We were parked at the gate still, just ready to push back... I have the twelfth row's left side to myself (only two seats thanks to McDonnell Douglas's tremendous powers of appreciating just how wide Americans are) and I actually get to see out a window for the first time in however long.
As some of you may be aware, I am something of an aircraft nut (hah! so much for that plan) and can't get enough of the airport, especially when I have an excuse to be there. Needless to say, it's of great entertainment value to watch taxi, takeoff, and landing operations just because so much cool stuff happens in the process.
I was staring mindlessly at a baggage cart, wondering why its trailer sported a tare weight of 1,920 pounds when I noticed a 747 taking off. Well, I thought, this should be pretty cool. I don't get to see 747s every day. Little did I know that the atmospheric conditions were just right for a ridiculous plume of vapor to trail off of its wings. I mean, take the area of a 747's wings, then double it, hanging the excess from the trailing edge. It was something else.
I also marveled at knowing we were next when we crossed the ILS/hold short line for our active runway (they were running cross traffic; approach patterns were directed to runways 9, takeoff traffic seemed to be limited to runway 4L, but it could have been on both as well), so take my fascination with it as you will.
On the way in, I was reading taxiway indicators laughing about how there were so many numbered spurs (think, in freeway terms, I-495, I-395, I-695, and the like, only instead it's things like A18 and B2) when I saw something that amused me greatly, which you know is going to be bird related. Specifically, a lone hawk was sitting on an M taxiway sign staring at the ground. The humor to be found in this, of course, is that taxiway indicators are about three or four feet tall. Additionally, and I'm sure much to the hawk's chagrin, there was about 6 inches of good snow on the ground right below it.
Either the hawk had moved to the other side of the airport while I was waiting for my flight, or there was another poor bird stuck in the same fate as the first.
[a meaningless aside: I'm sorry I use the elipsis so often in my headlines. I'll work on that in the future.]
Anyway, the flight from Chicago to BWI is only rated to take an hour and twenty six minutes. This is almost pathetically short, although it's not quite as bad as the 53 minute flight from Orlando to Tallahassee that Katy and I made last March. At least enough time to whip out the iBook and compose this and listen to a couple Dream Theater tracks (no small task, I guess).
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