| Fly The Friendly Skies
Posted: 5/20/2008 8:52:36 AM | When man first looked at the flying creatures in his world, he longed to join them in the endless, clear blue skies, to have no earthly constraints or boundaries and eat them. Through man’s ingenuity and evolutionary intellect he accomplished this task along with being able to transport alcohol to get completely inebriated while making passes at beautiful women employed to entice the male gender to fly the friendly skies which are smoggy and brown and wearily depressing especially in reference to LA where people must live in their cars for 7 hours at a time during commutes. Hmmm maybe there should be freeway stewardesses handing out drinks there?
When anyone speaks of flying, I always remember the worst flight I ever took. I was coming back from Connecticut and had to catch a connecting flight in Pittsburgh. I was flying a defunct local airline named Allegheny. It was a 20 minute flight to Youngstown airport which in actuality was some farmer’s fallow field he never planted. There was a building there but I never saw a human in the facilities. Once a herd of heifers wandered through looking for grass but did not stay long after they consumed the few lobby plants that were there.
When I went to board my plane I noticed it was a propeller passenger plane seating about 75-100 people. I might not have had reservations about the flight but seeing some garage grease monkey using a tire patching kit to fix the front nose tire and inflating it with a bicycle pump really bothered me!
I boarded the plane with 2 other passengers and took a wing seat which of course was not a particularly good place to sit when all was said and done. The captain came on over the intercom and proceeded to say he was flying us to some location in Ohio and he was looking at a map at that moment and using his sextant to figure out the direction. We had begun to taxi down the runway when he exclaimed rather loudly to his chagrin that he had dropped his bottle of Jim Beam on the control panel and it was sparking and smoking like Hell. The co-pilot also chimed in with a question to the pilot about “What are all these dial thingies to right down here?” Too late to run for the door which I found out later could not be sealed properly and had to be duct taped from outside!
We got into the air and climbed to a high elevation when it became apparent the AC was not working. The cabin temperature began to rise rapidly and breathing began difficult. The small AC units above my head were blowing volumes of hot air into me face. Anxiety began to set in and I was starting freak out. The person sitting 1 seat forward and the opposite row from me, opened a notebook and I could see she started writing her last will and testament. I ALMOST forgot about what was transgressing when she started writing about who she was leaving the small torture chamber and her collection of cat of nine tails to when the voice of the captain snapped me back to reality.
He apologized for the AC being out and kindly offered anyone having problems a shot of his whiskey “on the house”. I almost took him up on that offer when I looked out the window and saw oil spewing across the engine fuselage. This was not a “LITTLE” oil, it was quite an impressive amount. I thought I had spied some little green creature sitting upon the engine but upon closer examination I realized someone had blown their nose on the window and it had never been cleaned off.
Twenty minutes can be an eternity. The Captain came on the intercom again and said his name was Captain “Ape Shit” Smith and that he was a former biplane pilot and since there were only a few of us onboard, he wished to show us the famous maneuver that gave him that nickname. After the plane had performed 3 barrel rolls and a loop the loop, I saw my life pass before my eyes and part of it was being read by Walter Cronkite and he was asking David Brinkley about the part I was in which I found naked in a room with a bowl of chocolate pudding by my 4th grade teacher for some odd reason.
When he announced we were landing I could feel my sphincter loosen somewhat and I consciously realized I started breathing again. As we touched down, we hit the runway so hard I thought the front tire had blown which in all actuality could have happened when you are using a 4 year old, bald tire taken from a 1968 Buick. Fortunately it was just a wayward goat that had wandered onto the runway to eat the grass growing up through the pavement.
They pulled the duct tape from the door as we 3 three passengers were scrambling like insane people to it in a desperate attempt to get the Hell out of the plane. Me being the gentleman that I am, placed the woman in front of me in a full nelson and pile drived her into the carpet which I noticed curiously had been autographed by Wilbur and Orville Wright. I also took her business card from her suit jacket since women with torture chambers and cat of nine tails are hard to come by, well at least back then they were!
As I exited the plane, Captain ‘Ape Shit” Smith stood there thanking me for flying Allegany. It was the first time I have ever punched a senior citizen standing, balanced on their walker in the face. | |
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