19 November 2007 17:27
As we back off from the gate I settle in and put on my noise cancelling headphones. I picked them up about a month ago and considered them to have paid for themselves by the second flight (4 hours and change to California). I opened up United's magazine to see what flavour drinks they serve (why do I always end up on the airlines with Coke products?) and passed by no less than three ads for various brands of noise cancelling headphones (mine excluded). This ranks as one of the very few times in my life where I'm not bothered at all by doing the "in" thing. If I had an iPod to plug mine into...well then I would be bothered. The only thing bothering me is kid in front of me who keeps slamming the window shade up and down. He could stand a little "bothering" by his mother, ineffective though that has repeatedly proven itself in the last hour.One of the articles catches my eye, the author bought a Round-the-world ticket from the group United is a part of. He covered 27,500 miles on 19 flights from leaving Dulles til he returned two and a half weeks later. The price tag? $3000. My jaw just about bounced off my seat belt buckle. Granted, I'm sure he doubled that in hotel/food/ground transportation costs on his layovers, but still...three grand for 19 flights? He bumped himself up to business-class for an additional $4700—which I dare say would be worth it for a concentrated trip like that. As he himself pointed out he ate 15 of 51 meals in his airline seat, spent 2 of 18 nights aloft, and of course spent umpteen dozen hours just sitting there. Apparently there are a lot of options with these Round-the-world tickets: you may travel between 26k and 39k miles, from 10 days to a year, and have between 3 to 15 layovers. ..I've been thinking of hitting Mennonite World Conference 2009 in Peru, instead of going and coming back maybe I should keep going {thoughtfully considers selling house to finance expedition}.
Ah yes, you may have noticed that I'm back on the airlines. The job in Louisiana did not go very well, but it went very typically. It was a three mission set, the first went off without a hitch. The second was postponed due to cold weather and high winds...this gave us the opportunity to spend an extra day in Houma—exotic paradise it is not. We requested and were denied permission to double the next two missions into the same night, which turned out okay because we weren't even able to finish the one set before us. A quarter of the way in we lost a spray motor and had to return to Houma for repairs. By this time the temperature was already below 60ºF and falling rapidly. By the time we could have effected repairs (I guessed half an hour) and gotten back in the air it would have been 7pm and too cold for the mosquitoes to still be out. Mission scrubbed we headed back to the hotel to order pizza and let today's problems slide until tomorrow.
I went out to the airport to "effect" that half hour repair. Two hours later I had things wrapped up. {shrugs} I'm just glad I didn't have to get it out in half an hour. It seemed like a simple enough repair, and I can probably do one in half an hour now...but this was my first time so there was a, ahem, small (but significant) learning curve. Now we were given permission to double up missions, so we finished off the second and completed the third. Piece of cake.
Now we were to land in Mississippi for a plane swap. We'd been homebound from California when called off to do the Louisiana missions, so we parked the California plane and used a local one for our flights. Now we were swapping back for the trip to Virginia. I estimated about an hour. I know to always double my estimate for anything related to "departure time" in aviation, so that's why I said one hour...double the half hour it should take. Maybe I shouldn't have said it out loud, but we did manage to take off just shy of two hours on the ground. The left tire of our outbound plane had a slow leak, so I had to track down an air tank (which only involved two sets of keys and five locked doors). We eventually got airborne in our no-frills edition King Air sans pressurization, cabin heat, or autopilot.
There's always the slightly incredulous tone that you get from the first or second departure controller when they get around to reading your strip, "and confirm seven thousand is your final altitude requested today?". I know I shouldn't base my sense of manhood on how high I can fly a King Air, after all seven thousand was waaay up there in a Cessna 172 during flight school, we hardly ever got that high in the Duchess. But flying a King Air cross country at seven thousand feet with single engine piston planes flying over head at nine thousand feet is like buying a Dodge Viper to go tooling down interstate at 50mph with Chevy Aveos and Geo Metros passing you up. In northern Georgia we actually ran into a minimum vectoring altitude so they had to kick us up to 9000 for terrain. By this time it was 1230 in the morning and . it . was . not . warm. We finally reached home around 0145, where I crawled out of the airplane and happily wandered into Flightops where the security guy had it at about 75 degrees.
So now I'm finishing up a commercial trip to Florida to spend a couple days on call before Thanksgiving rolls around as the "official" end of the mosquito season in Florida. And just like the hurricanes are supposed to stop on schedule on 15 November, sometimes nature has different things in mind than official. I put my laptop away for the decent and watched some Squarepants Spongebob. The other kid in front of me (yes, there are two of them) has spent the last forty-five minutes watching Bob and alternating between high pitched giggling and yelling at his mother about some or other new and funny thing that Bob just did. I have to admit though, watching cartoons with no sound is entertaining...it's amazing how little sound is actually needed to get the point across in that somewhat unrealistic and violent genre.
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