Fair warning and full-disclosure notice here: This one’s for the airline geeks…

For those of you who know me well, you know that I’ve been a lifelong, passionate aficionado and fan of commercial aviation. Those close to me affectionately refer to me as the airline über-geek.

Imagine my extreme pleasure when I discovered the Flight Memory website a while ago. Flight Memory is designed specifically for my geek brethren and me, and allows us to input or upload our flight data into their online database. The website provides a repository for our flight statistics, as well as the ability to generate very, very cool maps.

Here’s how it worked for me: I have an Excel file where I keep all of my flight log data. Every time I fly, I capture the basic flight information, including the aircraft registration (aka the tail number) in my database. I’ve been keeping this database since my 20s. It comes in handy when I want to see if I’ve previously flown on a particular plane, or, more importantly, when there’s an incident.

For example, when Captain Sully put N106US into the Hudson River earlier this year, I was able to query the database and see that I’d flown twice on this particular aircraft, twice in 2001 on the USAirways Shuttle between DCA and LGA. But I digress….

After creating my Flight Memory account, I shipped off the database to the website guys, paid my low fee, and they uploaded everything into my account. Ince it was all uploaded, I had to do some manual adjusting of the data, but the bottom line is that I now have some very, very cool statistics and the ability to generate maps. With this data, I also can order some beautiful posters and with the premium membership, I have the ability to really play with the data and generate even cooler maps.

Here’s what my Stats Overview page looks like:

Here’s a visual representation of my domestic flying:

And, lastly, here’s my international personal route map:

Go take a look at Flight Memory’s website, and if you’re like me, you’ll have yet another cool tool to facilitate procrastination. 

[Read the rest of this article...]

The fabulous Heather Poole Flight Attendant Blogger Extraordinaire has started a new trend – photographing her Savvy Navigator bag tag in various places around the world! More and more Savvy friends have been asking about how they can get one, so we've decided to make you an offer you can't refuse:

For a limited time, If you’d like to receive your very own bag tag, AND promise to send back photos of it in use around the world, we’ll send you one FOR FREE! Just click here to let us know where to send it.

This just in from the Londolozi Game Reserve in Sabi Sand, South Africa, about the beloved female leopard whom many of us here at Savvy Navigator observed, loved and respected over the years:

It’s another typical July winters day. The halcyon blue and honey hued bushveld is treading its way to the wind and dust of august and another season – something new. The bizarre and the surreal is something you get used to around here, like the changing of the seasons. But in this particular run-of-the-mill July week, two quite dramatic events are unfolding. The first, not ten kilometres from the lodge a friend lies dying. If you have passed through Londolozi in the last 17 years you will probably have met her. If you lingered to work and share the dream you will probably have befriended her. If you were a ranger or tracker you will probably have come to love her. I am talking, of course, of the 3:4 female.

Her life story is told somewhere else - in fact in many places. So I am not going to rehash her remarkable life for you here. Rather, I would like to comment on the alluring effect she has on so many. As I write this, she has not yet passed to wherever good mother leopards go. And over the past two years she always seemed on death’s door, but this time her back legs can no longer bear her weight, she cannot climb trees and to follow her piece of shade, she has to crawl around using her front legs. Skeletally thin, with sunken eyes she waits, probably for a hyena, to close the chapter on what for a leopard is probably an ordinary tale. So many of the staff at Londolozi have gone to say their last goodbye to a leopard who was able to bridge the gap between man and wild animal. That is no ordinary tale.

She has shared her 17 years with us, her trials and tribulations of motherhood, her constant battles with other predators and her successes and failures on hunts. She has posed for photographers and at times frustrated our best efforts to find her. Truthfully, how do you bid farewell to such an awe inspiring animal. Do you watch her last breath or just let the end become another of those wonderful bushveld mysteries?

I’m not sure what the answer is, but the second dramatic event is the respect that is being accorded her in a very Shangane fashion. Rangers and trackers are all wearing small black ribbons attached to their shirt sleeves with safety pins, in memory of her. This is normally reserved for important members of the Shangane community. To say that she has had a pronounced effect on those that have known her is a profound understatement, just like the one Elmon uttered a few weeks ago while watching her in good health “this one is a good leopard."

[Read the rest of this article...]

 Our beloved partners from South Africa sent over this pic today. It's a great, new, interesting perspective of Cape Town, including the coastline, waterfront, City Bowl, and the new World Cup 2010 stadium. Enjoy!