for the data, suppose that companies that are performing badly have to pay more to attract CEO talent since the proposed CEO is taking on reputation risk if they fail to turn the company around. Then you'd expect exactly what the study found; the more highly paid the CEO, the lower the corporate performance.

This report should have looked at how CEO pay in one year affected company performance the next year and vice versa.