Since I have been gone every weekend in August, it was time to catch up on bunch of things I had to do around the house plus I wanted to spend some time with my kitten so I stayed home this weekend. I was actually going to work some time over the weekend, but found out that I did not have access to the rigs for some reason. Can't say I was too disapointed...

On Saturday we went out on a boat with my buddy Ryan and some of his friends on lake Macbride. We went tubing and that was a lot of fun. The weater was just perfect and there were a lot of people on the lake as well. At the end of the day we stopped for dinner at a place by the docks and that was a good ending to a beautiful day.

On Thursday I finally decided to start looking for a car. So I went to a Honda dealership nearby to check out a Civic. Instead I ended up walking out of there with keys to a 2001 Nissan Altima. Sweet. One less thing to worry about! Then on Friday I put it to the test by driving to Chicago to visit Justin. When I came there his neighbours were having a party and we joined in. Soon we started playing flip cup and I have not had that much fun at a party since the Ohio State days. To top it off, the party got raided by police which is another thing I have not experienced in a while :) No worries, we went to some other people's apartment to keep on enjoying the great American spirits while playing poker until early morning.

In the afternoon we headed out to downtown Chicago and walked around a bit before climbing to the top of Sears tower. The view was pretty nice and I got kind of sad when I saw what used to be the Meigs field airport just off downtown Chicago. Next we stopped by at a pub to get some real Chicago deep dish pizza and it was delicious. Afterwards we walked over to a park where there was a latino festival. Then it was time to head back to catch a movie.



When I got back on Sunday, it was time to go pick up my new kitty. He is just ten weeks old and oh so cute. As far as the name goes, I decided on Dymka - haze in Russian. Why? Well, he is gray so Smokey was original thought, which translates as Dymok in Russian. But I thought it was a tad too long and then came up with Dymka. There, now you know :)

I have been telling my friend Gabe that works for Microsoft in Seattle that I would come and visit him for some time now. Now that my other friend Chris have just finished his internship at Boeing, I have decided to finally make it out there and meet up with both of them. The flights there were nothing particularly exciting. I have got to fly on the dynosaur DC-9 once again and once again I found myself smiling once those engines reved up for take-off - the sound of shear power (and joy). The landing at SeaTac was a joy as well, definitely one of the two smoothest landings I have ever experienced.

Chris picked me up from the airport and we went out to meet with Gabe and his family at a nice Japanese restaurant in Kirkland. I have not had good sushi in a while so that was good. We topped it off with some ice cream and drove out to Seattle to meet up with some of Chris' friends. After I won a couple fast pased poker games we went out to a club where another one of Chris' friends was a DJ. I gave it a shot, but I figured that house music is not one of my things...

The poker tour continued on Saturday. We went out to a bar with another one of Chris' friends where he played in a quarterly tournament for a chance to go to the World Series of Poker. Unfortunately he did not make it, so we went back to his place and BBQed for a little bit following with another game of poker. Afterwards we drove out to meet up with some other Chris' friends and attempted to play a game of Risk. I actually liked it a lot. Maybe I was too quick to burry the board games in our age... I will be getting some soon (to keep us occupied during the long winter months in Iowa...)

This Wednesday we went on to flight test our FMS software on FAA's Challenger 604 business jet. Right now there is a handful of people in our department that know how to conduct a flight test and they want to train me and other program focals to be able to do these as well so hopefully I will go on more of these in the future.

It took us a while to get going - some errors kept popping up on displays when we were on the ground. Finally shutting down the aircraft and pulling some wires out seemed to solve the issue and we were ready to go. First we flew to Des Moines and then in the afternoon went up to Waterloo. I got to ride the jumpseat just behind the pilots on the first leg - it really is the best view in the house from up there. There was not much time to enjoy it though. Once we got to Des Moines, we got busy executing our test plans: go up to an altitude, reload the approach, set up interception angle, turn inbound observe how autopilot captures and flies it, write down anything and everything, break off at or past FAF with ocasional full approach to the runway, fly outbound, rinse and repeat with different set of parameters. The whole thing just seemed surreal after a while, just as if were doing this in our systems rigs and not actually being up in the air in the real airplane.

FAA uses this aircraft to check navigational aids and approaches and air traffic controllers are instructed to "provide special handling, as required to expedite Flight Check aircraft". In other words, we could do pretty much anything we wanted short of breaking the FARs. In Des Moines the approach we were testing was actually conflicting with the runway currently in use, but we got it anyways. I like the flight check callsing. :-)