Duxford Girl

Every time I hear about UFO sightings, I think about this video:



That's a 57 year-old Avro Vulcan Bomber that has been out of service since the 1980s. Note how saucer-like it looks at some angles. Imagine the stuff that governments are testing now that we have no idea about.

This is impressive footage of what an emergency landing actually looks like (all of the people on board escaped with minor injuries). Note where the cell phone ends up during the landing. Hence the reason securing the cabin is always part of the checklist.

I've been wanting to get back into the left seat for several months now but since I still have to finish the last four courses of my master of commerce, flight lessons are at least a year in the future for now. So instead, I've been working on my theory, reading my FTGU and trying to absorb as much as possible so that when the opportunity presents itself, I can get my license and ratings as quickly as possible.

It's no shock then that all this flying stuff has nestled itself into my subconscious and cropped up in my dreams. For years I've had a re-occurring dream of watching a mid-air collision. The circumstances surrounding the collision have always been different but I've always on the ground, looking up, watching it happen. I hadn't had a dream like that for several years but the other night I dreamt that I could see YYC from my patio and that I watched a runway incursion happen when a private jet landing on 34 collided with a 747 on 09. I wasn't sleeping very well to begin with because I was wrestling with a bout of insomnia so when I woke up from the 3-seconds of decent sleep that the dream had likely occurred in I was unable to get back to sleep. However, it wasn't because I felt scared by a nightmare (the likely outcome in the past), it was because I couldn't figure out why an ATC would clear a 737 to 09 in the first place and why the captain would take the clearance and a myriad of other thoughts that keep running through my mind every time I restlessly repositioned myself hoping I would find a configuration that I would finally fall asleep in.

When the morning came, I still hadn't slept and I was still thinking about the dream. It was like having a song stuck in my head. The cure for a stuck song, is to listen to it. So I decided to do the same thing with my dream, except in the form of a little obsessive web research.

Having said that, when it comes to runway incursions, there's a clear choice to obsess over: The 1977 Tenerife Disaster. You can read up on this disaster included in the links of this page:
http://www.project-tenerife.com/engels

and also watch an excellent NOVA documentary about it here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/deadliest-plane-crash.html

"We shall not sleep..."