(bryan chaisone) wrote

PACMAN,

Sounds like you have seen alot. Maybe a vacation to Chiangmai,
Thailand will loosen you up. It is a beautiful northern area of
Thailand and prices are very reasonable.

Bryan "the monk" Chaisone

Monk,
One of these days I would enjoy that. Some of our guys went back and
rode the elephants up the mountains, I wish I had gone with them. I
probably already told this story but although did not spend the night,
flew the milk breeding cattle supply to Chiang Mia in a 747F-200 in
87. We could not undersand what ATC was saying when we came off
enroute freq in the middle of the night, so we just stayed over the
lights and shot the published VOR approach. When got on the ground we
realized we probably would have hit the terrain there if we had done
anything else (our worldwide Jepp kits did not show any terrain info
back then.) and here we were looking at high altitude peaks all
around the airport!

Anyway, we were taxing in when all these camera flashes went off, sort
of like the Olympics. We thought they were impressed with our 747.
But these were local farmers who were excited about the cattle. Some
of them started walking between the engines as we were trying to park
so the Captain hit the brakes and shouted to shut them all down, so I
did. I hadn't started the APU yet so we were sitting in the dark
short of the parking spot with no power. Anyway we held an open house
and had a lot of the beautiful farmers 20yr old daughters on board the
upper deck with them. The Capt looks at me as I was going to start
the walk-around and says: "Pac if there's any way to break this
airplane, this is the town to do it in!" We were scheduled to
continue on to HKG. I never did such a careful preflight in my life.
But I couldn't even find one stinking hydraulic drip to write up! I
reported the bad news to my Capt. He says: Guys that's O.K. The
off-loading has taken hours and the ramp agent Roger here (a brit)
doesn't realize we're about to run out of duty time. So we won't tell
him until five minutes before it happens.
Cpt Jim drops the bomb on him, and he panics (this means he gets to
explain to headquarters why the third leg was postponed by 24 hours.)
"Get out of here you Bloaks! Get out of here you Bloaks!"

Cpt Jim looks out at the dozens of cattle bins on the ramp that had to
be re-loaded and says: "But you haven't finished reloading the bins
yet"

Roger says: "I don't care! Get out of here! Were pushing you back
now!"

Damn. We hadn't counted on this.

Screwed out of a beautiful layover. So we left broken hearted.

pac