This Plane Spotter’s Guide was in Steven’s stocking at Christmas.
Santa asked me (yes we chat) what I thought of it the next day and being my true bitchy self, I said (something like) “I don’t think we’ll use it. It has a bunch of old ass airplanes in it we’re only going to see at an airshow, in a museum, or flying over my house on the way to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh, in which case I’ll just look up what kind of plane it is on Flightradar24. I need to learn models of Cessna, Piper, Beechcraft, Cirrus, Diamond, etc. That is mostly what I see flying.”
What is it about the mother/daughter relationship that makes me so brutally honest? Yikes, Kim.
So needless to say, I haven’t looked at this book since Christmas.
But.
BUT.
Maybe Santa was on to something. I can’t say if this is from personal experience, maybe it’s hypothetical, but there COULD be instances where instead of air traffic control (ATC) saying “watch for traffic” they say “turn when you’re past Bristol” and you have no idea WHAT THE HECK that means cause what is Bristol?
WELL GUESS WHAT! It turns out Bristol is one of those old ass airplanes and there are two of them in this book! So maybe this book is useful? MAYBE?!
If, in a hypothetical situation, one had opened a book like this prior to flying and seen some old plane names, then encountered ATC saying “Bristol”** instead of “traffic” while flying, would they have known what the heck was going on and NOT been shocked to see traffic on final approach when they thought tower hadn’t mentioned it?!
Sigh. This probably doesn’t make any sense but I had to get it out of my system.
I have to say, flying sure does give me A LOT of stories to tell. Thank you to Val, Bobbi, and Mom who’ve all had to listen to this maybe hypothetical Bristol (more likely Bristell** after some research) story.
*Confusingly it’s a town north of our airport but not in its airspace
**(Or maybe ATC meant a BRM Aero Bristell NG 5 (piston-single)? Which is a newer plane and definitely not in this book… Hmm, if only there was a way to check…)
