I'm posting early here - hoping to pique some interest ......
How about this time we don't go into a lot of details about how I got from Niagra Falls to Oregon? Suffice it to say that come April 1st I was doing some work from "home" when the word came in that we'd be flying Turboprops in Turkey! With Spring Fever in the air I called the wife-unit and told her to pack and bags and load up the kids and meet me in Adana. I promised them some warmer weather and "Mediterranean Sunshine."
While they packed and booked their commercial flight, I decided that it had been too long since I've flown the 777 flagship (as this landing will attest:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbBk_gBUrEk ). The 300ER is great because you can pick any two airports in the world (so long as you have about 9,000 feet of runway) and fly between them. So, I loaded up the flagship and real weather from KOFC and headed out on the long flight across North America, over the Atlantic Ocean, Over the whole of Europe and arrived the next mid-day into our Flight Club Airways Hub at Beirut Lebanon. Hummm, seems like I was just here about five months ago! While I waited was a good time to tune into http://www.plr.org/ and enjoy the sounds from my Brother-in-Law's station in Walla Walla, WA.
Leg One: Beirut to Adana. It took the family another two days to actually arrive into Adana, Turkey at which point I took one of my favorite TProps up from Beirut.
Leg Two: Adana to Elazig. After several days in southern Turkey (Hans, it was all fine! Thanks for your concern but really, we had no problems here, everyone was great.) I loaded up another great TProp, the EMB-120. This one in Go-Air livery that my daughter picked out. (She wanted a Caribbean livery but I said that we couldn't fly that here.) Once packed and loaded and cleared we were off, over some of Turkey's most remote and scenic areas!
This was a beautiful leg! Meanwhile my wife began asking where all the WARMTH was to go with this "Mediterranean Sunshine." Leg Three: Elazig to Van. After just a couple of days here it was my son's turn to fly. He picked THE DOG livery for the EMB-120 and we were off to Van, a lakeside city which Wiki says, "Dates back to at least 5,000 BC. Van was the capital of the Urartian kingdom in the 9th century BC. Its ancient inhabitants called themselves Nairi and the city was a major Armenian center."
I want to take a bit of a detour here. If Wiki (or anyone) is going to use the BC dating system, which is commonly understood as "Before Christ", doesn't that infer some belief in Christ or the Biblical history recorded? And isn't my understanding that the scholars who are supposed to know a lot, figure about 2,000 years from Adam to Noah, another 2,000 years to Christ and a final 2,000 years to now. So how can Van be 5,000 years BC? Wouldn't it have gotten washed away? And how can dinosaurs be 30 million years BC? The Bible would indicate that there was a creation event somewhat more recently than millions of years ago. If you are going to ignore that part and go with the 30 million years then the date currently should be April, 78,675,213. Just wondering, sorry.
Leg Four: Van to Yeravan. Really, I'm considering this leg as THE FOTM! This leg could nearly stand on it's own - making the rest of the flights just the set-up.
"And besides that, it's bloody cold for April! 42*F? C'mon..." So with that, we were off for Mt. Ararat and beyond. The real weather hadn't changed much but we were departing southbound this time. We turned right out over the lake and picked up our NDB heading, roughly northeast.
This FOTM from Andrei certainly has proved to be scenic. Most of our scenic flights have been within a pretty limited area (Northern Pakistan or Papua New Guinea for examples) but this one covers some pretty remote and scenic territory!
Finally, ahead, we see the target, the destination for this month's flight. At this point my daughter took over in the left seat and wanted to look for Noah's Ark.In our search for the famed ark, we turned south to circle the mountain.
I wonder which way Noah and his family came down? "It's beautiful down there" someone comments from the back of the plane. "Not warm, but certainly beautiful." "Well, it'll at least be an education for the kids" I reply. Finally then, we turned toward the NDB
and headed down with Lydia still at the controls. Having recently flown to the bigger Yeravan airport ( http://dash-8rtw.blogspot.com/ ) we were heading into the smaller strip this time. The daughter was struggling to make small corrections quickly, it is quite the art you know. The wheels touched ... we bounced ... she shoved the stick forward ...
I'm going to stop the story here and encourage you all to tune into www.toomuchfs.com come May 1st to see our next Feature flight ... (I had a GLORIOUS FLIGHT down into ****** and you can enjoy the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei3NFzzTvWg) and you can read the final bits of this story in the Pilot's Reports.
