Hi, this is Chris Hebbs.

I don’t know why you’re listening to this, but since you are, let’s talk about travel.

I am headed out on business travel a little later today, headed to Washington, D.C.

for the week.

D.C.

is one of my frequent work travel destinations, given that my job is regulatory in nature, lots of interactions with the FAA.

This week’s interaction not directly with the FAA, but with an industry standards body, which is just about as exciting as it sounds.

I’m going to be in a conference room with a bunch of engineers talking about the ways we need to improve software safety certification for specific types of software development.

Yeah, that’s exciting stuff, but it comes with the territory.

Historically for work, I have traveled, oh, a handful of times per year.

My busiest work years, I traveled maybe 12 to 15 times per year.

Usually for a week at a time, usually for the kinds of meetings that I just described, getting together with other experts from within our industry to talk about the best ways to do things in support of aircraft safety and specifically safety of airborne software.

Occasionally, I’ve gotten the opportunity to go to other company and regulator locations, which has been fun.

My career over the years has taken me to Cologne, Germany several times to talk to EASA, the European Aviation Regulator.

I’ve gotten to go to Brazil a couple times, Canada a multitude of times, and even India once, which was quite an adventure.

Probably was stories worth telling another time.

I would love to take a second trip to India with what I know now, having been there once and the adjustments I could make.

Personal travel is something I’m looking forward to the opportunity to do more of.

It’s one of those things that’s challenging when you have a bunch of kids at home.

Family trips are more of a challenge to pull together, and so we’ve tended to shorter ones of those or infrequent big family trips, with the kids closing in on all being out of the house.

My wife and I are looking forward to the opportunity to take some of our own trips, and I know my wife is looking forward to the opportunity to leverage some of my work trips where she can come along and explore some of those locations that she’s so far only heard about from me talking about them.

My local airport right now, the Eastern Iowa Airport, is a mixed blessing.

It’s quick and easy to get to, which is great.

On the other hand, it flies direct to very few locations, which means you’re almost always signed up for a connection.

Today I’m actually lucking out, headed to DC.

We have one direct flight to DC every day.

I will be on that, so thank you, American Airlines.

Looking forward to not having a connection.

On the way back, I do get a connection.

The one direct flight in on Friday is too early to support my meeting needs, so we’ll see how that goes.

Connecting through O’Hare is always an adventure, but it’s what you do when you need to.

After we relocate to the Pacific Northwest next year, I get the flip side of that kind of accessibility slash connection trade-off.

You can fly without a connection an awful lot of places out of Seattle Airport.

The downside is I’m going to be the better part of an hour drive to get there.

So we’ll figure out the logistics of that when we get to it.

But my travel experience will get to change a little bit then.

If all goes well with the trip, tomorrow’s podcast will be recorded live somewhere from D.C.

So I look forward to that, and we’ll talk again soon.