Don't die of shock, I am doing a second blog just days after doing another one. This hasn't happened in over a year. I thought I would just put a few recent photos of my adventures up here and then give a brief explanation since life here is so different from back in the good, old USA.
About a week ago we spent the night in Belgaum, India, near GOA, while flying one of the four holiest men in India, according to the Hindu Religion. His title is Shankaracharya and when we flew him, we got the most amazing handling in Indian airspace that I have ever seen. Direct to altitude, no level-offs, direct to destination, no turns, and asking for our descent request before we started even needing to go down. Very unusual. When the man, who speaks no English or Hindi, only Tamil, his native language, was coming down the steps of the plane, we asked for pictures and I put my arm around him for the snap, which got me "shouted on" by all the Indians present. I guess you are not allowed to touch him, so that was a faux paus. I immediately placed my hands together and apologized to the audience, which was accepted. That's him coming down the aircraft steps in the bottom picture here. He traces his lineage back to Lord Shiva, which is one of the Hindu gods and so he occupies a very special place in Hinduism. According to my copilot, there are four of these guys, one for each geographic sector of India and this one was from the South of India, not far from Chennai. We flew him for two days and while staying in Belgaum, I snapped a photo of our pool at the 3-star hotel where we stayed, which was probably one of the nicest available in this town. Our rooms were huge, with two inter-connected rooms, one for sleeping and one with a couch and chairs and a second window A/C unit, which would probably be needed at certain times of the year. I was on my way back from the gym, where equipment was basic and I was the only one there, but the stuff did work and I had no complaints. Not every one of our trips is to some exotic location with 5-star hotels available, so don't think we are always living high.
The second photo down from the top is taken with another Citation XLS that belongs to the Maharashtra government here in Mumbai. I was giving a flight check to the chief pilot, who is a friend of mine, and we were at the Vadodara Airport, which just so happens to be my copilot Vipul's home town. I had been there before a few months ago on a charter but Captain Buhariwala chose to fly there for his Proficiency check and so I got to see it again. Plus, I got to fly in this fine aircraft again, which was nice. It is actually newer than ours, so it's the newest Citation XLS in India at the moment. The captain and his wife are good friends of ours and we have been out to dinner with them, but the best part is that he is a good pilot and I enjoy flying with him and his copilot for these flight checks. They always appreciate my understanding of this aircraft and helping them to understand and operate the systems is fun. This time I had him do a short field landing because India has many airports that are around 4,000 feet long and I want to make sure these guys are sharp on coming in to these shorter airports, which require a lot more skill than landing at Delhi or Mumbai, where the runway is over 2 miles long.
The third photo is of our Air Hostess on this particular day, Rupinder. She was made available because our own Parizad broke her leg on the local express train here the other day. She will be out for 4-6 weeks while that heals up. Vipul had taken me to the train station in downtown Mumbai to watch thousands of people get on and off these local trains during the rush hour. The trains only stop for about 15-20 seconds, during which literally thousands of passengers get on and off the trains. You have to preposition yourself near the door when it's time to get off and not before. If you get too close to the door, you will be forced off by the motion of the crowd. If you are too far away, you will never reach the door before it moves on. I guess Parizad was traveling with her brother and some friends during a busy time and got pushed down by the crowd, and broke her ankle. She weighs all of 95 pounds and was not in the women's area because she was with her brother so got into trouble with the bigger guys getting on and off the train. Ouch! Anyway, we have had two rental air hostesses in the last two weeks and this is a picture of Rupinder. She says she was offered a job last summer by our company but they didn't reach an agreement so she has been free-lancing and ended up working for us this day. Most of these air hostesses are in their mid-20's, agewise, and make around $100-$120 USD for a full day of flying with us.
This weekend we were on a political flight since it's election time here in India. This means that you fly into places you wouldn't ordinarily go because these politicians need to connect with people out in the villages. We flew into two VFR (visual flight rules) airports that had no operating control towers or any kind of instrument approaches. This gets interesting because if you haven't been in there before and you are trying to find the airport, all you have is some Latitude-longitude coordinates and then you search in the haze for what you hope is a runway that you can recognize. We found both of them, even though it gets a little dicey when the visibility is only about 3 or 4 miles. The client did bother to get us a hotel rooms for the 3 to 4 hours that we were waiting for them in each location but even though it may have been the finest in town, it was marginal and probably wouldn't rate anything above a 2 star hotel. I snapped the next photo of the menu at our restaurant for lunch because I got so tickled at the misspelled English. The Hindi word for 3 is "tin." Which is pronounced "teen." I thought the menu was talking about only 3 beers available, even though we weren't drinking beer, I was laughing at that when my copilot pointed out that "Tin Beer" is actually beer served in cans. So, then I got that straight but pointed out that Budweiser had become "Badweiser" and I know my folks would have loved that name for any kind of beer - ha! The Kingfisher should have been one word and the Royal Challange was another typo so they were 3 for 3 on that. But, the air hostess was horrified at the lack of cleanliness of the chairs and furniture. It's just another world out there, nothing like Delhi or Mumbai at all and worlds away from anything you would see in America. I was entertained by the 25 year old's naivete about life in the villages just a few miles from the big cities. She could not imagine what they "do" and how they have any "life". After seeing the typo on the menu I gave her the nickname, "badweiser" and told her she had a lot to learn.
Karen and I were at home the other day and went to the mall for lunch and a movie. Only problem was, the movie we wanted to see in English wasn't showing for more than 2 more hours and we were already tired and stressed from having run around the mall with literally thousands of people having a holiday on "Republic Day." We have never seen the malls this crowded, it was totally unreal. One of the stores had two salesmen with bullhorns, inside, trying to outdo each other across the aisle. Loud doesn't begin to describe it. But, anyway, we didn't want to bother to go home in traffic and more stress, only to turn around and come back to the mall, so we just decided to buy tickets to the next Hindi movie, which was just starting, and sleep through that movie in order to get some rest so we would be up for our English movie. The whole plan worked great, except for the fact that Shah Rukh Khan was starring in the movie, he has been my passenger, so I had some interest in the movie, AND, they constantly break into English in these Hindi movies. They call it Hinglish. So a large part of the dialogue was in English and it was a bang, bang action movie and those scenes could be done in any language, they are universal, so we didn't get as much sleep as we thought we would, but still felt rested and only paid 3 dollars each to have a couple of hours rest. When I went to the theater box office window to buy the tickets, the guy said, this movie is in Hindi, I said, "I know." And then I asked for the tickets anyway. I think he thought I didn't understand Hindi. Doesn't he know I have been living here for nearly 3 years now??? Shame on him for thinking that - ha!!
I spoke to another ex-pat pilot who flew the holy man and he said he is a nice guy. He was nice to me. Karen has issues with the fact that he did jail time for a murder-for-hire situation a few years back. A couple of the local pilots that knew I flew him brought that up, too, but Vipul, my copilot, is a believer, so it is interesting. Having him on board did cut through a lot of red tape with ATC.
Take care my friends and have a great week.
Dan
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