So for those who missed it, last week Robb picked up a delivery flight. Basically, fly to Seattle, spend the night, go to Boeing field, and pick up a brand new airplane for delivery back to the mothership in Atlanta.
The cool thing about delivery flights is that they are each flown under a one time Part 91 authorization (yeah, you may want to Wikipedia that), which equates to operating under general aviation regulation vs commercial regulation. In layman’s terms, it’s kinda like flying on your friends Cessna… none of that sit down, turn this and that off, lock the passengers out of the cockpit, and buckle your seatbelt stuff. Granted, you are expected to behave – this is still company business after all…
That meant a rare opportunity to watch daddy work – actually being able to watch him take off and land the plane and push all of those cool buttons in the cockpit – cause you know they use every single one… Very cool.
We had a day’s notice on the whole thing and decided to make it work – these opportunities don’t come up that often. Six hour flight on a full outbound plane be damned.
We had high hopes of joining Robb on his outbound afternoon flight, but wouldn’t you know that it would be the only departure to Seattle that would go out completely full (damn you and your laws Murphy). So the boys and I went home, they napped, I worked, and we came back for the 8:40pm which worked out great – mind you not as planned, but great anyway.
I really expected the boys to sleep on the flight seeing as 8pm is normally bedtime plus- makes sense right? Wrong! Aaric crashed, but only after watching Disney’s Cars AND Planes. Kieran, who I can only guess thought staying up was a contest, held out for the whole flight. Aside from a full on 15 minute meltdown by Kieran about 30 mins from Seattle they were perfect happy flyers! Europe here we come (okay, maybe just Iceland and Central America for now – no need to push our luck, right?)
Anyway, we made it to Seattle, took a nap, and the next morning signed for a nice new airplane at Boeing Delivery Center. The Center hosts any number of people / airlines coming to pick up planes with each having their own reception room to wait in while all the details are finalized and the plane is prepared. Being the ever curious person that I am, I went around and peeked in other peoples rooms (using Aaric as my “runaway child”) to see the various catering accommodations – i.e. we had croissants and fruit in our waiting room while the China Air folks had noodles and the Scandinavian Airline folks had Salmon. Nothing makes you a better host than entertaining companies buying multi-million dollars pieces of equipment I guess…
I will say that I’m a little sad to report that new planes do not actually have a new plane smell. Other than that it was pretty neat and Boeing was nice enough to cater the flight (ref: selling multi-million dollar equipment) – nothing like a cooler full of Hagen-Daz, crab legs, and champagne to make the 6 hour flight back feel like a party…
