interesting side effect

sunday afternoon: threaded my way through the oddly shaped parking lot of the "centennial terminal (2)" of the ninoy aquino international airport. i was going to call it oddly "arranged," but a quick google earth look-see reveals the, well, bigger picture.

the airport itself is laid out in as a parallelogram, with one of the sides in line with the main runway. in the rough center of the layout is the v-shaped terminal building: two wings/arms; south wing for domestic and north wing for international services of philippine airlines.

between the arms of the vee, the various parking zones surrounding a circular area containing the air traffic control tower and a lower building that seems dedicated to massive cooler/evaporator airconditioning units. public parking is essentially to the west of the atc circle.

entrance to the parking is at the west sharp tip of the parallelogram, with various arrows painted on the access road hugging the perimeter indicating traffic flow. the "oddness" of it is that the parking rows cut straight "vertically" north/south across the parallelogram's long east/west axis.

which means that turning into a parking row necessitates a more than 90 degree turn, close on 120 or so, i guess. minor quibble, i suppose - but the car is small. i wonder what it's like for the bigger denizens of the streets (american suv's, for example).

i was there rather early - hopefully to watch a few planes taking off or landing - and also to escape the oppressive heat in the makati apartment. i was planning on spending a few hours in the car, engine and aircon running, listening to some music courtesy of a teeny mp3 player attached to the car radio via a cassette interface with wire and earphone jack. (the car's radio is a hit and miss; sometimes it works, most times it doesn't - hence the investment in the cassette interface.)

okay. park car, insert cassette, power on. i attached the mp3 player and was working my way through stellastarr*'s harmonies for the haunted album and fiddling with the volume control when there was a slight burst of static, and then a voice.

what the hell?

a woman spoke, saying something to the effect: "cebu pacific (number) please expedite your approach, incoming traffic 24-a."

i'd heard jargon like that before, seeing as i visit a certain website full of aviation videos, some videos of which include air traffic control chatter.

amazing! somehow or other, the car radio was picking up the atc communications. in my excitement, i texted a friend about it. i then disconnected the mp3 player. still the voices came. sometimes, i could even hear a few planes' communications with the tower, mostly asking for "pushback."

as a test, i ejected the cassette. a radio station came on, but poorly (not surprising, seeing as i almost never tune to any stations at all). the atc voices were stilled. popped the cassette back in, and they resumed.

interesting. wonder what it is that's making it work.

anyway, at that time i decided that i might as well see what action there was out there for a while. securing the car, i made my way to the end of the domestic wing and saw a cathay 777-300 and a singapore 777-200 take off in succession. there were also a bevy of philippine airlines a320's taking off.

and then a philippine airlines a330 landed.

that was most likely the flight from bangkok. so i made my way to the arrival area of the international wing...

anyway, an interesting afternoon, to say the least. and a bit of trivia, too. or maybe it was just that shift, but all the atc controllers i heard that afternoon were female...