For everyone who wants to celebrate Barack Obama’s first visit to Canada, you may want to listen to the ATC for the Air Force One callsign.  Conviently, LiveATC.net has the terminal, tower, ground and cleareance frequencies setup for Ottawa Macdonald-Cartier International Airport.  You can find the link to the streaming audio here, or if you would like a diagram of the airport to look at, check out cyow.ca.  I believe Air Force One usually lands at Ottawa Macdonal-Cartier, but someone once told me that there is also a Canadian Air Force base near by where it sometimes lands, maybe in the event of an emergency.  I wonder if the controller will say something funny when they make radio contact.

The green Air Force One pictured above is an April Fouls joke from How Stuff Works.com.  It was suposedly a new version of Air Force One that uses hybrid fuel technology.  Something the US government should get cracking on anyway.  I wonder if it’s more fuel efficient to fly the president in a F-18 than it is to fly him in a Boeing 747.

Obama will arrive at approximately 10:30am ET on February 19th.

I took an hour and a half flight from Dryden to Thunder Bay today in a Cessna 172SP.  The winds were calm, but light flurries as I took off.  Things cleared up when I got close to Dryden.  Landing was a little hard and could use a bit of work.  This flightw as flown IFR, but for the most part it was VFR conditions after I got outside of Thunder Bay.

I’m thinking I’ll head to Winnipeg next.

This is an amazing photo taken by Janis Krums of the rescue attempt of U.S. Airways Flight 1549. It beats CNN by far!  I believe it was taken from a ferry helping with the rescue.  Amazing job by the pilot making an emergency landing.

I’m listening to a lecture by Ira Flatow from Insight Cruises where he is explaining why the Bernoulli principal is wrong.  Instead of explaining all the details, you can listen to the lecture here.

I wonder if this has any effect on X-Plane’s wind modeling in their flight simulator.

 I noticed that you can now listen to the air traffic control frequencies for  Thunder Bay International Aiport on LiveATC.net.  They are currently streaming the frequencies for:

Thunder Bay Ground: 121.9 
Thunder Bay Tower: 118.1 
Thunder Bay Terminal: 119.2 
Winnipeg Center (CZWG) – Marathon Sector (GND/FL280): 132.125 

I just heard a CF-18 flying over my house, and then the controller said, “Follow the F-18 inbound.”  And later I heard, “F-18 is departing the runway.”  I think the actual radio for the pilot of the F-18 was too faint to hear, so I couldn’t hear what he was saying.  It sounded like he was asking for clearance to fly the pattern again, but the controller said no because he has seven Cessnas inbound.

So have fun with this!  If you’re a Grounded Pilot like me, you’ll enjoy listening to real ATC.  I think the future of flight simulators will embed real live ATC and traffic data so you can fly alongside real world traffic.