Although we welcome Santa into our homes and hearts this time of year, carefully choosing his favorite cookies (chocolate chip, despite the ongoing snickerdoodle rumors) and waxing eloquent on the magic he uses to shove his girth into the chimney, we know very little about Santa in his role as aviator.
Sure, Santa's been flying for years. He's one of the original aviation pioneers, after all. But specific information about how he coordinates his flights and manages his crew has been in short supply. Despite NORAD's very cool Santa Tracker, scientifically-minded kids want to know more. How does Santa navigate from place to place? By what means does he avoid mid-air collisions? And what does Santa do about safety?
To that end, former Marine Corps aviator and retired commercial airline pilot, Ian D. McDonough, who flew many, many Christmas Eve nights, agreed to give us the insider's scoop on Santa the aviator and what's actually going on up there.
Five Fun Facts About Flying with Santa
courtesy of Captain Ian D. McDonough (Ret.)
- Waypoint Navigation: Although Santa relied for years on older means of navigation, he recently switched to use all GPS waypoint navigation. Waypoints are identified with five letters, e.g. SANTA, CHMNY, RUDLF, SLEHY, etc. Unfortunately, several waypoints required immediate change due to the fact that Santa became distracted by those which were food-related like MILKE and COOKY. Oddly, CAROT provided no difficulty and was allowed to remain the same. (Did you know you can use your parents-only hotline to call the North Pole for your five-letter waypoint? You can! Santa's Workshop has permission to release this information.)
A version of this post was originally published at the Five Kids Is A Lot of Kids blog which can always be found at waypoint: CHAOS.
"santa claus and deer" image credit suphakit73 at freedigitalimages.net