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I was just south of Calaveras reservoir, climbing at about 80 mph on my way back to my home base near Sacramento. It was late Sunday afternoon, and I had just left Reid-Hillveiw airport in San Jose, where the always busy weekend traffic had already run down a trickle. The weather was beautiful, and the warm air and time of day seemed to have put everyone in the Reid-Hillveiw control tower into a slow-motion daze.

The controller radioed to say that my frequency change was approved, which struck me as being rather odd since I had not requested permission to leave the Reid-Hillveiw radio frequency. Obviously this controller was in a hurry to forget about me , even though I was passing through a very heavily traveled piece of airspace and was still on his radar screen in the form of a dot with a four digit I.D. number and an altitude read out. Just so I would know if there was any inbound traffic in the area, I decided to stay on the Reid radio frequency, a decision that my have saved my life.

A pilot flying a Mooney got on the radio and asked for a clearance to land at Reid, and right away I became concerned. Three things about the other pilot's radio call bothered me, first of all he made it clear by the way he phrased his request that he was not familiar with the area or Reid-Hillveiw airport. The second thing that raised a red flag in my mind was the fact that the other pilot was flying a high performance aircraft that was descending, quite possibly at a speed of around 200 mph. But the most worrisome aspect of the radio call was the fact that the in-bound aircraft was coming in my direction.

I scanned the veiw through the windshield for my high-speed traffic, but with a closure speed of nearly 300 mph I was certain that he MUST have passed me by now. He had to of passed me I thought, because the tower said they had him on radar and surely would have warned him of my presence, since I was also still on their radar screen. I kept looking out over the nose anyway, when I suddenly I saw a black dot directly in front of me just above my altitude.

At this point every thing that happened in the next few seconds was product of pure reflexive action, no thinking was involved. First I banked the plane 90 degrees to the right, then banked 90 degrees to the left and then rolled back to level flight. The whole procedure took as long to perform as to read about, and just as my wings returned to level, I looked out of my left window to see the Mooney pass about a hundred and fifty feet off of my left wing tip at exactly the same altitude. That was bad enough, but to make matters worse, I could clearly see the Mooney pilot, his head looking down at the unfolded map that was blotting out most of his forward vision.

I was absolutely livid, to the point where I was speechless. How the hell could the controller that had noted my position one minute before the Mooney pilot first called in not warn me and my traffic that we were on a head-on collision course, as the radar HAD to have shown. For several minutes I thought of how I could bring this lapse of service to the attention of the tower without screaming obscenities, though after a while I realized that I was still shaking to hard to expect to have any control over my emotions. It just goes to show you folks, you can't depend on other people to do your thinking for you, even if it is their job.

Do you have access to an airplane and the desire to get paid to fly? I am looking to hire the services of someone interested in flying around Lake County to do some aerial photography. I would prefer a high wing aircraft, the slower the better. Super Cub,Aeronca, or any high winger that has a window or door that can be opened in flight.Call 279-9836 to set up a flight.

 

 Hanger Tales #5

As I headed north from the mountain town of Prescott Arizona, the temperature had already hit the nineties, though it was only about nine thirty in the morning. Ahead of me lay the Grand Canyon, and a long day of flying, as I was planning to be in Sacramento in the late afternoon. By the time I had reached the western end of the canyon the air had gone from silky smooth to white water rough, and it became difficult to maintain a constant altitude.

With great difficulty I struggled to fly the plane and take still and motion pictures of marvelous but bouncing vista, and after about fifteen minutes I figured that I had wasted enough film. So the course now took a westerly turn in the direction of another high desert town, Kingmann Arizona. Kingmann was an odd place, because here in the middle of nowhere was an airport that had not only a 3500 foot runway, but also a huge 7500 foot runway with rows of large airliners parked at one end of it. This was a storage facility for airliners where they were protected from time by the low humidity and protected from the scrap pile by the low parking fees.

Normally this field would have been nothing more than a check point, but this time it was also going to be the only fuel stop until I reached Porterville, California. So after topping off the 36 gallon fuel tanks I taxied out to the runways and looked at the windsock to determine which runway to use for my take-off. The windsock showed that a five-to-ten mile an hour breeze was favoring the short runway, but I decided that the long runway would take me in a direction closer to my course, so I gave a radio call to declare my intentions and shoved in the throttle.

Even though it was ninety-six degrees and about 6000 foot elevation, the plane excelerated rapidly, but for just a split second seemed to stumble. The interruption in power was so brief that I wasn't even sure the I had really heard anything at all, but just to be sure I chopped the throttle and turned back onto the taxiway. After I reached the run-up area I checked everything twice, and did a long full power engine run just to convince myself that the engine's burp was imaginary. So once again I pointed the Piper down the runway and applied full throttle, and this time got five or ten feet in the air before it did it again, only this time I was SURE that I hadn't just imagined it.

So back to the run-up area I went, and this time I ran the engine for five minutes at full power before I decided that whatever the problem was, it no longer existed. Now came take-off attempt number three, which went great until I had reached an altitude of about two hundred feet. At this point the engine didn't just burp, it suddenly and completely ceased to function. I was now flying a heavy, short-winged glider, and I quickly realized that if I was going to avoid destroying the plane and myself in an off airport landing in a field of cactus I was going to have to work fast. I put the plane into a steep dive and crossed the controls to side-slip the Piper toward the ground as fast as I could. The landing wasn't the kind that you would want your friends to see, as I hit the asphalt hard and bounced three times before I could get it stopped near the end of the mile and a half long runway.

As I put the plane on the tow bar and started to drag her toward the repair shop, I couldn't stop thinking about how close I had come to choosing the shorter runway, which would have definitely resulted in a landing that at the very least would totaled the plane. After pulling off the engine cowl and taking the screen out of the carburetor, it became clear why the engine had quit, as a glob of greenish slime was covering the wire mesh filter. Was it from a fiberglass refueling tank that I had used at my home field, or was it from some bad gas that I had picked up in Barstow? I will never know, but I do know that if that glob of muck had plugged the carb an hour earlier I would have been engineless over the Grand Canyon, an emergency that would have been REALLY challenging.

On a nice summer afternoon about twenty years ago, I pushed the throttle in on the green and white two seat Cessna and swung onto runway 30 right at San Jose International airport. It was only the fourth time that I had ever flown in an airplane, and like any student in control of such a device,I was pretty excited. My instructor that day was a young man named Scott Kingman, the kind of guy who's calm professionalism made me believe that if their was such a thing as a natural -born pilot, then this guy was it.

Soon the Cessna broke free of the ground and began a somewhat leisurely climb that included a forty-five degree turn at an altitude of about a thousand feet . We were headed for a practice area several miles away to do stalls and spins, and I gripped the yoke tightly as I peered over the nose and scanned the horizon for traffic. Now anyone who has flown in a small plane at full throttle with no headsets on can tell you that the noise level is deafening, reducing conversations to shouting contests. So I was very surprised when I heard a high-pitched whine coming from the Left (my side) of the airplane. A glance in that direction revealed the fact that a huge piece of red and blue stripped aluminum was hurtling straight at us! I simultaneously screamed SHIT! and hauled back on the yoke, standing the 1200 pound trainer on it's tail. I twisted around in my seat to see the wing tip of an American airlines 727 pass a scant 20 feet away from the tail of our little plane, and stared at the faces in the cockpit of the massive aircraft that had almost ended our flying careers permanently. Scott yelled "I've got it!" and pushed the nose down hard just before the stall did it for us. We both looked out the left side of the plane at the rapidly fleeing airliner, too stunned to talk or act. After about a minute Scott radioed the tower that we had just had a near miss with an airliner, which caused the controller to scream " why did you deviate from a standard departure!" , to which Scott replied "we didn't". Then the calls came in, first was "hey, an airliner is flying through the pattern and almost hit a Cessna", then two more people radioed in to register their shock and disbelief. The tower radioed us to report to the tower when we got back, though I was ready to pack it in right there and then.

 When we got back to the field Scott filled out a near-miss report, and the end result was that the American airlines pilot claimed he was just trying to save fuel by starting his turn at far too low an altitude and in the wrong place, and was officially reprimanded by the FFA. I never dreamed that I would ever see an aircraft of that size at such close range in the air, and hope that the opportunity never again presents itself. I also learned that even when you are a stones throw from the tower and have all the latest gear to tell the controllers your precise altitude and position your safety is still your responsibility.

Next Week: Flying while Female

The most dangerous pilot is the kind that has something to prove. Sometimes that means trying to fly an airplane that demands a higher skill level than that possessed by it's operator. Other times it is the pilot who is so intent on making a particular flight in order to impress friends that they fly into weather conditions that they or the airplane can't handle. This story deals with another type of hazardous pilot, the female pilot who is trying to prove that she is as good as any of the guys, or better.

I was on a check ride prior to my first solo cross country flight, and sitting next to me was a female instructor in her mid thirties. She was a Northwest airlines DC-9 pilot during the week and a flight instructor on weekends, so I went into the flight assuming that I was in the air with a real professional.

The flight started well enough, departing San Jose international airport and arriving at the now long-closed Santa Cruz Skypark without incident. This particular airport was somewhat challenging to use, since it had plenty of features seemingly designed to snatch airplanes from the sky. At one end of the runway there was a huge Cal-Gas propane tank storage facility, and at the other end of the very short and fairly narrow runway was a steep cliff. To make matters worse, the field was surrounded by tall trees and power lines. As we sat in our rented Cessna 150 at the cliff end of the runway, we watched a two seat Luscombe approach the field. At first the Luscombes approach seemed normal, but as it made it's turn from the base leg of the pattern onto final approach, we could see that he was WAY to low. In fact, the Luscombe went completely out of sight in the valley to the west of the field.

Both the instructor and I were horrified, expecting at any moment to see pieces of the airplane and it's contents flying in all directions, including OURS! Just as we were certain that the impact was inevitable, the small silver airplane came roaring right up over the brink of disaster, it's nose pointed skyward. We were close enough to see the terrified look on the pilot's face as he plopped the Luscombe firmly back on the runway.

Still somewhat shaken, we departed the field and set a course back across the Santa Cruz mountains to our home field. As we approached the summit road area, without warning the instructor pulled the throttle all the way out and said "you have just lost power, where are you going to land?". I didn't appreciate her timing, because every bit of ground of within gliding distance was covered with two hundred foot tall redwoods and douglas fir. In desperation I said that I was headed for a roughly one acre sized patch of dirt about a quarter mile away and set up an approach for it. We got lower, and lower, and lower, so I asked if I could push the throttle back in and get some precious altitude back. "No" she said. We got lower, and I asked again, "not yet", she said. At this point it was painfully obvious that the best pilot in the world couldn't have pulled off a safe landing and those damn trees were getting really close so I said in a near panic "NOW?".

Finally she said "OK , you can give it some throttle now", and I cursed myself for letting this insane demonstration of nerves go so far. Years later I was flying over the same ridge in a more powerful airplane with my wife when we encountered a downdraft that pulled us toward the ground at 1500 feet per minute in spite of the airplane being at full power with the nose pointed at the sky, and I wondered many times what would have happened if we had encountered even a tiny downward gust during our self inflicted practice emergency.

After we got some altitude back I swore that I would never fly with that woman again no matter what. There really wasn't much time to reconsider that decision, because three weeks after our flight she was dead. She was on an instrument training flight with another female pilot when she collided in midair with another female instructor with a female instrument student near Morgan Hill. The other instructor and her student survived their crash landing, but the woman that I had flown with and her student both died in the crash of their plane. The really ironic part of the story is that both instructors knew each other and had met at the airport before their lessons, and had discussed the fact that they would both be flying with instrument students in the same practice area at the same time.

Next weeks story: Army Arrogance

My God!, what a beautiful day! I was flying southbound in my 1954 Piper, and for once the California central valley was crystal clear. It was only about eight-thirty in the morning, but I had already flown over a hundred and fifty miles, dropping my wife off at the small mountain top airport at the town of Paradise, not far from mount Lassen. Now I was half way back to my home base, a small private field called Sunset Skyranch, about fifteen miles south of Sacramento.

But there was something else besides the clear skies that was unusual, and that was the number of aircraft in the sky on this weekday morning. It was shortly before the gulf war, and you would have thought that the battle was going to taking place in Stockton. As I looked out of my right window, I could see a F-117 stealth fighter shooting approaches at Beale Air Force base, further south two F-111s were departing McClellan Air Force base, a flock of B-52s were shooting approaches at Mather Air Force base, a C-141 was shooting approaches at Sacramento international airport, and C-130s and C-5s were in the pattern at Travis AFB. It was an aerial armada the likes of which I had not seen in hundreds of hours of flight time. I had no idea that my contact with military aviation was about to get much closer in the next few minutes.

When I arrived at my home field, I noticed that a two-seat ultralight was in the pattern for the dirt runway that paralleled the paved runway, and made a mental note to keep track of the small aircraft as I entered the 45 leg of the traffic pattern for the paved runway. The landing was uneventful, and except for a couple of people in the transient parking area, the airport was deserted as I pushed my airplane back into it's hanger. As I closed the hanger doors, I could hear a distinct whop- whop-whop that I knew without looking was being generated by the two bladed rotor of a military UH-1 Huey helicopter.

As I locked the hanger doors, I looked up and saw the little ultralight climbing steeply after having just completed a touch-and-go on the dirt runway. Then, another aircraft burst into view from behind a stand of trees, it was the Huey and he was headed right for the ultralight at a slightly higher altitude. I watch in amazement as the Heuy blew right through the traffic pattern and passed directly over the ultralight. Just as the helicopter whop-whoped past the little plane, the ultralight went from a steep nose-up attitude to a very steep nose-down attitude and it's engine began to scream as the obviously doomed craft hurtled toward the ground. The ultralight disappeared behind another hanger and a sickening crashing noise confirmed the fact the the landing had gone very badly.

I dashed across the parking area and past the two other stunned witnesses to this tragedy, and hopped over the barbed wire fence, landing in a recently harvested corn field. The ultralight was standing on it's nose, it's wooden prop shattered into splinters. A few yards from the plane was one of the occupants of the plane, laying face down in the corn stubble. The other occupant was slumped over in the crushed cockpit, but was making sounds that confirmed that he was still alive at that point. I went to the man on the ground first, assuming that his body had hit the propeller as he was thrown from the plane and that he was dead. As I hesitatingly turned him over, I was greatly relieved to find that he had not gotten a face full of propeller, and that he made a quiet groan.

By now the other two witnesses had arrived on the scene, and I sent one of them back to the field to call 911. We couldn't do much for the man on the ground, so we turned our attention to the man still trapped in the wreckage.

As we tried to figure out how to remove him and how bad his injuries were,we noticed that the Heuy had turned around and landed about two hundred feet away, and that a very young airman had jumped out and was running towards us. When he reached us he asked if there was anything he could do to help, but we informed him that an ambulance was already on the way, and he quickly turned and ran back to the chopper which left as quickly as it had arrived. Finally, the fire department, CHP, and paramedics arrived, but only the paramedics, the two witnesses, and myself seemed to be interested in removing the pilot from his mangled craft. The aluminum tubes and sheet metal that comprised the nose of this airplane had wadded up in a ball, with the pilot's feet in the middle of it.

After some improvising and applying some brute force, we managed at last to free the pilot's crushed feet from the twisted metal, and I helped to load him onto the stretcher and carry the one end of the load a hundred yards to the waiting ambulance while the CHP officers and firemen stood nearby, cracking jokes.

I found out later that both men survived their ordeal, but that both men were crippled for life, with the pilot being paralyzed from the waist down. But that was not the end of the story. The cause of the accident was painfully obvious to me, and I was the only witness who had seen the entire event unfold. As the helicopter passed directly over the small plane, the downwash from the rotor blades caused the ultralight to stall, and there was not enough altitude to make a recovery. That was the story that I was going to give the FFA, and I left my phone number with someone at the crash site so they could contact me. So I was very surprised when I got a phone call from the airport manager, who told me that I had better keep my mouth shut or I would be in serious trouble of an unspecified nature. Apparently the pilot was suing every body in sight including the airport. So I caved in and bit my tongue, selfishly putting my desire not to lose my treasured hanger ahead of telling the truth.

I have wondered about that decision ever since, because I found out that both the pilots involved were jerks. The ultralight pilot was illegally giving dual instruction, and had been shunned at a couple of local airports for making a habit of performing low-level aerobatics near airport traffic patterns. A friend of mine said that he was flying along side this guy in another ultralight directly over the ARCO arena during a Sacramento Kings basketball game, when all of a sudden, this nut does a snap roll and would have collided with my friend if he had not made a instant avoidance manuvoure.

The Army pilot had a Cessna that he keep at our field, and at a rare appearance at one of our airport association meetings he bragged about how he would take Army Blackhawk helicopters on joy rides to do errands for himself and friends. The unanimous decision among the regulars was that this guy was a first-rate asshole. In the end the FFA blamed the ultralight pilot for the accident, though the accident was only partly his fault because he should have figured out that the turbulence from the helicopter would hit him. Most of the blame goes to the Army pilot who flew right through the traffic pattern and should have seen and avoided the small plane who was operating in a normal fashion.

It was less than two days after the Loma Prieta earthquake when I found myself wandering around my at-the-time home base, Reid-Hillveiw airport in San Jose. My wife and baby daughter had escaped injury and our apartment had only taken a few hours to straighten out, so I had nothing better to do on this Saturday morning than to hang around the airport and find some maintenance task to attend to on my airplane. Flying was out of the Question, the surrounding mountains were cloaked in clouds and a light rain was occasionally falling. Weekends usually meant that Reid-Hillveiw was a bee-hive of activity, but the weather and the earthquake had definitely dampened the spirits of most pilots. So it was surprising to see a dozen or so people loading several aircraft a short distance from where my airplane was parked, and I decided to find out what was going on. Right away I noticed that several of the people were friends that I knew from the airport association, and their cargo was mostly boxes of food." We are flying supplies into Watsonville" was the answer when I asked what they were doing, and was also told they were recruiting planes and pilots to join the relief flights to the town that had been cut off from the outside world when the earthquake destroyed the two main bridges that connected the area with the rest of us.

I went back to my plane, pre-flight and taxied over to the loading area, where after removing the back seat we were able to pile a huge amount of drinking water, disposable diapers, sleeping bags, tents, food and everything else that people need to live these days. Boxes were piled on the front passenger seat, and the rest of the cabin was loaded to the ceiling. Sure it was a lot of stuff, I told myself, but how heavy can some sleeping bags and diapers be? I had conveniently pushed the thoughts about the five gallon water jugs and cases of canned food to the back of my mind, besides, the weather had more worrisome aspects to it at the time.

After getting a reassuring report of good weather at the destination field, I fired her up and taxied out to the runway. As I pushed the throttle in and started to roll down the runway I checked to see if the parking brake had fully released, because the acceleration on this take-off was definitely sub par. After an unusually long take-off roll we finally broke ground, and as soon as we were in the air I knew that something was not right, as the rate-of-climb was anemic and the plane wallowed like never before. OK, I thought, this will take a little adjusting to, I just have to do everything a little slower and carefully.

So I got the little Piper headed south and dodged the clouds that were getting lower and lower as we continued towards the unmovable obstacle between us and Watsonville,the Santa Cruz mountains. The ceiling was down to below two-thousand feet and the rain was getting harder, not a good sign when having to try to find a thin spot in the clouds so we could scoot over the ridge. To make matters worse, there was a very tall radio antenna sited on a nearby mountain top that had numerous guy wires extending out from it that were very difficult to see when even when the weather was good. So I was just about down to south county airport when I decided that to continue would be insane, and it was time to put this bird back on the ground and sit this weather out.

I decided to do a straight-in approach since no-one else could be stupid enough to be flying today, and nobody was on the radio for the last few minutes that I had been on the frequency. WRONG! I was shocked to see a steeply banked CHP Cessna 185 cut in front of me on final approach, and had to break off my landing attempt in order to avoid landing on top of the traffic spotter plane. Great I thought, now I will have to go all the way around and try again, but as I started to set up the new course I saw a small break in the clouds and decided to give the original plan one more chance. The radio confirmed the fact that people were landing at Watsonville, so at least I knew that better weather was ahead of me. After a lot of map checking and scanning the clouds I found a thin spot and popped over the ridge with about two-hundred feet to spare.After a little more fumbling around I spotted the airport and was amazed to see that there was a string of aircraft lining up to approach the field.

Finally, the main wheels hit the runway, and I breathed a sigh of relief now that it seemed that the flight was a success. But as the plane slowed down, there was no sign that the nose wheel was going to touch the ground anytime soon. As the speed decreased to jogging -speed, the nose gently lowered enough to let the tire touch the ground. When I taxied up to the aid workers at the terminal, they laughed and said they were taking bets on wether or not the plane was going to tip-over backwards on it's landing roll. I have no idea how much cargo weight was burdening my trusty Piper, but it was certainly far more than the legal limit and the load impressed the aid workers greatly.

As I fired up and departed the field, I finally had a chance to look around, and was dumbfounded by what I saw. An entire trailer park of over a hundred homes was below me, and I could see very few of them that were still on their foundations, and virtually all of them had collapsed carports next to them. Then I came to the downtown area,which appeared to have been bombed, I had never seen anything like it before. All of the grand old buildings were lying in piles of rubble in the streets, and everywhere you could see people camping in their front yards, too afraid to sleep in their homes.

Needless to say, as soon as I got back to Reid-Hillveiw I loaded her back up again( but this time we actually weighed the cargo and didn't overdo it). When the air lift ended a week later, we had carried over 250,000 pounds of supplies to the grateful residents of Watsonville, who looked at their local airport differently from then on. I often times wonder what would happen to Lake County if the" big one" hit nearby, would we become stranded like Watsonville and have to depend on Lampson field to save us? Only four roads would have to be closed to cut us off completely, and that scenario is not too difficult to imagine if a large earthquake took out just a few overpasses and bridges, or created a couple of landslides in in opportune places. Something to think about the next time you get annoyed by a low flying plane.

The following are accounts of actual exchanges between airline and control towers from around the world:

The controller working a busy pattern told the 727 on downwind to make a three-sixty (do a complete circle, usually to provide spacing between aircraft). The pilot of the 727 complained,"Do you know it costs us two thousand dollars to make a three-sixty in this airplane"? Without missing a beat the controller replied, "Roger, give me four thousand dollars worth!"

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PSA was following United, taxiing out for departure. PSA called the tower and said "Tower, this is United 586, we've got a little problem, so go ahead and let PSA go first." The tower promptly cleared PSA for takeoff before United had a chance to object to the impersonation!

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A DC-10 had an exceedingly long roll out after landing with his approach speed just a little too high. San Jose Tower: "American 751 heavy, turn right at the end if able.... If not able, take the Guadeloupe exit off of Highway 101 and return to the airport."

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Western Airlines had a term for its second officers. The term was "GIB," which stood for, "Guy In Back." The term was strictly unofficial and was actually frowned upon by the management at Western. It seems that some wise-guy pilot had been browsing through a dictionary and had made the discovery that a "gib" is a castrated tomcat.

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It was a really nice day, right about dusk, and a Piper Malibu was being vectored into a long line of airliners in order to land at Kansas City. KC Approach: "Malibu three-two-Charlie, you're following a 727, one o'clock and three miles." Three-two-Charlie: "We've got him. We'll follow him." KC Approach: "Delta 105, your traffic to follow is a Malibu, eleven o'clock and three miles. Do you have that traffic?" Delta 105 (long pause and then in a thick southern drawl):  "Well... I've got something down there. Can't quite tell if it's a Malibu or a Chevelle, though."

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Unknown Aircraft: "I'm BLEEP g bored!". Air Traffic Control: Last aircraft transmitting, identify yourself immediately!!" Unknown Aircraft: "I said I was BLEEP g bored, not BLEEP g stupid."

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Tower: "Eastern 702, cleared for takeoff, contact Departure on 124.7." Eastern 702: "Tower, Eastern 702 switching to Departure ...by the way, as we lifted off, we saw some kind of dead animal on the far end of the runway." Tower: "Continental 635, cleared for takeoff, contact Departure on 124.7, did you copy the report from Eastern?" Continental 635: "Continental 635, cleared for takeoff and yes, we copied Eastern and we've already notified our caterers."

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O'Hare Approach Control: "United 329, traffic is a Fokker, one o'clock, 3 miles, eastbound." United 329: "Approach, I've always wanted to say this...I've got that Fokker sight."

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The German air controllers at Frankfurt Airport are a short-tempered lot. They not only expect one to know one's gate parking location but how to get there without any assistance from them. So it was with some amusement that we (a PanAm 747) listened to the following exchange between Frankfurt ground control and a British Airways 747 (call sign "Speedbird 206") after landing: Speedbird 206: "Good morning Frankfurt, Speedbird 206 clear of the active runway." Ground: "Guten morgen! You vill taxi to your gate!" The British Airways 747 pulled onto the main taxiway and stopped. Ground: "Speedbird, do you not know vare you are going?" Speedbird 206: "Stand by, ground, I'm looking up the gate location now." Ground (with impatience:) "Speedbird 206, haff you never flown to Frankfurt before?" Speedbird 206 (coolly): "Yes, in 1944. But I didn't stop

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