Come Fly With Me

I've always loved flying. A long time ago, my mother took my two brothers and me on a flight to visit her mother in Virginia. I think we were living in South Carolina at the time, otherwise, it wouldn't have made sense to drive, since when we lived in North Carolina, we were only about 3 hours away by car. I don't remember much about the flight except that I was excited beyond belief and wanted to do this again...as much as possible!

Since then, I've flown many, many times. Here's a few accounts of those trips.

Once I decided to fly from Virginia to Vermont. This was in the early 80's. I was to meet some scouting friends that had gone up earlier from West Virginia. We intended to do some shooting, some skiing, some snowshoeing, some drinking...all the cool winter sports. I wanted to take my .44 Magnum Ruger Super Blackhawk with a 10 1/2 inch barrel. This thing is a monster. It is carried in Alaska for protection against bears, and used for hunting. It's also fun to blow up gallon milk containers filled with water. My packing for this trip consisted of my backpack, with a sleeping bag strapped to the bottom of the frame. The pistol traveled to Vermont stuffed in the middle of the sleeping bag. Of course, I checked the backpack. Interesting what you could do when there was no TSA.

From about 1980 to 1984, I worked for a great boss. He had a Cessna Skyhawk XP. The XP is a 172 with a bigger engine. Back in the day, there was no overnight delivery of anything. So if a TV station needed parts QUICKLY, the manufacturer would put the parts on a Greyhound bus - basically buying the box a seat on the bus so it would get to us much quicker than any other delivery service could get it to us. How bizarre is that? Think how expensive that was! But bus service in those days meant there was express service between large cities where folks like RCA were located, and other large cities like Richmond. So it was our own private package delivery system, in an industry where every 30 second period of time means DOLLARS made or lost, and lost was a bad thing. So if you needed the part, you got it as quickly as possible. When Linc was there, he'd fly us to Philly and we'd pick up the parts that RCA would put in a taxi and send to Executive Air (the FBO), we'd pay the guy behind the counter for the taxi ride, then fly home.

Nipper

The most fun was flying to Nashua, New Hampshire for a course in strobe technology. You've seen those strobe lights on large towers now? For 4 years, I maintained 13 of those f^>kers on a 1000 foot tower. You gotta love working 800 feet off the ground with 480VAC 3-phase, which in a strobe light gets stepped up to about 10,000V (with a 25,000V trigger voltage). I digress. We left in the evening. About an hour out from PTB, Linc says "You got this?" Excuse me? "Put your feet on the pedals, grab the yoke, and  keep it straight and level." So for the next two hours, I flew the plane. Perfect VFR weather, a few miles off the coast so the entire East Coast of the United States is visible, lit up like 1000 miles of Christmas tree. As we got farther north, the weather got a little dicier, and Linc took back over. By then, I was competent on most of the instrumentation, knew the comms up one side and down the other, and was changing freqs as often as ATC was spewing them out. We got close to an intermediate stop, and suddenly, the weather closes in. We're now on IFR. As we got close to the airport, Linc hands me a clipboard with a check list on it. "Tell me when this happens.

Flash Technology High Intensity
Obstruction Lighting Systems

Then count off and let me know if we are here" he says, pointing at things on the list. OK. We broke out of the clouds at the minimum ceiling and touched down as gently as can be. For the two hours we were on the ground, I was in charge of the plane. I had it refueled, cleaned all the windows, and tried to figure out if the pitots and other stuff sticking out of the fuselage were OK. Then we took off again. In clear weather. Into a fricking mountain!!! The airport is in a horseshoe shaped valley. We take off, then bank upwards like we're being chased by MIGs in Soviet airspace. Fun trip! I got to fly us home once we were off the ground. Linc landed it, but hey, who's complaining about getting to fly a plane!

The Chicago Hilton. Nicest hotel I've ever stayed in.

Sometime between 1986 and 1999, I had to fly to Chicago with my work colleagues. I worked for the US Army. We were tasked with videotaping the Junior Reserve Officers Corps parade in Chicago, Illinois. Oh god, what a drag this will be. I didn't know how bad it could get. Back then, there were still "excess baggage" charges. We had about 10 large Anvil cases filled with TV cameras, videotape recorders, audio recorders, microphones, and all the peripheral cables, tripods, fishpoles,  you name it. The first issue was, how were we going to pay for shipping all this crap to Chicago? I called my boss and he told me to put it on my government issued credit card. So I did. $225. Try this today, it would be a $GAZZILION. We got to Chicago. Turns out we stayed in a famous hotel, right on Michigan Avenue. Why was it famous? Who's seen "The Fugitive" starring Harrison Ford? Remember the scene near the end when all the police cars converge outside the hotel where Ford is about to confront the corrupt doctor? Well, I've shot video from the same spot where that scene was filmed and stayed in that hotel! HAHAHAHA, pretty useless trivia there. Anyway, we videotaped the crap we needed to shoot. Then hell began. We checked out of the hotel, and loaded our rental van.We had about 8 hours to kill before flight time, I got outvoted, and we spent the next 8 hours at O'Hare, with the other two drinking themselves silly while I watched the miserable weather finally cancel our flight 4 hours after it was supposed to leave (it's now past 11PM). We got the last 2 motel rooms within 30 miles of the airport and slept about 5 fitful hours since we had to be back at the airport at 6:30AM. The next morning, when we finally got back to Richmond, our personal luggage was there, but not the approximately $200,000 worth of television production equipment. After filing all the appropriate claims paperwork and watching several airline employees almost break into tears as they realized they were going to be laying out a fair amount of money for the lost equipment, loaded our stuff in the van that had been sent for us. Just as we were getting ready to pull away from the curb, a lady came running out, flagging us down. It seems our equipment was flown to Richmond the night before on the plane we weren't allowed to board, and then it was stacked in the back of a room since no was there to claim it. They even loaded it for us, relieved as they were.

I CANNOT believe they make Huggies colored like denim!

Most of you know about my trip last summer to England. That was my second trip. The first was between Christmas and just after New Years in 2007-8. I am fairly patient with all the crappy security procedures and such. I'm not really sure how much of it is productive, but it is there, it is going to happen, so I might as well go with the flow. On the return trip, we arrived in New York (La Guardia airport for those who care). After all the gyrations dealing with Delta Airlines - Oh. My. God. How stupid can a company be? But that's an entire post in and of itself - I found myself in the final security line of this trip. I'd been standing in this line for about 45 minutes, and was about halfway to the checkpoint. I will mention that the whole time, some 20-ish kid in uniform was sitting behind a podium at the checkpoint, in full view of all these people, picking his nose, and doing nothing else that I could discern. Surrounding me were all sorts of people, and I love to people watch, so this isn't the worst thing that's ever happened to me. There was a young couple immediately behind me with two children, a girl about 7 or 8, a boy about 4. Suddenly the little boy is grabbing his wienie through his pants and hopping. Any parent knows that that means! (Oh, and you can't leave the security line - no idea why not, but it will attract all the wrong kind of attention to you.) The mother said something to daddy. Dad reaches down and picks the kid up under his arms, lifting him about eight inches off the floor. Mom kneels down, whips off his shoes, socks, pants and underwear! Then she reaches in her large bag, pulls out a pair of Huggies, pulls them up, replaces his pants, slides his shoes back on. Daddy sets him down, and mom points her finger at him and says something in Danish - I'd just spent 8 hours on a plane with 267 Danes, I was near fluent - "GO!" I about burst out laughing - here's a mom who's been traveling with kids for a while! Good mother!

I really do enjoy flying, especially in small planes (General Aviation types as opposed to commercial, which has turned into a real PITA these days, not to mention, it's expensive). I saw this the other day, and I think it fairly describes the costs involved!