It had been a fun morning. The heater had broken in the TRACON radar room. It was 20 degrees outside, not much better inside, and the hot chocolate I was drinking was losing its steam—literally. On top of that, busy last-minute holiday traffic had been giving our morning skeleton crew a kick in the teeth.
A Beechcraft King Air checked in. He’d just departed a local uncontrolled field VFR and was requesting a pop-up IFR clearance to New Orleans at FL180. Since he had nothing on file, it was up to me to punch his info into the computer and assign him a routing.
