Learning to Fly

WOW! What a day of flying! We had to take 3 flights in order to get to a place that isn’t that far from where we started. That’s enough flying to turn Jandiz upside down. First we had a 6am flight from Sitka to Juneau on a Boeing 737. The flight lasted a whole 27 minutes. By far the shortest flight I have been on that actually landed where and when it was supposed to. We picked up passengers in Juneau and continued on to Anchorage in the same 737. In Anchorage we deplaned the 737 and switched airlines to one that had service to Kodiak on a Dash 8. This is where things got interesting. If you fly out of Anchorage on a small prop plane THERE IS NO SECURITY. That’s right – no TSA, no metal detectors, no x-ray machines, no nothing. Nada - zilch. You check in at the counter as usual, get your boarding pass, go down the escalator, and you are at the gate. All you have to do is show your library card and your boarding pass and you are good to go. The ironic thing is that from the moment you enter the terminal to the time you pass through the gate, a woman on a loudspeaker keeps repeating that the terror alert is code orange.

Speaking of flying, I have an interesting flight coming up next week. I’ll be flying from Kodiak to Dutch Harbor. The interesting thing about flying into Dutch Harbor is that THERE IS NO AIRPORT. Their “airport” is actually an emergency landing strip with a large mountain at each end and water on the sides. That design allows the pilots to have a large margin of error. This landing strip also intersects with the main street in the town, so when a plane is landing or taking off they have to block off Main Street - railroad crossing style! Wait, don’t go surfing for porn yet, there is more interesting info about flying into Dutch Harbor. You see, no airport means no instruments so everything is done visually. Not too big of a deal on a clear day, but in Dutch Harbor it rains at least 280 days out of the year and is cloudy for the remaining 85. So, as the pilot approaches the landing strip he radios to someone on the ground and asks if they can see the runway. This “someone” is usually a high school student on summer vacation or a retired WWII vet. If “someone” can’t see the runway the pilot will either circle and wait for the strip to become visible, or turn around an go back to the airport of origin in hopes of trying again the next day. Well, more variables = more exciting travel = more attendance at AA meetings for The Captain. Cheers.