Most of you have probably heard me rave about Microsoft’s video blog for developers called Channel 9. It’s named after my favorite feature of United Airlines—namely the ability to plug a headset into your armrest and listen in on the cockpit’s radio by tuning to channel 9. As I was flying back for a visit to Seattle, our pilot did something that put the original United channel 9 in the same class of coolness as Microsoft’s Channel 9. He invited us to tune in to Channel 9 for a 10 minute "talk show", where he proceeded to talk us through a bunch of trivia about our airplane and our flight. He talked about why we fly so high, why the cabin isn’t pressurized all the way to sea level pressure, what it is that pilots actually do, and some performance numbers for our airplane.
One of the neater things that he talked about was that technically the only part of the flight that the pilots pretty much have to do is taxi and takeoff. He talked a little about Category III ILS operation, pointed out that both Seattle and Denver are equipped for Category III operations, and then went on to explain that the only reason they have visibility minimums for Category III is so that once your autopilot has you safely on the ground you can see far enough to safely taxi clear of the runway.
If you want to see just how eerie Category III operations are, there’s some great video of a Horizon Airlines Category III ILS approach into Portland up on YouTube.
Update: we had clear skies down to a few hundred feet above Seattle, at which point it turned to very dense fog. As I was deplaning, I gave the captain kudos for his radio show, and said "speaking of category III, what was the RVR when we touched down in Seattle"? He told me it was 5500 ft. That was way longer than it looked, but I’m sure he was right. He said that they worried they’d have to do an autoland because the RVR number kept going up and down on them.