Hello all you simmers,

In the above story I mentioned that I would bid to fly trips to the Caribbean during the colder months.  The trips were not that efficient for building time for the monthly total, but they were really like vacations each trip since you would stay a full day each trip so it was really like a paid for vacation every time.

This one trip - back in the 1990's I remember had a special ending.  We would leave New York's KJFK and fly down to Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic.  The flight was about 3 hours and we would arrive in the early evening and spend the next day at the beach resort before flying home the next day.  I know, very tough duty!  ;D

Just before we were to fly home to New York, I was watching the news about the scheduled launch of the space shuttle which had been delayed but was now set to takeoff that evening.  We were flight planned along one of the AR (Atlantic Route) airways, well off shore maybe 400 hundred miles off the coast of Florida.  As we were flying north along the AR route at 41,000 on a clear night all of a sudden we could see the glow off in the west of the launch from Florida.  We saw what looked like the boosters separating from the main shuttle.  The shuttle was going almost directly over our flight path and as it passed over us we could see the short bursts from the steering thrusters against the night sky.  That is a flight I will always remember.

If you folks have any questions or comments send them to me here and I'll try to answer them. 

As you may know since I retired from flying, I am an enrichment speaker on Viking Ocean ships where my main job is Viking Resident Astronomer on the two ships that have state-of-the-art planetariums and very high end telescopes that allow me to show passengers the wonders of the night sky.  But as a side line I bring along my Predator lap top with Lockheed Martin's P3D-v5 and Captain Sims Boeing 757.  The ship has a fantastic theater with a wall of high definition 1080p LED's - not a projector - and Dolby surround sound.  During the cruise I take the passengers into the cockpit of the 757 to one of the cities along the cruise route in a real time flight, from cold start, where they see everything a pilot does to fly the plane.  It is really a fantastic scene on a high definition screen 30 X 12 feet.  Passengers have told me they are looking for the seat belts in the theater seats!  The cruise director comes around before the flight and hands out air sickness bags as a joke and some of the staff act as flight attendants before the flight with a safety briefing.  Passengers love it! 8-)  I've been doing these presentations on Viking Ocean since 2016 and have been all over the world.

I hope you all are enjoying your flying.  Stay safe!

Lou