Friday, April 16, 2010

Small World


I've taken BA flight #85 several times in recent years.

It leaves London's Heathrow Airport - a small city complete with doctors, entertainment, hotels and traffic jams - in the early evening and, if things go as they are expected, it touches down at YVR just on time for dinner at home of the same day.

Not today however.

Not only that flight but some Scare Canada and KLM flights have been cancelled as well as BA#85 and the flight heading back to Heathrow, BA#84.

The source of all the fuss?

Well, it's Ma Nature up to her funny tricks again.

Just a small matter of that volcano exploding out from deep below a glacier in southern ICELAND!

In Europe, many flights have been grounded because the volcanic ash is clouding the skies for many hundreds of miles.

Imagine sitting on board what seems to be a "routine" flight and then hearing the captain crackle over the loudspeaker, "Sorry to interrupt this Sandra Bullock movie that I know you're enjoying. I saw it in a lay-over in Tokyo last week and I thought it was terrific too. We'll have it back up and running in just a moment. I just wanted to give you fair warning though that we've been advised by the meteorologists with whom we are in regular communication that we are about to fly through some pretty...ach... heavy volcanic ash. I know that sounds unusual and it is. But not to worry. The little bits and pieces are pretty small and by the time they get up to 39,000 feet, which is our present cruising altitude, they've kind of...gee whiz... cooled off. So just relax and enjoy your flight and if you see a kind of darkness come over the starboard side, well, no...oof...ah, no problem."

1 comment:

harriethedgehog said...

That ash looks awfully like a William Blake vision out of which God could come roaring. I bet some religious spook is going to declare this unpronounceable volcano the beginning of the 2012 Apocalypse! They have that peyote stuff in S. America so the Mayans are bound to have tried it and then invented their confounded calendar.
I was at Pine Mountain Observatory by Bend, OR, minding U of O's property while the manager went on some mission for days. A female friend of Mark's showed up to surprise him, luckily she had heard of me! PMO is 8 miles up a mountain gravel road that starts 26 miles east of Bend in the middle of nowhere, not the kind of place you drop by on spec for frivolities! Anyway the booze ran out and I dug through Mark's liquor cabinet as a last resort; discovered what I thought to be some exotic tequila. Several hours later my guts were splattered down the toilet, my mind far, far away. It was mescale from Mexico and you do not drink it like tequila. The sign I left in the liquor cabinet is still there 10 years later but the bottle is gone. "Barfartus spewartus am Pinus Humptus"