Flew to Turkey today. With any large movement of people and assets, getting there is half the battle. The devil is in the details, and it is the coordination of all the little things that makes the trip eventful or not.
We had an issue this morning over the number of boxed lunches. The flight today was 6 hours, so we usually pick up lunches on base for the trip. Normally 
the crew calls in lunches for the actually flying crew, and the passengers are taken care of by the Passenger Terminal. Sometimes. Sometimes they aren’t, and so it gets confusing. Apparently today things were supposed to work by the book, yet we ordered lunches for everyone and suddenly we had about 30 too many lunches and a very unhappy Transient Support office. I think we just paid them the extra money, took their lunches and left as soon as we could!
It was interesting taking off out of an English airfield, climbing through the clouds, and then flying across the English Channel into Holland. I imagine it was much the same route, altitude and speed that thousands upon thousands of WWII fighters, bombers and transports did back in 1942 - 1945. It was glorious day, and we were in and out of clouds so you could see for miles across the English countryside. The villages are still small and isolated with farmland for as far as you can see. Later on we saw the multitude of ships dotting the Channel probably looking exactly the same as it did 50+ years ago.
For the first time in my life, I flew over East Germany, the Czech Rep
ublic, Hungary and Romania
. Back in the years of the Cold War there was no way an American Air Force plane would even think about flying through this part of Europe except in times of conflict, and now it’s an everyday thing. Amazing how things change over the course of a career.
Flying over Turkey was interesting… it is a very mountainous country (at least the way we flew) and not much civilization. We didn’t see the airfield we were flying into until the very last minute, even though it was supposedly by a large city… Not sure if it was the haze or what, you just couldn’t see many city lights, even after the sun went down.
Once again we encountered a failure of logistics. Got there just as their bus drivers all went home. We waited almost and hour and a half on the ramp waiting for a ride to the base hotel we were staying at. Of course that meant we arrived after all the on base food establishments, save the bowling alley, were closed, and that only lasted about an hour. Some things never change.. unfortunately over the course of my career, the support aspect of the Air Force has taken a tremendous nose dive. We do more with less and less every day, and you see it in the erosion of support programs at every military base in the country. We buy great weapons, but you have to get that money from somewhere…
No comments:
Post a Comment