Sunday, October 22, 2006
Sleepless In Seattle
This week Guy has been really good at sleeping through the night, even though Katrina has cut out the 9:30pm 'dream feed'. He goes down at 7:00pm after a story or three and sleeps right through until 06:00 or thereabouts. Jack and Katrina wish they could say the same this week.
Jack had to go up to Seattle to inspect Air New Zealand's latest B777 airliner at the Boeing factory and issue it's certificate of airworthiness. While Jack was away Katrina didn't sleep well, and for Jack it was 22 hours of travelling to arrive on a rainy Sunday evening in Seattle. Depsite being compeltely tired, at 9:00 pm Seattle time your body thinks it's 5:00pm NZ time so sleep is hard to achieve. There were three days to carry out the inspections. Getting up at 06:00 in the rain and dark of a west coast autumn was quite disorientating after the nice long spring days we have been having.
Anyway apart from being tired all day and awake most of the night the inspections went well with no significant problems and at a breakfast meeting on Thursday morning we were able to sign all the certificates and purchase agreements and shake hands and make copies of everything. Then we loaded all the fuel and all the dinner and climbed aboard, 25 people in a 319 seat airliner. We took off just after 12:30 Seattle time climbing up through the misty rain and out over the brilliant endless blue of the Pacific. Travelling with the sun at 850 km/hr the afternoon seemed timeless as we coasted over Hawaii at 40 000 feet between towering thunderstorms. Some of them were billowing up past our cruising level and into the stratosphere with icy caps of wispy pannus cloud as the crew manouvered us through the great canyons between. Jack was watching all this from the middle seat on the flight deck. The crew kept explaining the aircraft navigation systems to him, in return for him keeping them supplied with cups of tea and smoked salmon sandwiches from the galley.
As the sun finally overtook us and set near Samoa, Jack and the other two Air New Zealand engineers got the ovens working and heated up the chicken, salmon or steak dinners. The AirNZ fleet manager who was also on board did the wine service (for the 20 other passengers not the crew!) as we cruised on through the night at mach 0.85. We landed about midnight NZ time 14 hours and 11 323 kilometers from Seattle. The aeroplane weighs 140 tons (empty) and burned about 90 tons of fuel on the trip, (less than normal as we were almost empty of passengers and freight) That was about $60 000 dollars worth so you need a lot of friends if you wanted to go cruising in your private B777.
Enough techno trivia I know you only read this for the photos, here is one of Guy and Katrina the Sunday afternoon I left, some from Seattle, and my little mate when I got home on Saturday morning.
Jack had to go up to Seattle to inspect Air New Zealand's latest B777 airliner at the Boeing factory and issue it's certificate of airworthiness. While Jack was away Katrina didn't sleep well, and for Jack it was 22 hours of travelling to arrive on a rainy Sunday evening in Seattle. Depsite being compeltely tired, at 9:00 pm Seattle time your body thinks it's 5:00pm NZ time so sleep is hard to achieve. There were three days to carry out the inspections. Getting up at 06:00 in the rain and dark of a west coast autumn was quite disorientating after the nice long spring days we have been having.
Anyway apart from being tired all day and awake most of the night the inspections went well with no significant problems and at a breakfast meeting on Thursday morning we were able to sign all the certificates and purchase agreements and shake hands and make copies of everything. Then we loaded all the fuel and all the dinner and climbed aboard, 25 people in a 319 seat airliner. We took off just after 12:30 Seattle time climbing up through the misty rain and out over the brilliant endless blue of the Pacific. Travelling with the sun at 850 km/hr the afternoon seemed timeless as we coasted over Hawaii at 40 000 feet between towering thunderstorms. Some of them were billowing up past our cruising level and into the stratosphere with icy caps of wispy pannus cloud as the crew manouvered us through the great canyons between. Jack was watching all this from the middle seat on the flight deck. The crew kept explaining the aircraft navigation systems to him, in return for him keeping them supplied with cups of tea and smoked salmon sandwiches from the galley.
As the sun finally overtook us and set near Samoa, Jack and the other two Air New Zealand engineers got the ovens working and heated up the chicken, salmon or steak dinners. The AirNZ fleet manager who was also on board did the wine service (for the 20 other passengers not the crew!) as we cruised on through the night at mach 0.85. We landed about midnight NZ time 14 hours and 11 323 kilometers from Seattle. The aeroplane weighs 140 tons (empty) and burned about 90 tons of fuel on the trip, (less than normal as we were almost empty of passengers and freight) That was about $60 000 dollars worth so you need a lot of friends if you wanted to go cruising in your private B777.
Enough techno trivia I know you only read this for the photos, here is one of Guy and Katrina the Sunday afternoon I left, some from Seattle, and my little mate when I got home on Saturday morning.
# posted by Jack and Katrina @ 10:14 am 
