By now I'm sure there are a few people eagerly awaiting my arrival in Kansas, so they can direct me to the hilly bits where people know how to use pi correctly, or get me a tour of the Cessna factory. In my job, however, the fact that I have been told to go somewhere, that I have filed a flight plan, filled out a complicated webform, and advised customs officers of my intended arrival time never means that I actually went there. So no, I didn't go to Kansas. I pulled up the airline websitebooked a flight home instead.
Then I called back the US Customs people to say I wouldn't be coming after all. They couldn't find the e-form that said I was coming, so just as well. Then I called back flight services to tell them the flight was cancelled. "Mind if I ask why?" asked the specialist, in exactly the tone used by the guy at the newspaper when I told him I wanted to cancel my service forever. "The aircraft registration and certificate of airworthiness are missing," I explained. (To the FSS guy, not the newspaper guy. I cancelled the newspaper because the presence of a newspaper on my doorstep bore almost no relationship to the "vacation" status registered in their computer).
And then I took a cab to the airport, and flew home.
On the way I overheard a quintessential Canadian conversation comparing snow and rain, "In the snow it's cold but you can do things. In the rain you get all wet." Winter is coming. I don't remember if it was the same or different people who while discussing transit options came up with this arithmetical theory, "We could take the #44. Or we could take the #22 twice and maybe we'd get there."
Kansas, presumably, is still there, and maybe I'll get there later, too.
4 comments:
The aircraft registration and certificate of airworthiness are missing
Oh dear! What ever it is, it isn't yours, and it isn't an airplane. Aviation is a strange buisiness. A missplaced piece of paper is, for practical purposes, as bad as a missing wing. At least the documents should be less expensive, if not easier to replace than the wing.
So, how long you reckon you've been flying around without a Airworthiness certificate and registration?
Different plane. The PRM drove me from the plane with the broken cables to another city, where the plane with no documents was sitting in a hangar. I haven't flown it in ages, and it had docs then.
Dear Trix:
I feel great sympathy for the poor bloke (or bloke-ette) who has to sort this out. If the aircraft is N-registered, it won't be easy.
As Donald Douglas said, "When the weight of the paper equals the weight of the airplane, only then you can go flying."
Regards,
Frank
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