Good evening,
I'm sitting upstairs in Palacio Loyd, and decided it was high-time to write. I was SUPPOSED to be in pre-departure crew rest today, before flying off to the majestic untamed reaches of Alaska, but some asshole in scheduling decided it's more important for me to be certified in all the nuclear-end-of-the-world shit and be able to fly a plane through a mushroom cloud. I understand how priorities work, and I admit it would be kind of cool knowing the Top Secret inner workings of how the nuclear holocaust is supposed to play out, but I was gonna go hiking in Alaska! Now that has to wait an unknown number of weeks!
Despite the disappointments in scheduling, I'm excited to say I have been flying. I have another 50-somethin' hours down on paper. Yesterday I was to refuel test flights over the Gulf, but the receivers cancelled and we already had 100k of fuel loaded which ruled out patterns at MacDill (or Miami like I initially suggested). We had to fly at least an hour away to burn down to landing weight so I was like "fuck it, let's go to Charleston". So we did. I went over the bridge, I saw the aircraft carrier, and looked at the church steeples poking through the historic parts of the city; all things that I have done dozens of times visiting aunts and cousins, only this time I peaced-out early and was back home in Florida an hour later.
A few days prior to that, on the 26th of April, I had a nice 8.1hr good-deal-Friday mission flying presidential support, which was AMAZING and I can't wait to write about it! Only... Oh, this is awkward... Well, it's just... I can't talk about it. Yeah, I know I joke a lot about how things are classified but I'm not kidding this time. I could've been refueling a flying strip club for the president and I'd still be honor-bound (read: NDA-bound) to keep my lips sealed and you and the rest of the serfdom would have no idea. I will say, I wasn't refueling a flying strip club for Donald Trump (BUT OMG COULD YOU IMAGINE?) Anyway, I still took off from the Sunshine State and went to some undisclosed location and did stuff and was back home in Florida 8 hours later.
A week prior to that I had my first trip! My Dollar Mission! It also happened to coincide with my first time flying in SEVEN months, so many antics were to be had on all fronts. I hesitate to admit that the pranks were lazy at best (a glitter bomb? really? am I twelve? Now my wife has to clean that up.) But while the pranks were lacking the shore excursions were NOT. You see, while on the road the copilot is designated as the "Cruise Director". The AC is always tired of running the show, and officers never trust the enlisted with the entire funness of a trip which rules out the Booms, so the Cruise Director duties go to Co by default.
And cruise-direct I did. We hit real New England breweries in Portsmouth, the Salem Witch Museum, and when I finally got comfortable with my position I delightfully informed the crew at 35,000ft over the North Atlantic on Day 3 that we would be going to New York City next. So we did, and now I've been to New York City. The next day I went to Boston. C'est la vie d'un voyageur. One day I left Tampa, traveled to some new places, and was back home in Florida a week later.
The quick-paced travel can really fuck with the senses of time and space. We're trained from an early age to think the world is so massive that even your relatives a few states over are a distance away from you that's equally high in time and money. Of course the revolution of air travel changed things from the way it used to be, but even still if you want to be in Maine in two hours you need a pretty good reason to justify spending a grand on tickets. For the most part it's putting up the airfare once or twice a year and the rest of the time putting in days-worth of driving. For the average person, Charleston is 10 hours or $600 away from you. New York is 16 hours or $800 away from you. If you live in Texas or Alaska, good luck.
And then there's people like me, people who get paid to fly. Charleston is only an hour away; it's an afternoon escapade in which you can eat your lunch while watching the Ravenel Bridge, which you used to run across as a high schooler, fall beneath wing. It takes twice as long to drive to New York from Maine than it does to fly to Maine from Florida. But to pilots, a day in Manhattan is only one good deal in scheduling, one flight, and one ambitious Cruise Director away. Seeing downtown Boston is as hard as deciding if you'd rather stay in the hotel and watch movies on an off-day, or see downtown Boston.
When I moved to Texas for Pilot Training, I remember seeing the massive windmill farms about halfway between San Antonio and Laughlin. I remember seeing them a few weeks later when we went to SAN for New Years, and the hour and half of driving that separated me from them. Then I had my first flight in the T-6, and it took about 7 minutes to get to the MOA where Captain Jones ripped us into a cloverleaf, I remember looking up (down) through the canopy, and seeing the same windmill farm.
I'll leave you with the tale of TUDEP. Everyday when we flew out of New England, we'd go halfway across the Atlantic and catch a flight of F-15s coming home. Each flight was long, in fact we could've landed in Europe in less time than it took to go halfway and come back to New England due to winds. Each day we started the oceanic portion of our journey heading east and picking up our path of Lat-Longs that told Gander when and where we'd be as we did our work outside of radar coverage, and then we'd come back. About half of the days that point started or ended at TUDEP.
The first time we did this, as I was in the cockpit alone loading the flight plan while the AC was doing the walk-around and the boom was preflighting the APU, I realized something as I punched in "T-U-D-E-P" into the FMS. I had been there before! Not only that, but I was extremely familiar with the place.
TUDEP is a GPS waypoint about 100 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. Because of the way the winds flow and the great-circle geography of Europe and America, this waypoint is one of the several starting or ending points of the aerial highway across the Atlantic. Due to it's importance in transatlantic travel and my passion for everything-flying in high school and college, for a while I've known quite a lot about this waypoint. I know more about this point in space than I do some countries. It's at about 51°10' North and 53°14' West. It's commonly used as both the starting point for the easterly tracks, and the ending point for the westerly tracks. Hundreds of planes fly over this spot on Earth everyday using it as a standard routing. And I've been there more than once, even before becoming a pilot, most recently on a plane to Switzerland while in college.
And from the cockpit of a KC-135, I visited TUDEP again. I looked out the window at the endless range of sea, clouds, and icebergs; the same view I saw many years ago. A few hours later after turning around I saw it again. I've been to TUDEP, a landless and random yet traceable point in space over Earth's surface, more times than I have been to New York City. And on the last day of the trip, I passed over 51°10'N 53°14'W again, for probably the ninth or tenth time in my life, and was back home in Florida a few hours later.
Until next time...
