I've been gone for several days, not that anyone cares :icon_smile: , down to Albuquerque to pick up my daughter and drive her back here to see some doctors about her neck. I haven't flown in 32 years so I was a bit nervous about this trip. I left Spokane WA early Monday morning and it was fine. We passed over Pullman WA and I spotted my Granddaughters house....bright red metal roof with a big WSU painted in gray on it. (She and her housemates had nothing else to do one weekend.)

Just past Pullman the weather turned ugly and we hit storms and high winds even at 33,000 feet. Two ladies in front of me threw up, one of the overhead luggage doors flew open, and the guy next to me simply said "wake me when we get to Salt Lake City." At one point I looked out and saw the right wing about 15 feet above us and thought, "aren't the wings supposed to be fairly level?"

We got over Salt Lake City and damned if we wern't put in a holding pattern. Finally we head in and landed, but I thought we landed in the lake there was so much spray coming up.

The final leg from Salt Lake City to Albuquerque was fine...nice weather. The biggest laugh I got was just as we were landing. The lady in front of me was a school adminstrator and was heading home from a conference in Utah. She said we would be coming in right over a parochial school and we should be able to see the kids....it was lunch time recess. Sure enough, about a block from the end of the runway is the school. And one little kid was his own welcoming committee for Delta Flight 1441. As we went overhead at about 150 feet he proudly gave us the bent arm, one finger salute.

Now that was New Mexico hospitality at it's finest!! :thumbright:

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1975. I was a young L/cpl in an 81mm mortar platoon. Flew off a LSD (landing ship;Dock- not the other one) off the coast of Spain. Ch-46, the Marine version of the Chinook helicopter. Going to spend about a week in the field, no biggy, usual grunt stuff. Aircraft hummin' along nicely as Ch-46's go, probably at about 5000 feet guesstimate. Cruisin' along, remember weapons pointing downward, everyone just sorta lookin' at each other, blah, blah blah. No headsets for us, no internal communication, we're just grunts along for the ride. Power gone. Engines silent. Drop like a stone... CH-46 has the glide ratio of a safe. We just look at each other... I reckon' it to be a macho-jarhead thing, I was scared beyond explanation. About 10 seconds (estimate) prior to impact, on come the engines, aircraft vibrates to the point that all blurs in my vision, noise barely endurable, aircraft suddenly slows rate of descent literally while able to see out the opposite window landscape. This is how I was introduced to the concept of auto-rotation, a methodology employed for "rapid vertical envelopment" to avoid ground-fire, etc. Woulda been kinda nice for the wing-wipers to let us know, IMHO. Scared of flying? Every single (hundreds, and hundreds) time, in every kind of aircraft, and STILL refuse to let anyone know... We're (jarheads) as dumb as we look.

GREAT stories!
I'll have to tell mine.
Back in 2003, my wife's best friend Mary Beth passed away. Bill (MB's husband) wanted us there for the funeral, which was in Montana. I have flown a few times, but my wife had not. I kept telling her how easy and safe it was. Well, we flew from Milwaukee to Minneapolis to our next flight. We had TERRIBLE turbulence the whole way to Minny. People in the plane that flew every week for their jobs said they NEVER saw such a bad flight. The landing......well....we just kind of "dropped" out of the sky, and hit like a rock on the runway. Then, because our flight was running late, we had to RUN to our connecting flight. We JUST made it.........then, we are sitting there, and the captain comes on and says something to the affect of "The piece of equiptment that warns us how close we are to the mountains isn't working, so we have to have a technician fix it". We sit there for about 30 minutes, and the captain comes on again "The tech can't fix it, so we have to leave this plane and go onto the one next to us"........we grab our gear, and just start to leave the plane, when he comes on again "Scratch that idea.......that plane isn't big enough. We are gonna have the tech remove what we need from THAT plane and put it into this one.....please sit back down". So the guy does that, and the captain says "We're ready to leave now!". We get out onto the runway........the co-pilot comes back, looks out the windows, goes back up front........captain comes on again "We have to go back, the wings need de-icing". So....we go back.....they de-ice one side........the de-icing truck drives away......captain again "The de-icing truck ran dry....we have to wait for another one to come out and finish the job". By now, my poor wife is hitting me......over and over and over........we FINALLY took off after that. Over 90 minutes late.
The flight home was PERFECT. We even got back over 30 minutes early.

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