No it's not me who is jetlagged and luggageless. I'm just stranded in a foreign country with impassable weather to the south and an expired IFR. The pilot who is coming up to provide a legal licence to file IFR through the panhandle is the one staggering in with no luggage and a head too many hours west of the last place it was. If I recall correctly there was a vacation involved so this is extra-Canadian jetlag, not just a few hours. I haven't rented a car, so I tell her to take the shuttle. Meanwhile I go downstairs to check that her hotel booking is in order. It isn't.
They say they don't have a room for her, even though her room was booked at the same time as mine. Originally it was going to be the room for the pilot who left yesterday, so the booking was supposed to be delayed one day, not cancelled. I haunt the desk, asking each successive clerk to look for the reservation. This sounds mean or useless, but so many times I have had one clerk find something when others swore it didn't exist. Some of them don't know how their systems work, and others just don't care. Most of them don't care. Probably all of them don't care and most of them don't bother to pretend they do. Eventually one of the clerks escalates me to a manager in order to get rid of me and the manager makes an executive decision to create the reservation despite the overbooking. It's someone who staggers in after midnight who will lose out.
My fellow pilot staggers in after midnight in some time zone, but without her luggage. She didn't expect it to make the connection that she had to run for. Now she wants food and sleep. I take her to the Century, where she can watch float planes land, and then we pick a meet time in the morning so she can rehumanize. We were going to leave first thing in the morning, but now we'll have to wait for her luggage.
Meanwhile, I am amused by what Wikio thinks my blog is about. It got Canada in the cloud (but thinks I'm based in the US), and I guess GPS is a pretty common topic, but do I really talk about Texas that much? I'm amused that it picked up on all the Star Trek references, but how does it think my blog is about "crank"?
7 comments:
Wikio's word cloud is hilarious. It must be that this includes all the comments and only recent posts. As I recall there were a few long threads around a Texas visit.
Elsewhere there is a trenchant keyword description of the blog:
* Games,
* iPod,
* Mahjong
I bet the "crank" was turning engines - but "Harrison Ford"?
Wordle uses the RSS feed to make a word cloud and it looks about right. "See Airplane Back Fuel People Get Airport For One Like Just Go" about sums it up for me.
I'll never complain about Harrison Ford turning up unexpectedly, even if he is getting a little long in the tooth.
A quick google analysis:
Crank has 21 results when you search within your blog.
Harrison Ford gets 13 results (mainly to do with your sharing logbooks with Harrison's beaver)
Canada is an obvious winner with 558 results.
I think they have the topic list across all blogs/sites. The word "crank" in the article you get when you click on it in the cloud is part of "hand crank". Also, while you identify as Canadian/Canadienne, the domain is in the US. You would think they could at least note the location in your profile, but that involves more effort to add understanding to the program.
My wife and I had a connection in Chicago that was scheduled to leave when we pulled in. Its gate was just across from the arrival gate. Luckily, while the door to the jetway had been closed, the door to the plane had not. It was closed as we found our seats. We spent the next 20 hours wondering it our bags had made it. They did make it. The luggage didn't make it on the flight out of LAX on the return even with over two hours after clearing customs and putting the bags back into the system.
When you fly with a Canadian license, and a "C-" airplane, but in FAA controlled airspace, I am a bit confused as to whose rules you must fly under, especially with regard to IFR currency. Our rules tend to be a bit more lax ("relaxed" is a better word here) than Canada. I have little difficulty in remaining IFR current, despite living in a blue-sky state and only flying on weekends (it helps to have your own plane and be able to go and practice whenever you want).
D.B.: My licence must be valid for the thing I am doing. Canada differs from the US in that not only do we have to maintain IFR currency, but our IFR ratings actually expire, even if you fly IFR every day. Mine, as of that blog post, had passed the expiry date, so I was not legal to fly IFR anywhere. I had to go and pass a flight test to fly IFR again.
There aren't a lot of big differences between rules. I can never remember the US VFR cloud clearance rules, which are difference than ours, so I think I'm often 500' too close to a cloud layer there, and I really don't know if I'd be considered illegal for spending 29 minutes between 12,500 and 13,000 without supplemental oxygen in the US. That would be legal in Canada.
I think on the inside of the airplane, so long as you are in accordance with your national laws and your company operating manuals that the FAA can't get you for it. Do US carriers have to give a safety briefing in French when departing from a Canadian aerodrome?
I get bored on the overnights and layovers so I created BoredPilot.com for us all to use. Enjoy and always leave something for the next pilot.
Post a Comment