Thursday, May 24, 2007

Notes from Vacation

I’ve been on a long road trip. One of those if this is Tuesday then we must be in Italy types. We had just landed in Kuwait City and made it back to the hotel from the Afghanistan day trip and were looking forward to our first day with out a flight or a bag drag since the start of the trip, our ass was dragging, when the phone call came. "We have a Lear in Abu Dahbi that we want you to move to Kuwait tomorrow". It gets worst, they wanted us to catch a 04:30 flight with two of the Principals, wait in Abu Dahbi while they finished up their meeting and bring them back with the Lear. We put our foot down and said "no way Jose", we will get some crew rest, take a later flight and initially only I would go so one of us would be rested for the next day’s flight to Egypt. After I started planing the flight I found out the crew member in Abu Dahbi they wanted me to use didn't have a U.S. fixed wing pilot's certificate. After much thrashing around it was decided that my co-captain would have to go anyway.

We get to Abu Dahbi in the early afternoon load the aircraft, BTW it is my favorite Lear in our fleet, a really beautiful airplane. I let the other pilot take the left seat even though it was my leg because he has very little Lear time (< 200 hours) and I figure it would be a good time to do a little instruction. Little did I know how much instruction I would have the opportunity to do. Just after rotation, as I called "positive rate" the left engine shot craps and rolled back. Once I got the airplane cleaned up and we were climbing, my first thought was “why in the hell did I pick this time to teach”. The obvious good news is he did a OK job and we made it around with out bending anything or hurting anyone.

As it turned out the biggest problem of the day was when we tried to get on the airliner to fly back to Kuwait.....our passports had been stamped out and we didn't have a stamp back in...try explaining that to Passport Control.

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