{"id":286,"date":"2005-01-19T12:51:01","date_gmt":"2005-01-19T19:51:01","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=286"},"modified":"2005-03-02T09:06:37","modified_gmt":"2005-03-02T16:06:37","slug":"airborne-and-headed-home","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rnsmith.com\/?p=286","title":{"rendered":"Airborne and Headed Home"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>1:40 pm Belgium time 2.5 hrs underway:<br \/>\n Airplane food is not very good under the best of circumstances. Today&#8217;s<br \/>\n menu was very poor and even the best choices for me were not very good. It<br \/>\n is just as well as food isn&#8217;t my biggest interest right now. Only problem<br \/>\n is, I need a mint to clean some of the taste out of my mouth. The lavatory<br \/>\n is empty so I&#8217;ll take my &#8220;passenger amenity toothbrush&#8221; and go make my<br \/>\n mouth taste better for a while.<\/p>\n<p> 2:25 pm Belgium time. We&#8217;ve travelled 1689 miles in 3 hrs 24 minutes and<br \/>\n have 6 hrs 17 minutes to go.<br \/>\n The cabin lights are out and most folks are sleeping. I&#8217;m reading a book,<br \/>\n <em>New Spring<\/em> by Robert Jordan. Across from me a fellow who works for<br \/>\n Rolls Royce is putting together some kind of a status PowerPoint show that<br \/>\n shows costs and revenues all going the wrong way. I don&#8217;t think I want to<br \/>\n be him in that meeting! The lady next to me is kind of snoozing and kind of<br \/>\n watching a movie. She&#8217;s some kind of a consultant in the paper and pulp<br \/>\n business and has over a million miles with Delta. The flight attendant<br \/>\n mentioned that when welcoming the woman on board. The woman replied that<br \/>\n those were the Delta miles and that she had a couple million more on other<br \/>\n airlines.<\/p>\n<p> Three million miles on an airplane is astounding. That&#8217;s more than 6 round<br \/>\n trips to the moon. When I was in the Air Force I flew more than 3,000 hours<br \/>\n in the backend of C-130&#8217;s, most with headsets on trying to make some sense<br \/>\n of the Chinese radio traffic we were monitoring. That would be about<br \/>\n 600,000 miles and about 125 twenty-four hour days. These jets today fly<br \/>\n much faster so she&#8217;s probably spent more than 250 days of her life inside<br \/>\n an airplane and another 60 days waiting in airports on airplanes. That&#8217;s a<br \/>\n lot of airport and airplane food.<\/p>\n<p> 3:50 pm Belgium Time, 4 hrs 50 since we left and 4 hrs 50 to our arrival in<br \/>\n Atlanta. We&#8217;ve come 2,170 miles.<br \/>\n We&#8217;re on a much more southerly route. We went southwest out of Brussels<br \/>\n towards Paris and then out over the Atlantic Ocean rather than out over<br \/>\n England and Scotland. I suspect this is a little shorter routing. We have a<br \/>\n 50 mph headwind and a groundspeed of 500 mph.<\/p>\n<p> The flight attendants make regular trips through the cabin bringing water.<br \/>\n I&#8217;ve had a couple of bottles and will drink at least one more. The lady<br \/>\n next to me is sound asleep with a light snore. The guy to the right is a<br \/>\n Vice President and is plowing through e-mail. He has something to so with<br \/>\n fuels and consumption.<\/p>\n<p> Music and a good book are comfortable things. I&#8217;m listening right now to<br \/>\n Loreena McKennitt on my iPod and reading. If the seat was a bit more<br \/>\n comfortable, I&#8217;d be set. The airplane has lots of little things that need<br \/>\n fixing. Two of the seats in Business Class have no seat padding installed.<br \/>\n It looks like they&#8217;ve been cannibalized to fix something on another seat.<br \/>\n Such is life on a nearly bankrupt airline.<\/p>\n<p> 5:10 pm Belgium time. 6 hrs 8 underway with 3 hrs 31 left.<br \/>\n The remaining flight time has decreased slightly as we&#8217;re nearing the US<br \/>\n coastline. Maybe the winds have lessened? The dynamic flight map says we<br \/>\n have 1,568 miles to go to Atlanta. As we burn off fuel, the airplane gets<br \/>\n lighter and flies faster. We&#8217;ve also turned a bit more southwest and<br \/>\n climbed from 33,000 feet to 35,0000 feet. The display just said the<br \/>\n headwind was down to 40 mph.<\/p>\n<p> There is a bit more activity in the cabin. About half of the passengers are<br \/>\n awake and reading or watching the TV monitors. Lunch will be served in<br \/>\n about an hour and a half.<\/p>\n<p> Dang, I pressed Send instead of Save as Draft. I&#8217;ll get to learn how some<br \/>\n other features work in this little computer.<\/p>\n<p> 7:00 pm Belgium time (11 am in Pocatello) and we&#8217;re over the US mainland<br \/>\n about 30 miles from Newark now at 38,000 feet. We&#8217;ll kind of follow the<br \/>\n coast south to Atlanta from here. We&#8217;ve slowed down &#8212; 454 mph groundspeed.<br \/>\n Arrival is still estimated to be 2:41 EST (about an hour and 35 minutes<br \/>\n from now). I&#8217;ve been up go to the bathroom and have most everything packed<br \/>\n away. Lunch will be in a few minutes and a hamburger is on the menu. I<br \/>\n wonder what airline food would be if companies who know how to feed and<br \/>\n satisfy the public actually had the catering contract?<\/p>\n<p> Airbus unveiled their new huge airplane &#8212; a double decker with the ability<br \/>\n to carry up to 850 passengers. Imagine clearing customs with that many<br \/>\n souls at a time! The initial configurations will have lots of free space,<br \/>\n stores, workout center, and such. It won&#8217;t last long. The Boeing 747<br \/>\n started that way and it wasn&#8217;t many years before that space was filled with<br \/>\n seats and paying customers.<\/p>\n<p> 8:18 pm Belgium time (12:18 in Pocatello). We are about a half hour from<br \/>\n disembarking. The hamburger was edible but would have been thrown out at<br \/>\n any respectable burger joint.  This leg is close to an end. Last time<br \/>\n through Atlanta the immigration and customs worked very smoothly. Here&#8217;s<br \/>\n hoping it will be so today!<\/p>\n<p> Time to queue this for sending upon arrival.<\/p>\n<p> &#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8212;&#8211;<br \/>\n Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>1:40 pm Belgium time 2.5 hrs underway: Airplane food is not very good under the best of circumstances. Today&#8217;s menu was very poor and even the best choices for me were not very good. It is just as well as food isn&#8217;t my biggest interest right now. Only problem is, I need a mint to &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rnsmith.com\/?p=286\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Airborne and Headed Home<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-e-mail-musings","category-travels"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pnKxs-4C","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rnsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rnsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rnsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rnsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rnsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rnsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rnsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rnsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rnsmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}