I have no idea what your name is, but you are ranting about needing to deliver aircraft to Spain from where they are in the Frozen North [Canada … brrrr]
You know, you dumb ass, you can fly the aircraft SOUTH and then fly East over the ocean to this strange exotic continent called AFRICA and then swing back North to Spain. I just randomly wandered over to a weather website and checked where the ash cloud is right now, and so far that path looks like it would actually work right now.
I know I probably shouldn’t listen to the news on TV because the morons generally piss me off because they show all the common sens of aspergillium niger.
Hey smart guy, here are a couple of things you didn’t think about:
You can’t just call up Egypt (or wherever) and say “Yo, coming in for a landing, be there in a couple of minutes!” There are protocols and procedures and whateverthehell.
Even if they can be delivered using the more southerly route, it will be more expensive, which is what the airplane guy quoted by the news guy may really have been pissed about.
The ash cloud is predicted to move its ash to squat near Canada here pretty soon, which could cut off all routes from this guy’s point of departure.
The plane in question may not have had the range for a different route. My dad used to work for a regional airline in the midwest that bought a bunch of planes made in England. Every few weeks he’d go there to pick up a brand new airplane and fly it back. They flew from England to Iceland and spent the night, and then to Gander, Newfoundland. The Iceland-to-Canada leg was stretching it for that airplane; if the headwinds picked up, they’d have to refuel at a place in Greenland. That’s why they overnighted in Iceland; the landing fee in Greenland was very expensive if you were past curfew and woke everybody up.
Flying planes across oceans is not a trivial thing.
I’m a little puzzled. Where in Canada is this guy coming from? The ash plume is currently from Iceland to Great Britain, right? Ten minutes with a great circle mapper shows that you can go from Montreal to Madrid and not go anywhere near the cloud. Maybe Yellowknife to Madrid gets too close for comfort, but you could always go Yellowknife to Montreal, restock on aircraft fuel, coffee, and English muffins, and then go from Montreal to Madrid, right?
That’s great to think that one could just hop a plane from somewhere in Africa to somewhere in Europe. I’ve got a whole bunch of coworkers stuck in Rwanda exactly because this can’t be done.
Little-known historical fact: Rwanda was named after Anaïs Rwanda, philanthropist and inventor of the round waffle. Her father was a consular official, assigned to the region shortly after World War I. Having been raised in a sheltered, upper-class Belgian home, young Anaïs was shocked by the poverty of the local people, and even as a teenager, worked tirelessly to promote disease prevention and better farming methods. She grew up to marry Howard Hughes, but even though she was no longer in the country, she never forgot the Rwandan people and was instrumental in providing aircraft for emergency food distribution, as well as insecticide spraying to control malaria. An old woman, still adored by Hutu and Tutsi alike, and happily remarried to a former U.S. Secretary of State, she’s Mrs. Rwanda Hughes Kissinger now.
