Thanks to Stephen for this. He’s a pilot and Steelers fan from California who had never been to Pittsburgh, until last weekend. I’ll let Stephen do the explaning on this one:
“I’m from California, but I’ve been a Steelers fan for about half my life now. Thing is, I’ve never been to the ‘burgh. People give me a lot of crap for this, especially because I’ve been a professional pilot for the past 9 years and I’ve literally flown all over the country. But some cruel force of nature has kept me away from Pittsburgh all this time…. until last Friday.
I spent a couple of days touring around and absolutely fell in love with the place. Some people I had spoken to warned me that Pittsburgh was just another run down big city like Detroit, but having been to Detroit, I can say that it’s exponentially nicer in the ‘burgh. I toured Heinz Field and finally bought my Terrible Towel there as I had sworn I would only get the towel within the city-limits of Pittsburgh (seems like the only right way), ate at Primanti Bros, and of course drank plenty of Yuengling which is sadly not available in California.
I want to end with a little nugget that you may not know about, but I thought it was kinda cool. Part of navigation reference in aviation are these waypoints that are referred to as “intersections”. Intersections are named points in the sky that are used as distance markers on airways or part of a path on an instrument approach to an airport. Each intersection consists of a 5 letter name and sometimes that name will be nod to the local culture of the area it’s over. For instance, near Santa Rosa, CA, hometown of Charles Schulz there’s an intersection named SNUPY which would be Snoopy from Peanuts.
Anyway, departing the Allegheny County Airport, I noticed that just west of Pittsburgh was the intersection YINZZ which I thought was pretty cool.”
NICE!
Now when are we gonna get an intersection marked PSAMP?
