Hanger at Le Bourget

Rotation No. 02

Home now, with a suitcase full of dirty laundry, and a smile. Hehe.

That was quite a rotation! 25 sectors in 22 days: Paris (Le Bourget), Antwerp, Luton (London), Hamburg, Riyadh, Geneva, Nice, Eelde, Moscow, Cannes, Istanbul, Farnborough (London), Milan, Stansted (London), Ankara. Seeing it compiled neatly like this it really makes me smile! For nearly every one of these airports I was going to for the first time. What will eventually become routine and non-exciting, was really so fun for me!

I flew an equestrian olympian, an F3 (Formula 3?!) entourage, a Saudi prince and princess, and a crabby salt-hating Russian, among others.

I had urges that were very hard to control. That is, urges to logon to Facebook and post huge raving status updates about how very very  much I love my job yakkety yack yack. Gotta say – very grateful to have WordPress!

Antwerp FBO Artwork

Empty out of Hamburg

Cute German airport policeman.
Rain shining on the taxiway.
Beautiful climb out of Hamburg, empty cabin.
Orange and pink and yellow sunset.
Kitsune Maison 11 playing on the soundsystem.
Toasty tobasco-fied sandwich out of foil blanket.
I am happy.

Bad Hops

Today I’ll be flying from Riyadh to Kuwait to Baghdad to Kuwait to Jeddah. Then tomorrow is pretty much the same thing but backwards. The only interesting thing is that flights direct from Saudi Arabia to Iraq aren’t permitted, hence the Kuwait stops.

What a great life this is.

Foxtrot-Alpha Livery

New livery sported by one of Etihad’s A330-300 (A6-AFA) aircrafts, promoting the Essential Abu Dhabi 2011 campaign. How magnificant are these colours?! After so much lacklustre pearly-white and beige on the general fleet, it’s a real refreshing pop.

Flight plans in China require around 6 days for approval, which completely hinders one of the main draws of private flying: flexibility. On trips here pilots get a print-out of the flight plan around 2 hours before the scheduled time of departure, sometimes even less I think. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are comparatively way the fuck wide-open.

I have a vague idea of (eventually) garnering a business aviation career in China. That the amount of time it takes for sufficient deregulation in region will correlate neatly with the time it takes for appropriate experience here in the Middle East. On occasion I come across chipper articles and essays online about the ‘untapped potential’ of China. And I agree – it’s there. The question is: how many years will it really take for that tight knot of airspace control to actually loosen up?

I say ‘vague’ because I have no clue on what direction to go. I’ll finish my IATA diploma in October, but so far is hasn’t helped me discover what I’d like to do after flying. Airport or FBO facility management? Aircraft brokerage? Something to do with ground ops?! That’s the downside to being a flight attendant (even if it is corporate) – it doesn’t lead anywhere.

I’d really like to go to SIBAS (Shanghai Int’l Business Aviation Show) in late March. I’d like to do some kind of entry-level work or maybe even an internship at the new (opened Mar 2010) FBO in Hongqiao (is there an age cut-off point for internships anyway.. like at what point is it just silly?). And now, if we’re getting all into ideals, I’d like to pull it together and work on getting to an intermediate level of spoken Mandarin. I still cringe, thinking how many years I spent in China and had no interest whatsoever in learning the language – I instinctively ducked it. Only now, when I was there earlier this month did I feel like I had a genuine interest in it, in understanding the characters and being able to form non-silly sentences. 🙂

NetJets China

Though Sokol [NetJets chairman] made similar comments regarding Europe, he sounded decidedly bullish about Asia, where he predicted annual growth in the next five years would hover somewhere between 6.5 and 8 percent.

“Anyone who has been to China recently has seen the enormous growth,” he added. “The ability of the central government to control and to throttle that economy is absolutely amazing to see.

And while one may not agree with all the policies of China, you cannot deny the extraordinary progress they’ve made economically. They’re going to be one of the economic superpowers of the future.” Sokol said NetJets is “filing for certification to create NetJets China later this year.”

From NetJets chairman advises patience – AINonline

Twenty-Eleven

“Francois Chazelle, Airbus VP-executive and private aviation, commented that China is an untapped business aviation market with big potential. Currently, the total business jet fleet in mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau numbers barely more than 50.”

Because 2011 has such a lovely ring to it, expectations are high. I can only plan relatively simply, and short-term. In 2011, I’ll be 24. The idea is to have worked in private aviation for a year, and with that, scout out a corporate flying job, based in a megacity (urban area with a population of 10 million or more). Plan A: return to Asia, work for Deer Jet. Plan B: EU. Plan C: remain in the MENA region, because, contrary to a few lovely articles (like this one) I’ve found about the emerging business jet industry in Asia, all the jobs still seem to be here. Whether it will stay that way, remains to be seen.

M-OOSE

Aircraft registration numbers are the best things ever! Plane spotters/enthusiasts all over the world take pictures of aircraft probably in nearly every airport it lands into. I can essentially track where the plane I work on has been these past months.. Geneva, London (Luton) etc.

There are some really impressive photo databases. I thought registrations were assigned by the aviation authority of the region or whatever, but there must be further options available for general aviation aircraft. Here you can find the (somewhat unimaginative) “M-BEST”, “M-COOL”, somewhat better “M-ERCI”, “M-ANGO”, “M-ARIE”… “M-OOSE” trumps them all though. 🙂