From the heart of East Central India

Hi friends,
I am sitting in my guesthouse room in Raigahr, India, where we have a huge steel mill. It is thundering and raining heavily outside. We tried to get in here yesterday morning from Delhi and it was raining heavily then so we couldn't get in and instead went to our developing steel mill and power plant in Angul, India, just about 130 km (100 miles) Southwest of Bhubaneshwar, which is along the Eastern coast of India quite a ways South of Kolkutta. Yesterday our first stop was in Ranchi and the trip from Delhi paralleled the Himalayas for quite a ways. There was a high cloud deck and then it was clear in the middle so you could clearly see all the peaks around Katmandu. I am sure I actually laid my eyes on Everest this time, although the peaks are so tightly packed together and almost unrecognizable individually that I can't be sure which one it was. We were at 41,000 feet and about 120 miles away and I felt like I could reach out and touch them. Now I really have to make a point to take a weekend off and go to Nepal, although they tell me it's not a very pleasant place to be these days with all the incredible growth and the attraction of all kinds of people, good and bad, it makes it not a good vacation spot like it might have been before, but I still just want to go over and then take one of the tours that takes you up over Everest. I will have my camera and I will get some photos of the highest place on this earth. Too bad it's in such a tough political spot.
Our smaller jet, the Citation CJ, which I will be flying again here soon, is in America right now, having flown across the North Atlantic and is now occupying space in Duncan Aviation's hangar in Lincoln, Nebraska. Captain Dhaka and my friend Jagjiven flew it over, taking 4 or 5 days and making stops along the way. I love this itinerary: Delhi, Tabriz, Istanbul, Dresden, Prestwick, Keflavik, Iceland, Greenland, Canada, New York and then on to Lincoln. I think around the end of the year, we will be doing the same trip in the XLS to bring it over for the same thing, paint, interior and any avionics or engine work that needs to be done. Pilot training will also be scheduled and Dan might get a few days off to visit family while there. I am hoping that the trip will coincide with the Christmas Holidays but who knows, its very far off right now. That trip that they did in the CJ this time of year with no sweat might be a little more difficult next winter against North Atlantic headwinds, but since we have more range and speed, if we made the same stops it would all work out well. I am really hoping for a couple of days in Istanbul. I have friends who say that is such an interesting city, historically and architecturally, so here's hoping.
India has been on-again, off-again about my flight examiner status. When I renewed my India license a month or so ago, they were taking all the examinerships away and I really didn't care, but I guess they really needed somebody for the Excell/XLS so I got notice yesterday that I have been re-approved for both instructor pilot and examiner on the CJ and the XLS. Furthermore, the government of Maharashtra, which is the Mumbai area, has their own Citation XLS and they have already contacted our company, looking for me to do a checkride for one of their pilots. This could be kind of fun and a great opportunity to improve safety and flight operations here, as well as make some good extra money. I am looking forward to the opportunity, for sure. I never imagined when I was in Citation Excell school in early 2000 that it would turn into all this.
Since I am at the company guest house and the internet here is quite slow and laborious, I will not try to put a picture on this particular blog. Just words will have to do. Speaking of words, I sent off an e-mail to the managing editor of my favorite "Flying Magazine" to see if they had any use for some interesting corporate flying stories from the other side of the world. I would like to do some short story writing that includes my experiences here and if any of these get picked up, that could make more money than the flying. It's just an idea at this point and I may get cruelly and coldly rejected, mainly because I have no clue how to break into the writing business as it pertains to magazines, but here's hoping it might catch on somewhere.
I have been reading Flying Mag since I was just a kid, seeing many of the well-written articles becoming a central part of my own flying career and learning experiences.
When I come on these trips to these smaller Indian towns and villages with not much English TV and no restaurants to go out and eat at, I am pretty much a foreign guest, kind of out of my zone. I went down to the sports room tonight and played some pool with the guys that were there. Won some and then lost a big one right at the end, but really had some great comraderie with the regular guys here. Since my skin color and position are obvious to all, I am treated like a VIP here all the time, never being allowed to carry my own luggage and having my clothes laundered just by calling the desk and having transport wherever I want to go. Since it was a long day today, I took a ride back to the airport and spent 30 minutes with the mechanics (called engineers here) who are rehanging the engine on the Bell 407 helicopter, which is a sad story since the engine had recently been overhauled but then they found metal chips in the oil sample after only about 500 hours. Turns out it was the #5 bearing on the Rolls-Royce C250 turbine engine and it had gone bad. They shipped it off to Singapore and had just gotten it back into Delhi, where our own Pilatus PC-12 had flown up to bring it back to Raigahr for re-installation. I had seen the pilot up in Delhi a couple of weeks ago and he told me the story. Interestingly, the engineers had taken many digital, detailed photos of the un-install process, at every stage, and they were carefully reviewing those photos as they re-installed the engine. Very smart. I wished I had done that a few times when I overhauled engines on my junky cars while growing up. Of course, digital cameras didn't exist when I was in high school doing this kind of work. They were quite interested that I am both licensed as a pilot and as an engineer because here it is like two different castes, and the two don't associate with each other and don't talk, except to discuss issues with the engine or airframe. It's just different here. Since I am now certified to do my own preflight inspections and fuel and oil monitoring, it takes about 10 minutes before each flight just to go through the paperwork and make sure that everything is signed off properly.
The other day I was drinking a larger than usual bottle of water as we flew and, apparently my left hand with-the-ring-finger, caught the switch that turns on the emergency locator transmitter for the last hour or so of the flight and it stayed on as we taxiied in and parked in Delhi, because we had no clue that it was on. Anyway, the proper authorities finally traced it down to our plane and you would have thought that WWIII was almost declared. Management was saying that it was an incident. I had to go over to the plane and show the engineers and one of the authorities how the water bottle fit in the holder and how, while grabbing for a drink, most likely I accidentally turned it on, without even feeling it or knowing that it was on. I had to write a detailed letter of explanation and apology to the authorities, sheesh!! Anyway, after doing all that, it still came up again in a discussion with my boss about other issues about a month later. There is so much here that is just culturally different. And, to make it all seem even more crazy, this type of emergency locator has just been made obsolete in the USA and they are requiring everybody to get them out of the airplane, probably for this very reason, false alarms. But at home you would figure out what you did, tell your mechanic, maybe call the local FSDO office and that would be the end of it, not an international incident like this. But, of course, after all the discussion, nothing happened. I told them I would go before a tribunal and explain how you might accidentally hit the wrong switch, as you might occasionally in your car or wherever. It was all too funny to me, because of the differences, and so it was over. Our aircraft has both a cockpit voice recorder and a digital flight data recorder. I found out just last week that the company occasionally has the engineers download the flight recorder just to review your operational practices. In
America the lawyers would consider this an invasion of privacy and would prohibit it except in the case of an accident or incident. I have nothing to hide but it is just such a different atmosphere. Now that I am an instructor pilot, it has been approved by the authorities for me to ride right seat and to put any potential Citation pilot I want in the left seat at my discretion. As long as we are flying into the big airports with long runways and instrument approaches, this will be an excellent opportunity to give our young pilots a chance at that coveted left seat. I have been training captains on this aircraft ever since I first went to Pittsburgh Jet Center in 2006, where I just started out in the right seat because we had several guys from the airlines and the military who needed left seat experience in the aircraft and since I was an instructor I could do that with them there. Some of my best friends are the guys that I flew with and trained during that time period. Hey Mike, Kevin, Ed and Bobbie, you guys fly safe, wish you could be here to see all this!! A couple of other guys that I trained are flying back with their airlines or one is working on planes again for what was US Air in Pittsburgh. Better deal and he gets to be home at night, something charter pilots don't get to do much.
Sorry if I bored all the non-aviation people on this one. I will be seeing Karen again at 3:45 a.m. on August 31, whether the place is sold or not. Belongings are in storage and we'll see how long it is before we come back to America, who knows?? Surely not me. I figured out a few years ago that I am mostly a passenger on this planet and this ride called life. I am just hanging on to see where it takes me. Every day is filled with appreciation for what I have and for the amazing life God has given me. I try to remain teachable and humble because I really like those kinds of people.
So, as Des Cummings, Sr. used to say, "Go out and make it a good day!"

Dan