There are things that you just have to get used to in another country. Here, since they really prefer sprayers to paper by the toilets, you have a hard time finding toilet paper. One of the reasons that it is rare is because the roll of paper, if there is one, is always small. I was in a hotel recently and asked for another roll and, after taking the wrapper off, this is what I found on a brand new roll. To give you a reminder of how it feels to be without this precious stuff when you need it, in Africa we used to call it GOLD! I asked Dr. Wical why that name and he said because you will realize how valuable it is one day when you are without it. So true!! But, in America this roll would be almost used up and over with, yet here it constitutes a full roll. I haven't figured out if they want you to use less and think that a small roll helps or if the smaller rolls are all the hotels want to risk in case of theft, I just don't know. I can find full rolls in the stores near our house but never in hotels.
Last night we spent the night in Angul, in Orissa State, near the East Coast of India, just a few miles west of a city called Bhubaneshwar. The pilots who live here were telling me that one of the nice things about this part of India is, for some reason, there are no mosquitos. How nice is that, especially this year since the monsoons were so heavy and the mosquitos were apparently potent since they have had so much dengue fever, including some of our drivers and flight attendants, called air hostesses here. It's further South than Delhi so I notice that it hasn't cooled off as much but it's closer to the ocean and so there is more of an ocean type breeze that helps cool it off a little bit. The whole facility, which will eventually include a steel mill and a coal gasification power plant, is still very much under construction, but the airport is done for now and the guest houses are nice and new. We like staying here because the menu isn't so strict and they have internet that actually works pretty well without so many filters that you cannot get anything done. And now, today we flew 25 minutes in the jet to Raigahr, where we are on a regular basis. There were a couple of new guys from England on board the flight and one of them is a private pilot who used to fly Twin Otters in Florida for a sky-dive school. He came up front to look things over and to see our glass cockpit. I think he was glad to see me up front and wanted to know about how and why I was in India. We ex-pats always want to know why the other guy is here.
The tricky part of this flight is to fly almost 900 miles with 9 passengers and then land, spend the night, and then the next day fly another 100 nautical miles after having taken on no fuel. Our airport in Angul is so new that they have the fuel truck there but it hasn't been DGCA approved yet so we have no option for fuel there yet. Making all your takeoff and landing weights and since Angul is a short runway (4000 feet) you have to do quite a bit of flight planning to make sure this is all going to work (it does).
Karen continues to recover at home and it has now been a full month since I brought her home from surgery late in September. She is doing well but we went to visit her doctor again last week and pressed a little bit for more information about what went on during her surgery. When Karen started talking about getting a couple of other things done she said both she and Dan needed some time for recovery before trying another operation on Karen. We took that to mean that she and the other doctor were quite scared by her low blood pressure and quite pale appearance. They had ended up giving her 3 units of blood and she spent the first night in ICU so that is quite a bit more scary then just a routine surgery with a trip home that night. At one point Karen heard the doctor's voice in the background saying something about her heart not doing things they liked and she had a hard time breathing for quite a while after the surgery so she was scared and quite uncomfortable but now seems to be fine and is on the mend, so to speak. I would still give her another full month before she will be doing exercises in the gym, other than just walking, but at least all the drains are out and the leaks are stopped now.
It's going to be another Christmas away from home as our thoughts about the Citation XLS going home before the end of the year have been changed by the maintenance schedule for India being quite different from the original. Our Phase V, which would be due in 5 years or 1200 hours, was done by the previous owner just before we bought it in 2008, so won't be due until next year because the 5 year schedule is compressed to 3 by the Indian government. That means that we won't be brining it to America like I thought for paint and interior and Phase V until possibly later next year. Dan's training will be due again next Spring and his 40th high school reunion will be coming in April so that's most likely the next trip home to the USA.
We are disappointed that Dr. Tim Jennings visit to India just didn't get wings. From the beginning it seemed like things were aligned against us. The SDA church had a campout planned that was a big conflict and the Sunday church never really got behind the program so we are going to back up and try again sometime in the near future. We already had some touring planned and were just looking forward to having company from America but sometimes patience is a virtue and this should be something we can redo and it will be better. One of the things making this year kind of scary was that President Obama will be here in Delhi that weekend and we don't know what will be shut down and when, so that's a big unknown.
While here in Raigahr this time there were lots of company pilots here so we set up a "party" and solved most of the company problems. That was fun. The difficult part will be communicating it to management. Tomorrow will be a 35 minute flight to Ranchi and then a 1:30 flight back to Delhi. This time of year it's much cooler and yesterday when we took off from Delhi it was only 78 degrees F, which we haven't seen for many months. That made the airplane perform much better as we are used to flying in 25 C above standard air, which really takes the excitement out of flying this airplane, putting us back in the regular jet crowd.
Well, it's getting late and we have to get up and fly tomorrow so I will sign off, say thanks for keeping in touch and hope to see everyone of you sometime in the near future.
Take care,
Dan
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