Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

I received and anonymous email today from someone who wanted to know if I am still posting. To you, whoever you are, thank you and yes indeed I am. Fly Guy was out of commission with an eye injury. I just flew my first trip in about a month.

To get into the operations area at my pilot base I take an elevator down to a lower level. There is a key code that one must enter to get the elevator moving. At this lower level where the elevator door opens you will find a contract security person sitting in a chair waiting for people like me. Their job is to check the validity of my security badge. Do you remember the movie “Men in Black”? There was a character in that movie who sat by the elevator that Will Smith would get into. Next to the man was a huge fan and nothing else at all. The man was always there waiting, waiting. At my elevator there is a character named Mary, 50ish, polite, and desperately needing to tell you her latest conspiracy theory. The elevator doors opened and there she was with her newspaper as her proof and me her victim. Mary doesn’t say hello, she just launches into her spiel like the dart from a blow gun. According to Mary our vice president Dick Cheney did not like his hunting partner at all. Mary tells me that our government is using the vice president as the perfect assassin, getting rid of the “trouble makers”. Intrigued, I stupidly asked Mary to tell me more. On and on she went explaining that there were 65 to 200 bullets in this poor old lawyer but that was not the reason for the heart attack. You see, he was not supposed to live after receiving all those bullets, therefore when the vice president went to go see him; he slipped the poor devil some poison and kapow, heart attack. Another thing I learned about this crime was the poor man was snuck up on by the V.P. The V.P. told the lawyer to go hunt in one direction while the V.P. allegedly went in another direction. In reality he circled back for the kill and emptied his 65 to 200 bullets into the victim. I kept trying to remember if I had seen something like this on CSI Capitol Hill once. I finally had to just walk away as I often have from Mary and knowing of course, that within 15 minutes I would be back in that same spot, catching the elevator back up to the concourse level. I was halfway down the hall and I could still hear her talking. On the way up the elevator doors had closed and she was still talking. I must admit there is a dark side of me that secretly hopes that when the elevator door opens, Mary will be there. I left LAX on a redeye for JFK last night. We were dispatched with half of our pressurization system working (safe and legal) which kept us to a maximum altitude of 35000 feet. We were heavy and our rotation speed at takeoff was 156 knots using 5 degrees of flaps. Flight time was only 4 hours 5 minutes due to great tailwinds of about 140 mph giving us a ground speed close to 600mph. Flight visibility was excellent being about 150 miles forward visibility. The lights of Chicago were memorable contrasted against the Great Lakes pitch black. About 250 miles out the air turned turbulent and we descended to 25000 feet into smooth air. Got bounced around on final but the landing was damn good, yeah it was mine. There was a blizzard in NYC less than a week ago, over two feet worth. I don’t know what they did with it but all the snow was gone. It is time for some sleep. This evening we fly to San Francisco for a long layover. So Fly Guy is still here and there are lots of stories in the works, all of which are true. Be Safe, Fly Guy