| Watching two sun rises within 12 hours | François
took a fligh leaving Osaka (Japan) on a Friday at 11:00 PM bound to Paris via Anchorage.
This flight arrived the same day (Friday) morning at 11:00 AM (after crossing the
date line). So he arrived before he departed !!. Then 60 minutes later he left
Anchorage to go to Paris and went throught the darkness once again after leaving Anchorage
and arrived in Paris on Saturday morning at 7:00 AM. The two exciting points
about this flight were to arrive in Anchorage before leaving Osaka, and the fact of having
two sunrises within 14 hour. One surise just before arriving in Anchorage, and the
second one before arriving in Paris.
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| Landing at Hong Kong's Kai Tak Airport | François was flying on a Cathay Pacific Boeing 747-400 aircraft from Paris to Hong kong in First Class. After an interesting discussion with the Flight Captain, he was invited to see the landing of the aircraft at Kai Tak Airport in Hong Kong in the cockpit. The exciting thing about it was the flight path of the aircraft, just on final approach right above Kowloon city buildings before touch down. The final approach was not straight. But the captain had everything prepared in his flight computer to make the final right turn OK from the bay to touch down at the threshold of the runway. It seemed so easy for the captain but so unusual for François compared to a classic landing at Parie CDG Airport or Amsterdam, that this experience had to be remembered. |
| Landing at St. Barthelemy Island in the Caribbean | This
island has a very short landing strip begining right after a steep hill and ending right
before a beach. Only a very few number of aircraft can land there, in principle STOL
aircraft such as the DHC-6 De Havilland Twin Otter or small piston engine aircraft.
The exciting thing about it is that there is a hill right before the runway threshold on
top of which there is a road. The problem is that when there is a truck on this road
right on the flight approach, the aircraft cannot land or it would otherwise hit the top
of the truck. So it is fortunate that there are not so many truck in the
island.
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| ATC Congestion when landing at Port-Au-Prince Airport in Haiti. | Francois
was in a flight bound to Port-au-Prince in Haiti. When the aircraft was about to
land, the capitain said in the microphone that he was put in a holding pattern by the
control tower, so he could not land. Passengers could not understand as there was no
traffic around the airport. But after about 40 minutes the aircraft finally landed.
As François was curious to know about the cause of this ATC delay he found out the
reason for it. It was that the president of the country, Baby Doc,
decided to use the airport runway to test his new motorcycle as he found that the runway
was the country's longest straight road he could use to test the performance of his
motorcycle. So he blocked the whole air traffic for about 40 minutes just for fun.
But he did not pay the bill for the extra fuel burned by the aircraft waiting to
land.
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