Infrastructure Geekery: Boston from the Air

One addendum to my trip to Canada; on the plane ride home, I was in a great seat to view Boston from the air, so I got out my camera and started taking pictures. Not the best quality, given that I was taking shots through multiple layers of plexiglas, but it was still fun.


We came from the northeast (roughly speaking), and looped around south of town. As we were looping south for our approach, I saw a large open pit in the middle of a wooded neighborhood. Wow... cool--there's an active quarry right this close to the city?


After a combination of Google Earth and Google Maps research at home, I found out that it was the West Roxbury Crushed Stone Quarry. One of the top links for that subject was a Boston Globe article (West Roxbury: 'Tween a rock and a loud place). It talks about the complains the neighbors have about the quarry, being loud and filled with trucks. I have zero sympathy: the quarry has been there since the 1800s--didn't you manage to figure that out on the way in? I hold unfettered disgust for NIMBYist neighbors who move into a place with disruptive but necessary infrastructure, and then attempt to get it shut down. However, one of the comments in the article made me smile, showing a much more reasonable attitude:

Mark Sheehan, who lives on Woodbrier Road, which dead-ends at the quarry, also calls the company a ''good neighbor" that lets neighbors take sand for free. ''My feeling is, if you move next to railroad tracks, you've got to expect trains," he said. ''If you move next to a quarry, you've got to expect trucks and dust."

The approach into the airport was normal, until we were almost on the runway. All of a sudden, I heard the landing gear go up, and the engines revved back up to full power. "Huh.. must be a go-around." (an aborted landing of an aircraft which is on final approach). It felt a bit dramatic, but it's not a big deal--the same thing happened to me on a flight into PHL a few years ago. The captain got on the intercom later, and explained that there was another plane on a crossing taxiway that was "getting a bit close to the runway." I wonder if this is pilotese-don't-scare-the-passengers for, "...and this other shithead plane was sitting on THE GODDAMN RUNWAY I'M TRYING TO LAND ON or something.

But at least on the second loop around Boston, I got a nice shot of the Zakim Bridge and surrounding area:


Our final approach was right over the shipping container yards in South Boston (heading towards runways 4L/4R). Ah.. apparently the Paul W. Conley Container Terminal.


Incidentally, for those of you who don't know how runway designations work, it's the compass orientation/direction, divided by ten (rounded)--so an east-west runway would be marked 9 at one end, and 27 at the other. Do a Google Maps or Google Earth check of your local airport if this isn't clear--the runway numbers are large enough that you can see them in those shots.

Home again home again, jiggidy jig.