Cabin crew pics - Chased by the paparazzi!!

When I flew Etihad in 2005 I was pretty excited to fly with such a brand new airline. They had only recently started flights to Toronto, and they were fantastic. Beginning with the Cabin Manager, who welcome us on board, to the last leg back to Toronto, it was photo after photo of this great airline's crew. The route was YYZ-BRU-AUH-KHI v.v. They now fly nonstop using the Airbus A340-600 and are rumoured to begin with the Boeing 777-300ER from summer'09 with day arrivals and night departures. They seemed really interested in ready to pose and that made it so much easier for me. I only repeated this madness of chasing the cabin crew for pics with Emirates and have flown Lufthansa and Qantas after that but did not take any photos with the latter two!!
Much to the surprise of the cabin crew being photographed as well as to those who I showed the pics to, I was told by some other cabin crew friends that it never happens to them!




I must have really caused quite a riot on those flights requesting these photos. The Etihad flights were on the Airbus A330-200 and Boeing 767-300, while the Emirates flights were on the Airbus A340-500 (out of JFK) and the Boeing 777-300, unfortunately not the 773ER! So the next time you know see somebody with a camera wanting to get a pic of you as cabin crew, feel like a celebrity! The complete details of these pics are at Etihad Airways and Emirates . Oh and while you are at it, you could view the trip pics of Lufthansa and Qantas

Plane spotting and model collecting

I've been in Toronto since 1996 but it was only recently (the past 3-4 years) that I discovered the joys of spotting, plane spotting that is!! If you like spotting and have gone spotting in Toronto then you definitely know of Rwy 23, located near the famous Wendy's and Country Style fast food outlets on Airport Road . It's marvellous how close you can get to the jets. The other location at Rwy 24 is just as amazing, but you just get to view them passing overhead before touching down seconds later as they do at Rwy 23, but no opportunity to poke your face into the fence!!



However this joy of getting to the planes so close as they come over your head was recently changed when I visited Sydney and was able to get up close and personal with the jets taxiing on their way to Rwy 34L.  No jets going over your head but the joy to see them pass by so close and perhaps wave first to the International captains and be waved back at most of the times, was such an awesome experience.



I just had to make the pilgrimage to the same spot again before I left Australia. A quick search using the Sydney buses website and very soon the route using a single bus from Circular Quay and I was on my way!!



And unlike Toronto where spotting is only feasible in the summer, unless you have a nice warm car to sit in on a cold winter's day (which I don't since I use transit here too to get to the spotting place) Sydney seems to have the best weather most of the time! So many other spotting locations in the world and hopefully will be able to be spotting at them in the near future.

The next closest thing to not being able to fly in a blink of an eye, and be transported to a convenient spotting location with the same measure of a blink of an eye is, you guessed right, being able to have a model plane close at hand, to ogle over!!




Which brings me to the next level that this obsession has taken me to, plane collecting! In a matter of just a year and more I went from a mere ten or less models to over a hundred!
Again, no major feat considering there are others out there with not hundred, but thousands of models, oh well make that a thousand and more!!  It's great to have these models close at hand but the madness had to stop. It's been a long while since I did get some models, and I hope to keep it this way. But with new long sought models being announced it won't be long before I am on my way to adding some more to the existing collection. 

So here's hoping to come across others who are equally passionate about collecting jets, and going around hoping to spot planes too!!

How it all began

Have you ever been obsessed with something, to the point that it completely takes over your life? Well Aviation has done that to me, to the point that now when people think of me, they think of something aviation related. As a child I grew up fascinated with planes and finally flew on a plane in my early teens. Then I flew short haul in 1994 and since then for almost every year after that, till present I have flown on one long haul flight! In today's travel of jet setting individuals that is nothing to be compared with, however just to get up to 39,000ft once a year is very therapeutic for an obsessed aviation crazy individual like me. It might beg the question, what have I done to perhaps get into the Aviation Industry? Well, I did work for an airline (ground) but a 9-5 job is a 9-5 job. What I really always wanted was to be a flight attendant. However it just never happened!! Anyway I am creating this blog to hopefully identify with other individuals out there, who never really got their wings to fly, but have to make do whenever an opportunity arises to get up there in the clouds, sip your drink, listen to your headphones and watch the clouds go by!! (Of course being a flight attendant would mean you would be the one serving, not the one being served)