O M D B

As-Salaam.

I've spent about a third of my last 36 hours in the air. Building those airline hours. Today was a long and shitty one, albeit fun at times and just plain chill and relaxing for all of it. We were supposed to fly at about 1300, 9am alert, so naturally we all went to bed between midnight and one last night. But someone called in sick (believe it or not even Air Force pilots can play that card) and we were alerted by surprise at 5:30am, taking off in less than three hours. It didn't seem that bad until we discovered it was over an 8 hour flight. So we'd be bringing all three meals for the day on the plane with us, and we found out about it at the last minute.

It was an entertaining and secret-ish mission however, with the French. They were quite entertaining. Sipping their pinot and smoking their gauloises during AR while flying with their knees. I'm sure there's a clever baguette joke out there but I'm honestly just too tired to work for it. They were only twenty minutes late. We thought that was pretty good since that meant they had to have taken off within an hour or so of their scheduled takeoff time. We had 8 hours to come up with jokes on the French but I can't remember any of them, something about berets. Just use your imagination.

Yesterday was a great flight. We got tasked to do training over Muscat with the Omani Air Force. I realized almost immediately that this would put us directly over Dubai twice. I was working the radios all day so I had a little more control of the sight-seeing,

"Muscat control, what is the lowest you'll let us fly? FL200? Yeah we request that."

"Muscat control, request direct Tango Uniform Delta India Sierra. For uhhhhhhh... weather."

"What's at TUDIS?" Traver asked.

"The Palm Island."

So we got our cool pictures of the Palm and the Burj Khalifa from the cockpit, and now I've flown over Dubai. I had my music plugged into my Bose A20's, and had all the songs playing that Karen and I listened to driving through the skyscrapers on the 18-lane Sheikh Zayed freeway on our honeymoon.

It entirely felt like it wasn't even a day at work, deployed. I woke up at 4am excited. I was going to fly over Dubai, I was going to see a God's eye view of Muscat, the Al-Hajar Mountains of Oman, and I was going to refuel the entirety of the Omani Air Force (it's only six planes). It's days like this that really serve as a reminder to why it's worth it being a pilot. I could not have paid enough money to experience that. If Karen and I went on a trip to Dubai again, and there was some excursion package out of Skydive-Dubai or whatever where you paid money to fly a plane over the Burjes and the Palms, and then cruised over the dunes to Muscat, we'd do it!

But that doesn't exist, unless you're an Air Force pilot. Then it's just a Tuesday.