Finishing Well

Hi friends,

I was talking with some friends this weekend and we were just amazed at what a land of contrasts India is in almost every way imaginable. Depending on the angle of your view, you can see tall, glass and steel buildings that would rival any city on earth or you can look lower and see complete chaos that starts with the construction cities that spring up wherever construction is going on. I am willing to bet that your local shopping mall doesn't have cows strolling along the walkways like I saw here in this picture. It is so incongruous at first that you have a hard time processing it and then you realize that much of what you see is like this and that is part of what makes India such an interesting place. As the title of this blog indicates, India seems to have difficulty finishing anything well.

There is a new building in downtown Delhi that was the landmark building for Delhi, the new tallest building in town and what should be a showcase of India's new accomplishments and technology. However, just as the got it finished and moved in, a huge rainstorm typical of the monsoon season here came to town. There were pictures in the paper and on the news of the beautiful structure with it's basement full of water and showing light fixtures in the upper floors that looked more like sprinklers as the water poured into the building. I think I have mentioned before that my bathrooms at my apartment look like they were finished by a 4th grader with a new clay set. Electrical outlets constantly burn out and windows leak water and hot air and noise. Looking down from my apartment, within a few hundred meters you can see where a completely different economy exists. I see poor mothers with 3 or 4 small children working on a street corner and while they work, carrying extremely heavy loads on their heads in 45+ (110+f) temps, their kids are self entertained in the dirt and filthy water along the side of the roads. Many of the kids are naked and are knee-deep in water that I cannot imagine would be good for you in any way, shape or form. As I look for signs of residential abodes, I see canvas tentlike structures, corrugated metal scraps and houses that defy description simply because they are constructed imaginatively out of whatever materials are available including cardboard, plastic bags, large pipes that have not yet been buried by the city departments, sticks, branches, tarps, and any combination of the above. Rocks sometimes serve to hold the roof on because any wind will otherwise blow it away. Within sight of this are homes and buildings that are beautiful, modern, air-conditioned and full of the educated and quickly growing middle and upper-middle class in India. A beautiful 700 series BMW or large Mercedes will mix it up in traffic with small cars, motorized rickshaws (tuk-tuks), bicycle rick-shaws, bicycles, donkeys, tractors, carts pulled by horses, huge diesel busses, motorcycles, little scooters being driven by people who are commuting to jobs with their business clothes on but faces completely covered with a shawl or scarf to block out the terrible dust and smog that pollutes the air. In addition, there will be the occasional herds of sheep and goats and cattle pop up everywhere, feeling completely safe because the cows are sacred in the Hindu religion. All of these are sharing the same space. When you include the fact that drivers of various experience are all over the roads, it gets interesting. Something about the stripes on the highways seem to hypnotize the local drivers to the extent that there are numerous signs reminding the drivers that "Lane driving is Sane driving" because many is the car I have seen cruising down the toll road or other busy highway just splitting the car right down the middle with the lane stripes. When you honk or try to get them to move over it doesn't even seem to penetrate their consciousness. Size means everything so the bus drivers do whatever they want, followed by the larger vehicles like trucks and SUV's while the very small cars and tuk-tuks are left to take whatever is left over. Also, to my surprise, if a driver misses his turn or deems it too far to drive to the next cut out in the highway divider, he will just turn and put his lights on high and drive the wrong direction on your side of the road. Passing on two lane roads is a cross between chicken and dodge-em. The big guy always wins and if the passer misjudges the other vehicle just has to get off the road temporarily until the vehicles pass. When you pull up to an intersection or come onto a major road from a side road, there is no yielding or waiting for a break in the traffic because there is so much traffic the break will never come, so the vehicles coming in from the side just pull out and expect the vehicles on the main road to slow down and allow the other vehicles to enter. So, while we are sometimes in a smaller car, we pull out in front of busses, trucks as well as motorcycles and tuk-tuks almost without discretion. If any of these situations makes you queasy, and riding like this gives you pause for thought, don't come to India. It is truly an everday occurence here.

Many road and other construction projects have been started with the idea that they will be finished by the time the Commonwealth Games are played here in October of this year. I have little faith in the idea that these timings are going to work out. The new Metro transportation system, which is a fancy, elevated train, has already opened but many of the stations are not completed nor are they anywhere near completion. You can see the trains going in one side and coming out the other of a building that looks like it is months away from being done. Glass is not even installed, the floors of the multi-level buildings are empty and you wonder as you see the open stairways how people manage to climb up to the trains without falling many stories down to the street. The whole mall in the picture above would be immediately shut down by OSHA (Occupational Safety and Health Administration for those of you not from the USA). Here, if your child falls in a large, open hole and is injured, you should have been watching your kid, plus, you have many more kids. It's all just a totally different world.

I am enjoying the differences and watching to see how the schedule works out for the games.

We are busy doing charters. I flew every day last week and now the phone just rang and we are off on another charter tomorrow to Ahmadabad. I am getting to see lots of India and some other places, too. Keeps life very interesting and exciting.

Keep in touch. I miss you guys.

Dan

From the cockpit

The pilots are happy and the view is absolutely amazing. Am I dreaming? Am I reading National Geographic? No, I am working and I keep pinching myself because this is so much fun. We had a great time in Georgia and it was because of the beautiful places that we saw but also because of the nice people who set it up for us. Much appreciation has to go to Oksana Gumashvili, who helped us find the nicest restaurants to eat at and the best places to go and set us up for the rafting tour, etc. She is well educated, speaks 3 languages (Georgian, Russian and English) and has a wonderful personality that helped us really enjoy our second trip to Tblisi.

We are back in Delhi now and it's hot, a little humid and threatens to rain every afternoon, but hasn't since we got back. Yesterday while out and about I just wondered how so many people got to this place (somewhere between 17 and 22 million) and find it a place to call home. Since I got back, I think my power has been going off about 25-30 times a day. Of course our apartment complex has backup power but it takes a minute or two to kick on and the air-conditioners have to go through a 2 minute off reboot cycle every time it happens. I finally got control of my TV and internet by buying two separate uninterruptible power supplies to keep that all going. A couple of times I have been on the treadmill in the gym when power went off and you can break a leg, literally. I think someone warned them so now they have huge backup power supplies for the treadmills in the gym. I don't know if America ever went through stages with this kind of growth and expansion but people tell me that the city where I live (Gurgaon) didn't exist 10 years ago and five years ago my apartment complex would have been in the middle of a farmer's field. I think it would be a great place to invest in real estate.

Anyway, Ashish and I are back and trying to catch up on laundry, errands at the bank and other places and get ready for our next trip. Unless something develops, charterwise, we are doing a simple company flight to Hisar, India on Thursday. It's a 25 minute flight Northwest of Delhi and then we will be overnight. Hisar was recently made famous on the International News circuit because there is an Indian doctor there who is doing in-vitro fertilization on elderly couples who want heirs to their family farms, etc. I think it was a 66 year old lady who gave birth to triplets that put the city up in lights. It's our boss's home town and his brother uses the plane a lot to commute back and forth to Delhi and Hisar. They always put us up in one of the company guest houses and it's pretty nice. When you get away from the big city, the TV quality goes down simply because there isn't a need for all the English channels out there so it's down to about 5 channels, one of which is CNN.

Our planned trip to Tel Aviv went to the Global Express because the charter schedule changed on it and it became available for this rather long trip for us. I am disappointed because I was looking forward to that but hey, the pay is the same and now I don't have to worry about flying over the Middle East again and who is trying to shoot at me.

I noticed after our trip over Kandahar last week that it made the news again as a roadside bomb killed 8 people, including 2 American soldiers. When you look down from 8 miles high, you just can't see this stuff and I wish all the political disputes would just go away. I was talking to an educated Indian at a party last night and he said that America equipped the Taliban in the early 80's to fight the Russians so now that they are fighting us we have only ourselves to blame. The only one who has ever conquered these people was an Indian (Sikh) ruler back centuries ago. Since then, no one has ever ruled them. We'll have to see if American firepower and will power can change that or not.

Karen is making progress in Pennsylvania with all the open issues we left behind on this hurry up job in India. The drivers here keep asking about her and the kitties are missing her because they are torturing me for attention.

Hope you all are doing well. I'll be in touch.

Dan

Tblisi Summer trip 2010

Tblisi, Georgia, July 2010.

What a gorgeous place this is in the summer time. This is a photo I took with my own camera in the evening from a walkway overlooking the river towards downtown and also the tower that stands up on the mountain overlooking Tblisi. The evening temperatures are just perfect, not requiring sweaters or shorts, just perfect summertime temps for strolling around and catching a bite to eat or whatever. We went to the World Cup semi-final between Germany and Spain and there was a restaurant that had set up a projection screen with the game going on while they served food and drinks outside. During the halftime show a group of teenagers from one of the schools in the city came by and entertained us with a dance routine set to good old Neil Diamond songs from the USA. It was just a great evening and with our favored team, Spain, winning, it was a great time. Another evening we went to a local Georgian restaurant where they do the local folklore dances complete with costumes and so on. The food and the entertainment were great and it sure is a lot different from what you could find around downtown Chattanooga or Pittsburgh, the last two US cities that I have spent any quality time in.

Then, we got up one morning and headed up the same road where we went snow skiing last January, only this time we turned off on a dirt road and headed for a river where there is the flow required to make a nice spot to go river-rafting. It's about a 1:30 ride on the river with the highest rapids being a class 2.5 or so. But, in the heat, the water is cold and it was a pretty good workout to take this trip. Afterwards our tour guide, Andro, the same guy we skiied with in January, had arranged for some cooks to come out and have a nice cookout with food and drinks and all. It was outstanding fun and so cool. Our little busload of people contained people from Estonia, Britain, India, Japan, America (me), and Lithuania, as well as the local Georgians, so it was a very diverse crowd and quite a good time. Of course as we rode back down into Tblisi in our un-airconditioned bus in the hot afternoon, we were all just about to die of the heat. But, when we got home and took a cool shower and cleaned up, it was definitely worth it. I have river rafted for years not far from my home in Tennessee, USA, and it was definitely higher rapids and a scarier ride than this but just the exotic place that I was and the international crowd made this a very pleasant memory. Of course, I am now nursing a little sore muscle action, as well as some sunburn - but still worth it, and ready to go again.

So, it's been a really nice second visit to Tblisi and we are now thinking of either going back to Delhi tomorrow or Tuesday and that means that our visit will soon be over for this time. Now it will be back to our work a day routine and waiting for our next exciting adventure of flight on the other side of the world.

I hope you are enjoying the photos and stories. I will try to keep you updated and send out another batch of photos from this trip which will include a lot more to see than the few that are posted on the blog.

Take care,

Dan

Side trip to Baku

Hello from the Western Shore of the Caspian Sea at a beautiful city called Baku in Azerbaijan. When our company does the business trips to Tblisi, Georgia, we sometimes have business interests strong enough to take us to Baku. On this particular trip we spent just one full day in Baku and I took full advantage of this trip to a city that I had never been to before. At our hotel in Tblisi the marketing and tour director is a woman named Oksana and she has friends in Baku, plus she speaks Russian, Georgian, and English so she could really help us with what we needed when we got to Baku, where there isn't a lot of English spoken. Even the tower controller in this part of the world has such a heavy Russian accent that I would defy you to understand what they are saying - very challenging.

Anyway, while we were in Baku our company arranged for a car and driver to take us wherever we wanted to go. We took a few minutes to eat lunch and then went to Oksana's friends, who just happen to operate a travel agency and were only too happy to take us to the Old City part of Baku, which is built like a fortress with high walls and gates and so on. It is a very old city with a rich history and so cool to see. It was quite hot as even though the Caspian Sea is a fresh water lake, it is located right at sea level, which means that it gets hot this time of year. With all of our walking through the Old City, we were pretty much burned up with the heat. But, as you all know, I love going to new places and seeing new things I haven't seen before so we continued our tour despite the 40+ (100F) temps and quite high humidity near the water. This is a part of the world that I have never known much about. Azerbaijan used to be a part of the former USSR and has a very high Moslem population. The city itself seems to be quite prosperous and busy and you wouldn't really know what the culture or heritage is just by looking out the window, as it looks like any modern city and has a tremendous growth spurt going on right now. It's quite close to Turkey so there is a strong Turkish flavor to the culture and to the city.

Anyway, we got our city tour, ate some wonderful local food at a great restaurant that our tour guides told us about. I ordered a pizza with a Mediterranean twist and it was wonderful.

So now, get our your maps and see where this place is. We saw two Gulfstreams parked on the ramp, one Gulfstream 4 and one G-5, so there is some money around these parts as they had the local registration number for Azerbaijan on the tail. It starts with 4K-.

The airport people spoke almost no English, including our handler so it was so convenient to have Okasana to translate, I don't actually believe we would have gotten through the day with just English. And the people we were dealing with in Azerbaijan kept calling us and they would try to talk to me but then just ask me to hand the phone to her so we could actually figure out what needed to be done and what the schedule was for the day. I guess if we keep coming here that I will need to brush up on my Russian language skills. So far, nyet.

Will give another blog shortly with pictures from Tblisi, which is so beautiful this time of year, just amazing.

Dan

Over a war zone!

Hello from over Afghanistan!

I never really thought that I would be regularly flying over a war zone. It truly does seem strange to me that our dispatchers are able to call and get permission for us to fly over Pakistan and Afghanistan. The permission numbers have to be repeated on the air and are very long, about 20 different letters and numbers. Once this is read to the controller and he verifies, then we can proceed into the airspace over these countries. You see Kandahar on the news all the time, and it's not usually good. When we are flying at 40,000 feet (or 39,000 over Afghanistan, anything over 39,000 is considered military airspace so we have to come down) it sure makes me think about what my options are if we have to do an unscheduled landing. But, since we now have regular business interests in Tblisi, Georgia, we will be flying this route regularly for years to come. Even the passengers are curious and want to look out the window and see what it looks like down where terrorists hide out and where it could be very hostile if we had to land unexpectedly. So far, our Citation has been a flawless performer and doesn't seem to know that it's over what could be hostile territory if we weren't up at these stratospheric altitudes. The trip across was a little shorter this time because the headwinds were much less this time of year then they were last January. But, our dispatch tried a different handler this time and it turned out to be a mistake. Last time we had used Universal Aviation out of Houston and things went flawlessly. Our turnaround fuel stop in Iran had gone perfectly and we were back in the air in less than 45 minutes. This time they acted like they didn't know we were coming and they wanted cash for the fuel. We were able to hand them the rather large sum of money but they came back from the bank and said that they couldn't pump the fuel because the bank wanted only NEW money. Ours looked new and still had the bills stuck together like new, but they weren't quite new enough and so, even with cash, we were in trouble. A couple of phone calls later and suddenly the gas began to flow. But, then there were other problems with the money issues and so eventually they parked the fuel truck in front of the plane so that we couldn't move until it was resolved. They also hadn't filed our flight plans for us and so that required another 30 minutes with ATC in the tower. All in all, our guys waited in the sun for about 1:45 before we got everything organized and back flying again. I have to say that I got a little hostile with dispatch because there is enough stress flying over war zones without trying to figure out all the details yourself on the ground with cash that isn't good enough because the company tried to save a nickel on the handler. I told them that it kind of defeats the purpose of taking your own plane if you miss all the deadlines for the meetings that you set up. Since it looks like we will be taking this trip regularly we got the business cards and phone numbers of guys we can call on the ground before we leave to verify that it's all been done.

Anyway, we got to Tblisi to find out that they hadn't really done their job here, either. Last time they had set up a special line for us to get through customs and handled the fees for everything beforehand. This time they didn't even want to take our bags because the handler had told them not to give the VIP service, which is more expensive. It's a long ways to the terminal and that won't happen again. Once inside, the guys had to pay for their own visas and so on.

But, we did arrive safely and are enjoying the summer weather in Tblisi. I guess Hillary Clinton had been here the day before in a show of support for Georgia over Russia in their dispute about who is going to control Georgia. Georgia got kind of upset about all this and actually tore down a 58 year old statute of Stalin that had been erected under the Soviet regime because I guess Stalin was born in some city in Georgia. It kind of reminded me of when they tore down the statute of Saddam Hussein in Beirut when American invaded Iraq a few years ago only this statute came down at night without a lot of fanfare.

We had planned on going and doing a lot of outdoor activities while here but our guide is gone to the mountains and is out of contact so we don't know. We have scheduled another whitewater rafting trip with someone else just in case. When you think of the climate and weather here, you have to think a lot like Colorado, which can be very pleasant in the summer time, too. Tblisi is only 1600 feet above sea level so it is hot in the afternoon, but not far away are mountains that rise to well over 10,000 feet.

We are for sure going to Israel now, just a couple of days after we get back from Tblisi. I think we will be in Delhi for two days and then depart for Israel. I am looking forward to this flight. The last time I was in Israel was 1995 and we flew in a commercial jet, so this will be such a high for me to fly over the "Holy Land" in our corporate jet. Kind of brings my two worlds together in a unique way, since I am trained as a minister but have been a professional pilot for over 30 years. International flying is challenging in ways that you cannot imagine in the USA, but in return the rewards are also amazing as you see sights and sounds that are so different from home. I was again reminded of how different it is as we flew across very hostile territory and spoke with controllers whose accents were very difficult to understand on equipment that seems to be horribly outdated and in need of replacement. Anyone who has flown over Cuba will understand what I mean. And, then you have to proceed with nonunderstandable commands and requests and things like permission flyover numbers and radios that keep breaking up and are so static filled that you cannot make out what they are saying. Sometimes you will fly for 100 or more miles without hearing from anyone or getting a reply on your radios while over hostile territory. It's just quite different, that's for sure. Some of the stations are just so far away and then I think sometimes the controllers just go for coffee or something and don't answer for 20 minutes or so. But, at least over Afghanistan again, we had a nice American military controller. When I asked him where he was from he said Seattle. He said there are 24 guys controlling all of the country and they are doing it without a single radar scope. Keeping track of airplanes like they do over the North Atlantic with position reports and estimates for fixes and so on. He said it's very different. I can only imagine what their lives are like on the ground, too, with trying to not get blown up on your way to work and so on. Since American controllers are required to retire at age 55 in the states, some of these guys are probably my age and just trying to get a few more years in before they hang it up.

We got a nice hotel this time in Tblisi and I will put up some photos from the trip plus some of the things we are doing here. I have got to bring Karen as they have these huge sections of downtown that are dedicated to just selling your stuff and it's like a huge yard sale but the stuff is so cool. Today I bought a working, wind-up phonograph player with many records. First of all, it's in great condition, but just the fact that it works and is so old is going to be so cool to have at the house. Maybe I will sell it on e-bay, who knows. There is artwork and antique silver and antique placeware, etc. A knowledgeable person could surely do well here, I am dangerous but really enjoy seeing all the old stuff. Now my windup phonograph will be my treasure this time.

Too cool!

Well, I hope everyone is doing well. It's a big world out there. All my life I had wanted to go to one of the General Conference sessions for our church and it's always been on the other side of the world for me. This time it was in Atlanta, Georgia (USA) and I was on the other side of the world, so I still didn't get to go. Oh well, maybe next time.

Take care and we'll give you more photos and stories soon.

Dan