Airplanes
I meant to wrap up some 2006 items here over the Christmas break, but the network connection this web server is plugged into was down the entire time.

Anyway, last June, during the Carp airshow, I stumbled about a large FirstAir scrap plane. I was very curious, so I went next to it, reached up, and pulled on the handle to open a hatch. Couldn't see inside. Little did I know, the hatch on the starboard side could only be closed from the inside. Feeling bad about leaving it open, I went to the other side, opened the other hatch, and tried jumping in. You have to understand, floor level was at my eye level, and there was nothing below the bottom of the hatch; suffice it to say it was very difficult to jump/climb into. I did it eventually, getting my perfectly new white clothes very dirty in aluminum dust in the process.

The plane was an Hawker Siddeley 748 (HS748), originally made by Avro. The inside of the fuselage was sad. What is now a pile of junk used to soar the sky. Now, it was just sitting in an aviation field, stripped of anything valuable, slowly rotting away. I eventually closed the hatches and left. It was a neat experience.

As I was swimming tonight and thinking about this, I had a bit of a daydream. I was a passenger on a 767 flying near Ottawa, and both of the pilots were disabled for some reason. No one else knew how to fly a plane, and since this was my dream, I decided to take charge. It was weird, because I had visualized the whole thing, from contacting the airport, to asking for a diversion to Mirabel where there would be less chance of hitting something, to asking for a pilot plane that could lead a glide path. Ten minutes of this before I interrupted myself! Bizarre!