Chicago O’Hare was one of the first terminal silhouettes I drew. While I generally like how it turned out, I’ve learned a lot of techniques from the dozens of terminals I’ve drawn since then. For a while, I’ve wanted to redraw ORD from scratch and try to recreate a better version of it.
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Charlotte (CLT) had been building an expansion onto terminal A for a while. Nonetheless, I was pretty surprised when I flew through CLT on 18 July that I’d managed to unintentionally book a flight on the day that it opened.
The new concourse forks off from the existing Concourse A where the long moving sidewalk hallway used to be:
Unfortunately, adding the new expansion has made CLT look slightly less “like a reindeer,” as one of my friends noted about the original silhouette.
2014 has been a record travel year.
I have flown on 86 flights this year, which has been my best year yet.
In particular, the last four months of the year have had me traveling about three weeks a month; I’m on a high stakes program at work, and it’s been a particularly busy travel time for that program.
Hotel nights are up this year, too. From 2011 through 2013, I was doing a respectable amount of travel, but the phase of my program combined with budget cuts (and the 2013 federal furloughs and shutdown) had a serious effect on the number of nights I spent on the road. However, I moved to a higher priority program in mid-2013, so while our budget still isn’t great, the priority of the program and the acquisition phase we’re in means that mission-critical travel has climbed back up. In addition, I’ve had far more personal hotel nights this year than usual, an effect of taking a good number of weekend trips when I got the chance, plus a true vacation in the summer.
These stays ended up being:
I’ve visited six new airports this year:
This put me at 54 total airports visited out of my 100 airport goal. I’m over halfway there!
I was able to reclaim Hilton HHonors Diamond this year – in fact, I hit the 60 nights required for Diamond in September, and ended the year with 96 elite-qualifying nights. In addition, I was able to hit United MileagePlus Gold for the first time (in fact, it’s the first time I’ve hit the second tier on any airline’s program).
I had six unexpected overnight stays this year:
Flight Log: https://www.flighthistorian.com/airports/CLT
Charlotte is my most visited US Airways hub, and at first, I was often flying to it as a destination when I did a number of visits to some smaller towns in South Carolina. Recently, however, it’s only been a layover for me – and I suspect I’ll travel through it a lot more often now that US Airways is part of American Airlines, as this effectively gives me a new American hub serving Dayton.
