Hi!
I would like to say a few thinks about myself here. I’ve been an aviation passionate since, being a little child, probably 7 or 8 years old, I flew for the first time, inside an Airbus A320 belonging to Iberia, between LEBL (Barcelona) and LEZL (Seville)… and well, since then I’ve been always fascinated by things which fly and have no feathers (which excludes birds, to which I only pay attention on birdstrikes), such as planes, helicopters, autogyros… and by the fact of flying itself. When one sees cars firmly attached to the ground, everything is normal, gravity doing its work. But planes? Despite knowing the profile of the wing is what creates the necessary lift to leave the ground and to fly, I still see flight as a mysterious, magic thing. It is impressive how things as huge as an Airbus A380 or an Antonov An-225 (this one being the largest aircraft in the world) can hold themselves in this thin stuff we call air…
I’ve always thought that living aviation as wide as it is is better than concentrating only in a single aspect of it, so, apart from enjoying real aviation, I also practise flight simulation and radio-controlled, or RC, flight with airplane models. Flight simulation because it is the closer I’m able to get for now to flying real, manned, aircraft, and RC flight because if in the real life I cannot fly full-size aircraft, at least I’ll be able to fly smaller ones from the ground… 
My activity right now in the real life is studying. Having passed reasonably well in overall what I could call the pre-universitary steps of education, I’m right now studying the studies for being an aircraft mainteinance technician, which although being not universitary, still offer you the opportunity of accessing university when you finish them. They are (at least where I’m studying it right now) two years long or three if you want not only to obtain the title for being a technician on aircraft mechanics but also on avionics. But I don’t want to stop here, as my plans are to enter an aviation-related university career when I finish studying the aircraft mainteinance technician studies. Perhaps I could study what recently has been renamed as aerospace engineering (being known before as ”aeronautics engineering”), cause although they include a lot of mathematics, which is certainly not my best point, I think that putting all my effort and illusion into it I’ll have chances of passing this career. And although all these are plans and I don’t know what can actually happen or whether everything will be as I plan or not… dreaming is free, they say… so let’s dream
Other of my great passions is space, especially human spaceflight. I enjoyed a lot following Space Shuttle missions (sadly the Shuttle program is now history) and ISS (International Space Station) expeditions and finding out facts & figures on the daily life of astronauts when they’re up there. Recently, and after discovering that my radio scanner, which I normally use to listen to the air band comm’s, could also be used to listen to hams, or radio amateur operators, I also discovered that there are two amateur radio transceivers in the ISS, which the astronauts use to make school contacts and to carry out general contacts with ham radio operators in the Earth, so I always expect the next pass of the ISS (and some time ago I expected the next passes of the Shuttle too *sigh*) over my location so I can try to hear an astronaut in my scanner! If the pass is during the night it will be possible to visually see it flying overhead like if someone had put a powerful light in orbit, which is stunning thinking that there are people there. I’m not always succesful, but when I do (like when I heard twice the Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli on two contacts with Italian schools, or when I’ve received Mike Fossum also on school contacts) I feel great. I won’t get an amateur radio license for now, but just listening to the ISS with the same scanner you use to listening to the local ATC is great too!
I’ve always lived in the ground floor of a house with two floors located very near to Barcelona, in Spain. Because of this I live very near (exactly 8 kilometers) also to LEBL, Barcelona-El Prat, which is what I call my “base” airport, so it is easy for me to receive the ATC communications from home and I also often go there to spot and to record on video and picture takeoffs and landings. Unfortunately the biggest we see here normally are A320s and B-737s and we do not receive a lot of heavy traffics during the year, at most we have some Boeing 767s belonging to American and Delta to the US and a few B-747Fs a week belonging to Jade Cargo and Cargolux which of course, carry freight. During the summer the activity increases and then A330s (Delta and US Airways) and B747-300s and -400s (Transaero) can be spotted. And ah! once a Lufthansa A380 visited us. It was on October 2010, and it came empty from LEPA (Palma de Mallorca) on a promotion flight during the Festa al Cel airshow of that year. Better than nothing…
And that’s all… 
Cheers!
(UPDATED: 6/11/2011.)
