Lèse Majesté

Aircraft maintenance you can trust

Gotta love this sight on the Airbus A320 on which I flew home from Portland yesterday:

Yep, that's duct tape holding up the luggage bin door. Right above the emergency exits too - can you imagine if it fell off and blocked the exits at the wrong time? And just to make it more fun, I snapped this while we were waiting for mechanics after the first takeoff attempt was abandoned, leading to a return to the gate. That turned out to be caused by low oil levels in the drive unit for a generator on one of the engines, discovered as we were accelerating down the runway for takeoff.  Eventually they added more oil and we departed an hour late.

Gives you confidence in the maintenance department, doesn't it?

Day 10

Seattle again... Slept in to give my cold some rest, did laundry, and went to the Museum of Flight. Lots of interesting and historical aircraft there. Just a few snapshots:

That last one is the Gossamer Albatross II, the backup to the man-powered aircraft which successfully flew across the English Channel in 1979. The display designers must have had some fun - they hung it ahead of and above an SR-71. An aircraft that flew very slowly at very low altitude, ahead and above of the world's fastest and highest-flying operational manned aircraft - nice...

Best part of the day was dinner with a former high school classmate and his wife. David is one of the few people from my teens that I have stayed in tough with. He cooked up  a delicious meal. They've lived in France in the past and served the meal in a French sequence: a hearty lamb stew on pasta (orso, I think), a salad, and a cheese course. Pascale wanted some dessert as well, so she brought out a couple flavors of sorbet. A lovely evening with the two of them and their cats.

Understatement of the year

Quoted on Forbes.com:

"The state of Alaska has many active volcanoes," said Alaska Airlines spokeswoman Mariann Lindsey. "We try to avoid them because they affect airplane engines."