18 March 2006 20:08
I dreamed a dream"ABC" is the imaginary FAA airport code for the Smithville community airport where my company (ACME Aviation) is located. I’m just paranoid, so I change the names on everything. Meanwhile; ABC, Smithville, home base, and headquarters are all synonymous.
First I dreamed I was driving to work in Jamaica (see note 1). This was a typical four-thirty in the morning run--still very much dark outside. Incidentilly enough though the actual scenery was from just south of Jenn's apartment in Salt Lake City.
I had passed several cars already when suddenly I found myself swerving to miss a pickup that was coming at me head on with no headlights. I was busy proclaiming to the world in general just exactly what I thought that feller's ancestry was when lo and behold here comes another!
I know Jamaican’s don't like using their headlights, but this was getting ridiculous (note 2). I turned a corner and came into a busier part of town. There were cars everywhere without their headlights on at 0430 in the morning. You could just pick out their silhouettes from the few streetlights that were operational.
I quickly jumped to the conclusion that it was due to the recent shootings (note 3), nobody wanted to make themselves stick out as a target. Well, neither did I so I killed my own lights and dived into the traffic with my normal enthusiasm. Later I noticed that about one in six cars were still using their headlights--not everybody was crazy. I was toying with the idea of turning mine back on when the dream shifted.
note 1: this comes from a conversation I had with Samantha the other night. Somehow we started talking about how "safe" living in Kingston is.
note 2: Rumour has it that they think running their headlights will wear down the battery...
note 3: Specifically that refers to this incident. The Christian Science Monitor has a good article, though they list Jamaica with South Africa and Columbia with the most murders per capita, I've read elsewhere's that for the year 2005 Jamaica reached number one. It's probably all in how you play with the numbers. Despite all that bleakness (and it is rather dismal), the effects on whities is not as noticable. Most of the killings are related to politics in the Kingston and Spanish Town areas (although the "senseless" murders of non-politicals are spreading), and white people (tourists especially) simply aren't involved. JCO has a good analysis here. All in all, I suspect a white person would be more likely to die in a car crash living Stateside than they would be to die by murder while living here in Jamaica.
Now I was "arriving at work". The dream staggered around a bit until it found a new theme to dwell on. During this stage the building I was in wavered from doctor's office to a meat packing plant with indoor volleyball courts.
With the meat-packing plant I met a whole bunch of people that I "knew", mostly Mexican engineers (note 4) working for the commission under the leadership of none other than Jimmy (note 5). They were playing soccer next to the rows of meat hooks and were very enthusiastic in greeting me (as in real life).
Next to them in the volleyball court was a bunch of aviation alumni that I went to school with (note 6). They had finished their shift and were just killing some time. They invited me to join them, but I had to get to work.
note 4: The evening before I'd spent ten minutes shooting the bull with Mr. Ffrench and one of the engineers in Spanish
note 5: Names are usually changed to “protect the innocent”. I don't know what this says about Jimmy, since that’s his real name.
note 6: There's been a steady influx of grads from my school hiring on with my company.
And this was the part that really made the dream interesting.
Turns out I was to ferry 6TT (note 7) back to Smithville. It had gone through major overhaul/heavy maintenance by Jimmy and his crew; both the Mexicans and the alumni. (Even now the thought of Jimmy doing maintenance on an airplane I was to fly sends chills down my spine).
I began my preflight with a rather naive air, but soon came to the realization that all was not well. It started when I was looking at the radar antenna and trying to figure out what was going to protect it from the force of a 200 knot slipstream. That’s when I realized that the nose cone was missing entirely (note 8).
I was looking around for the nose cone when I also noticed that this one was different from what I’m used to, this one had two pieces with a seem down the middle instead of being one piece (note 9).
Continuing around I noticed that the left engine was missing the oil cooler scoop, but I knew where that was (note 10).
note 7: 6TT (not the actual tail number) was a problem child that we'd recieved back in December. We were supposed to have it for two days, we wound up having it for more like two weeks--which brought on a whole myriad of problems in the realms of maintenance and paperwork. We finally got it sent to ABC sometime after Christmas, but only after it sat on our ramp for a while because it didn't have the proper paperwork to fly to the States.
note 8: I know I’m dense in real life, but I’m usually not that dense. The only time you look at the radar antenna is every 400 flight hours. In-between-times it's always covered by the radome.
note 9: 6TT is different, a civilian King Air where most of our planes are ex-military. They have a few notable differences, but differing nose cones are not one of them. This civilian/military "difference" will come up again.
note 10: This comes from an earlier part of the dream where Paul and I were struggling to keep 6TT's engine cowls out of the rising water in our hangar. A few of them didn't get sent back to base when the plane left. This in turn came from real life where more than once I’ve had to rescue parts from rising water in our hangar. We also neglected to send some things back with 6TT, but it would have been somewhat obvious if that had included parts of the engine cowling.
At this point I realized one that this plane had just come out of overhaul (i.e., big problems fixed, we now have many new small ones), and two that my departure was going to wind up being somewhat later than I’d planned/hoped (a very common feeling here).
So I decided that a ground run would be in order to test the engines out. I climbed in and started up. I was still trying to figure out all the cockpit controls, particularly the bleed air heat (note 11), when I noticed that there was smoke coming from the right hand engine.
No problem I thought, it was whitish so it was probably just some spilled oil. My confidence was not being increased by the amount of time it was taking to dissipate though. I glanced at the left engine to see if it was smoking any, but that's when I noticed three or four hoses trailing out of the cowling to the ground (note 12).
I was becoming very irate (another common feeling towards the ABC maintenance crew) and shut down, intending to go have a few strong words with jimmy. However, this is where the dream ended as I woke up fifteen minutes before my alarm clock was set to go off.
note 11: The civilian King Air has a different cockpit layout than what we're used to. Until last Saturday we were having problems with the cabin heat in the plane we take to Mexico. On Saturday I changed a temperature sensor--which has lead to being able to have a 75ºF or warmer cockpit instead of barely 60¬. Something I greatly appreciated on yesterday's flight. (As I write this, it's -17ºC outside at 21000 feet).
note 12: Another item too obvious to miss on preflight, or indeed even when they pushed the plane back out of the hangar. (And a Pratt & Whitney PT6 turbine engine has very few (i.e. zero) hoses that aren't "necessary" or "don't really need to be hooked up"). All of these problems come from the real life situation where we had a plane "ready" on our ramp to ferry back to ABC after a gearup landing that the ferry pilot had to spend two days working on before he flew it out. It was "ready" only because the recovery crew was "done" (their tickets home had already been rescheduled back a week and they were leaving and it was no longer their problem).
All in all it wasn't quite as exciting a dream as the time Roland and I were in Columbia stealing one of our planes back from a university with the CIA hot on our tails (Roland and I'd had a conversation about the CIA, which supposedly uses King Air's to spray herbicide on cocoa fields at night in Columbia). But just the same, it was very intriguing to watch the bits and pieces of my daily life re-arrange themselves in a new medly for this latest dream.
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