Sunday, December 11, 2011

I Can't Get There From Here?

Dueling Dealing With Living With "Small Market" Airports...


This morning one of my regular readers commented with a question about my whereabouts this weekend. I had already planned on commenting on my personal pre-holiday travel situation...once I calmed down a little from the trama...by doing a blog posting...so here it is.

Yes Ed, I was supposed to be flying back in Knoxville this weekend to take care of some business relating to the house we own there, but the Airlines, in their infinite wisdom (or lack thereof), changed my plans an hour and one half before I was supposed to depart our "Tulsa International Airport" yesterday evening.

But since you know me, I can't answer a question directly, and thus I take this opportunity to digress and talk about my history of flying while ending up telling the story of why I ended up spending this weekend cleaning out my garage and organizing my office in Tulsa, Oklahoma (airport code TUL) rather than beating the crap out of a guy that calls himself a "Realtor" and hiring a new contractor to do some work at our empty, unrented house in Knoxtown, Tennessee (airport code TYS)

Here goes...

First you have to understand that I spent the first 17 years of my life with my only contact with aircraft being looking at them in magazines, watching them on TV, and building them in the form of plastic and balsa wood models and flying them around our front yard and on over at the local elementary school ballfield. 

Don't get me wrong. 

I was absolutely CRAZY about everything having to do with airplanes, but I just didn't do much flying since my family elected to drive on vacation like most other families did in the 1960's and 1970's.

Wait..my dad--the Army Test Pilot--drove me out to our local airfield and took me up in a Cessna 172 with another pilot for an hour flight around our little town of Ozark, Alabama including flying over our house and "wagging our wings" to our neighbors.

But then things changed drastically at the age of 18 when I joined the Navy Reserve through the NROTC program at Georgia Tech and the summer after my Freshman year President Jimmy Carter sent me off on my first "Summer Cruise."

It was a "Cruise" all right, but not a "Carnival Cruise Line Cocktail In Both Hands" type of cruise, and the process of getting to the boat Ship was in and of itself an adventure I'll never get over or forget.

To put this adventure in context, you have to understand that other than the aforementioned birthday flight in 1968 I had never been in an airplane actually flying in the air for more than a single hour.

Now fast forward our story to August 1978 and I find myself standing at the Delta Airlines ticket counter with my Mother and Father presenting a government issued voucher to the ticket agent allowing me to board a flight from Dothan, Alabama and heading to the old (and now torn down) Hartsfield Terminal Building in Atlanta, Georgia.

Wait...come to think of it that wasn't actually my first visit to Hartsfield Airport...because my Dad took us over to the Terminal Building on one of our driving trips up to West Virginia to visit his parents back in the late 1960's and we went up on the "observation deck" to watch the Douglas DC-3's and Lockheed Tristars take off and land.

Better entertainment than going to a Circus or the County Fair to me.

So any way, with much pomp and circumstance and a few tears from my Mother, I boarded my first commercial airline flight heading ultimately to of all places...

SUBIC BAY, PHILLIPINES.

Now don't get me wrong here ladies and gentlemen, I was a quite well traveled youth having been driven to New Jersey and ridden a train from there into New York City when I was in Kindergarten.

I'd ridden in a car with my family not once but TWICE from Alabama to Pasadina, California before I was High school aged.

We took another trip to Salt Lake City, Utah and numerous other eastern regional trips to places like Washington DC  and Manassas, Virginia in our Motorhome.

"I'd been around"...

I thought.

But...

This "flying half way around the planet" stuff was something quite different.

Picture Jim Nabors character Gomer Pyle.

"Shazam" was an understatement when considering my situation, in my considered Redneck opinion.

Speeding this story up, Delta loaded up my luggage and my silly 18 year old butt on a DC-9 in Dothan, hauled me to Atlanta, managed to not allow me to get lost in the process and put me on a giant Lockheed L-1011 and  dumped me back on the ground in San Francisco, California...

all in less than about eight hours as I recall.

Then the non-stop adventure continued.

After stumbling around the airport there in San Fran I managed to find some guy in a Government Issued uniform who proceeded to direct me to an "area" where a bunch of other bewildered "Midshipmen"--also mostly on their first flights--were sequestered awaiting the next segment of our journey to begin.

I guess the first thing I learned while being on active duty in the Navy was the art of "hurry up and waiting."

There in that room with those rows of attractive upolstered yet impossibly hard seats we waited until the very last person on the very last plane ever arriving that day in California came into the room. Or at least that is what it seemed like.

Next they hearded us into some olive drab Military issue busses,  and proceeded to drive us across the mountains to a place called Travis Air Force Base.

Then, after some more waiting...serveral hours worth--something they call "Mustering" in the Military-- we finally got to see and get on the giant airplane which would haul us on the next leg of our journey...Alaska.

This time Lockheed was also the manufacturer, but the airframe was a lumbering C-141 "Starlifter"...

outfitted not with passenger accommodations but with "jump seats."

In having "jump seats" what it really means was the plane was set up for short duration missions "in theater" where the troups would have combat gear and parachutes and not required to make the SIX HOUR flight we faced.

Instead of rows and rows of seats facing forward like you would find in a bus or commercial airliner, this monster sized plane had a row of seats made out of nylon webbing running down the sides of each wall and then two similarly constructed rows of seats running down the middle facing  back to back.

The short duration design apparently didn't matter to the Air Force because they were just hauling Navy Midshipmen...

But hey, they did have the handy "kitchen module" so they could serve a hot metal pan of food in flight and there was the "pooper module" up in front of that contained things and conditions even I refuse to describe here on this blog relating to bathroom sanitation.

So they literally threw our duffle bags and extra suitcases into the back of the plane, strapped everything down with cargo nets, hearded us all on board and off we flew into "the wild blue yonder."

All tongue in cheek humor and sarcastic commentary aside, being young and strong and healthy at that time  I found that leg of that 27 hour trip to be the best part of the sojurn.

They gave each of us the chance to come up into the cockpit and spend ten or fifteen minutes sitting in a little seat between the three man flight crew just looking out at the horizon and around the instrument panels.

Since we were flying to the north west we were basically chasing the sunset, and it was a clear day with various layers of thin clouds hanging here and there and during my visit to the cockpit I remember seeing the sun just hanging on the horizon casting an orange and yellow glow on everything as we flew over the mountains of Washington state.

Hours later, Alaska is and was a blur in my memory because it was night when we got there and it was still night when we left after refueling the Jet and laying around on the floor in the under capacity "departure lounge" waiting on whatever it is that the military "logistics" people have to have happen before you do whatever it is that you could probably have done a couple of hours earlier if it wasn't for waiting on the "Paperwork."

We blasted off on that plane finally, now heading on the next leg of our adventure...

Yokota Air Base...

JAPAN.



   

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