08 August 2003 21:40
i was busy working underneath a sopping wet airplane that was in turn busy dripping on me. this had something to do with gravity, but i'll ignore that for the moment. the shop hanger has a glazed concrete floor. for the past two weeks, we have had fog every morning until well into the eight o'clock hour at least (today we had it until ten). we have not been having the dog days of august either, yesterday's high was 74ºF. it was misting that morning.. even when it's just foggy, you can open the north hanger doors and watch the fog roll into the hanger. the plane i was working on came from kingston jamaica (i've been there). it has Jamaica Defence Force plastered on the side, along with the black green and yellow of the Jamaica flag. it is also displaying a sad lack of corrosion control (kingston happens to be a port city, but the center of jamaica even isn't really all that far from the sea by the way the crow flys, (or king air, depending how you wish to word it). here i am, sitting cross-legged beneath a Beechcraft KingAir 100, s/n B-216, recently of the JDF, scrubbing corrosion from antenna mounts. a kingair 100 is a motley conglomeration of kingair 90 and kingair 200 parts. it has the fuselage of a 90, landing gear of a 200, a horizontal stab that looks like it could fly on its own, and every other random part in between. it was nosed into the hangar, half in and half out. i was sitting outside on the rough brushed concrete, looking inside to a puddle of water on the glazed floor. ever two or three seconds a drop would come off the plane and land on the puddle, scattering into three dozen droplets upon the surface tension. the sun had broken through the mist, rendering the droplets jewels, rainbowed brightness ..dozens of individual prisms scattering.ping! skitter... ... ping! skitter... ... ping! skitter...
glorious
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