King Air Trips

Here are some pictures of the King Air on a couple of recent trips. The first trip was to Greenville, Texas (GVT).







The second trip was to George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston (IAH), here showing the rush hour departures which were also agravated by weather delays. My passengers, inbound from California via American Airlines, had spent 20 minutes waiting for a gate to deplane after landing. They called several times by cell phone, worried about our departure. We delayed an hour for thunderstorms to dissipate before engine start, then spent about 30 minutes in line for departure.










Home again just before a thunderstorm moves across the field.




I'm scheduled to go to South Texas on Sunday but it appears that hurricane Emily [link may be perishable] will interfere with that trip before our return in the middle of the week, effectively preventing the trip.

And then it gets weird.

Warning: put away all beverages before reading.

Clayton Cramer has this to say about Scientology:

There is not a religion on this planet that even begins to approach Scientology for weirdness--and I am including every pagan belief you can think of when I make that statement. I have long suspected that Scientology was a scam for separating fools from their money--but I had no idea how bizarre Scientology theology really was:

75 million years ago, Xenu was the ruler of a Galactic Confederacy which consisted of 26 stars and 76 planets including Earth, which was then known as Teegeeack. The planets were overpopulated, each having on average 178 billion people. The Galactic Confederacy's civilization was comparable to our own, with people "walking around in clothes which looked very remarkably like the clothes they wear this very minute" and using cars, trains and boats looking exactly the same as those "circa 1950, 1960" on Earth.

--

Xenu was about to be deposed from power, so he devised a plot to eliminate the excess population from his dominions. With the assistance of "renegades", he defeated the populace and the "Loyal Officers", a force for good that was opposed to Xenu. Then, with the assistance of psychiatrists, he summoned billions of people to paralyse them with injections of alcohol and glycol, under the pretense that they were being called for "income tax inspections." The kidnapped populace was loaded into space planes for transport to the site of extermination, the planet of Teegeeack (Earth). The space planes were exact copies of Douglas DC-8s, "except the DC-8 had fans, propellers on it and the space plane didn't." DC-8s have jet engines, not propellers, although Hubbard may have meant the turbine fans.

When the space planes had reached Teegeeack, the paralysed people were unloaded and stacked around the bases of volcanoes across the planet. Hydrogen bombs were lowered into the volcanoes, and all were detonated simultaneously. Only a few people's physical bodies survived.

The now-disembodied victims' souls, which Hubbard called thetans, were blown into the air by the blast. They were captured by Xenu's forces using an "electronic ribbon" ("which also was a type of standing wave") and sucked into "vacuum zones" around the world. The hundreds of billions of captured thetans were taken to a type of cinema, where they were forced to watch a "three-D, super colossal motion picture" for 36 days. This implanted what Hubbard termed "various misleading data" (collectively termed the R6 implant) into the memories of the hapless thetans, "which has to do with God, the Devil, space opera, etcetera". This included all world religions, with Hubbard specifically attributing Roman Catholicism and the image of the Crucifixion to the influence of Xenu. The interior decoration of "all modern theaters" is also said by Hubbard to be due to an unconscious recollection of Xenu's implants. The two "implant stations" cited by Hubbard were said to have been located on Hawaii and Las Palmas in the Canary Islands.

And then it gets weird.

I've reproduced 90% of his post because, frankly, I just didn't know where to cut it. Here is the Wikipedia article that he is quoting from.

Here is the pic of the "Space DC-8" sans jet engines -




Artist's impression of one of Xenu's space planes, per Hubbard's description.

As they say, read the whole thing.

U.S. adventurers recreate historic transatlantic flight

Navigator Mark Rebholz sits in the cockpit of the Vickers Vimy biplane replica, as technicians test an engine at the airport in St. John's Nfld. on Saturday, June 25. (CP/Andrew Vaughan)

Canadian Press


July 4, 2005


ST. JOHN'S, Nfld. (CP) - After three weeks of weather delays and technical glitches, two Americans finally lifted off from Newfoundland on Saturday, beginning their 3,000-kilometre re-enactment of the first transatlantic flight.

Millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett and co-pilot Mark Rebholz left St. John's for Clifden, Ireland, under cloudy skies and in high wind at around 7:20 p.m., said Dean Williams, a spokesman for the pilots, who watched from a hangar near the runway.

Fossett and Rebholz's flight was expected take up to 22 hours as they crossed the Atlantic, recreating the 1919 flight by British pilots John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown.

Doesn't that look like fun? Here is a picture from this story in the Washington Post.



In this photo released by Oceansport, millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett and his co-pilot are about to land in Clifden, in western Ireland, Sunday July 3 2005, after re-enacting the first trans-Atlantic flight made more than 80 years ago. Fossett and co-pilot Mark Rebholz left Newfoundland on Saturday night in a replica of the Vickers Vimy aircraft used by British pilots John Alcock and Arthur Brown to cross the Atlantic in 1919. The wooden biplane touched down in Clifden, County Galway, in mid-afternoon. Adhering to the spirit of the original flight, the pair flew without satellite or lights and navigated by the stars and the moon.

(AP Photo / David Branagan / Oceansport, HO) (David Branagan / Oceansport Via Ap - AP)

Here's another shot from this story at MSNBC.


David Branagan / Oceansport via AP

Adventurer Steve Fossett and co-pilot Mark Rebholz are about to land Sunday in Clifden, in western Ireland, after re-enacting the first trans-Atlantic flight made 86 years ago. Fossett and co-pilot Mark Rebholz left Newfoundland on Saturday night.