Saturday, March 24, 2007

The charter flight went fine; the weather was perfect and despite worries of freezing fog at our destination, nothing materialized and we landed under clear blue skies. It was +7 when we departed Toronto but considerably colder at our destination and I forgot to bring my warm winter jacket and I was a chilly willy in the outdoors.

We gassed up, loaded our pax and headed home. I took some pics but they are all boring ones like this view of northern Ontario at 37,000':




Waiting for our pax in the great white north.



Shiny metal on the thrust revserers aids my egocentric nature



Our pax showed up and we loaded up. We lit the fires and headed for home, the engines happily converting huge amounts of money into smaller amounts of forward thrust.

One minor note is that one or more of the passengers must have recently had some internal tweaking, as over the course of our return flight both Kitsch and I were afforded the luxury of inhaling some odors that really should not exist. It wasn't bad enough for us to have to go on oxygen, but it wasn't the smell of Grandma's fresh apple pie either.

*The Next Paragraph Is Gross* You Have Been Warned*

This leads me to an aside - the only time I have had to go on oxygen while flying was when I flew medevacs, and it was due to the smell of the burn victims in the back of the MU-2's. It's really hard to convey the smell of that, but apparently we are hard-wired to recognize the smell as "VERY BAD" in nose-speak, and just smelling it can be completely distracting, so much so that flying the airplane was nearly impossible unless we got our air from a sealed, separate source. Oh, and just to really gross you out, not only does your nose recognize the smell of cooked human as "VERY BAD", it also recognizes it as delicious food, which can really set up a short-circuit in the ol' brainpan. Hopefully I packed peanut butter sandwiches in my crew lunch those days rather than roast beef.

Anyway, long story short, the entire flight was very pleasing to most of my other senses, if not my nose.

We landed safely back home, and loaded our pax into one limousine and their 2 bags into a second limousine. I guess if you have the cash to charter a private jet for a long flight, it's not too outrageous to meet the flight with a separate car just for a couple of small pieces of luggage. I guess.

I'm looking at the ending to this post and it doesn't have a 'zinger', so here's something scary and awesome to look at instead.

(From YouTube link) "One of largest and fastest passenger cruisers Voyager, in cyclone Valentina, middle Mediterranean Sea, 14.02.2005"

I hope they had lots of barf bags on board.

4 comments:

Aluwings said...

Wow! That's a heck of a ride. This got me interested. Look at this one:
http://www.cruisebruise.com/Cruise_Videos/Cruise_Video_19.html

Cruise Ship Sinks after crew abandons passengers

So much for the Captain going down with the ship!

Ian said...

Oy, I've spent many an hour sitting on my rear in that Shell.

amulbunny's random thoughts said...

That made me queasy just looking at it. I can ride in an airplane in most any kind of weather but I got sicker than a dog on a harbor cruise in HNL and nearly didn't make it back from Catalina Island in one piece on the boat. Guess I'm glad that the choppers fly over there.
Glad you're home safe.q

Anonymous said...

What I don´t really understand is how the helicopter could fly under those conditions.