I've only been on an airplane a few times in my life, and not in the last 17 years or so. I flew to Chicago a couple times, and Mexico once, and that's the extent of my time in the air. When I was a kid, my parents and I always took driving vacations because we wanted to see the sights along the way and take our time; we were in no hurry for a particular destination.

I heard there's a new supersonic jet in development that would fill the void left by the Concorde. I really would like to visit a far away place like Australia someday, and the idea of a long flight really doesn't bother me, but if I was a regular flyer, I imagine the idea of faster air travel would be enticing.

Does anyone here fly for work or fun on a regular basis? What's the favorite place you've flown to?

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

I do some regional flying. Only about 5-8 flights a year and mostly up and down the pacific coast or to New Mexico where my kids now live. I will be taking from SMF (Sacramento International Airport) for ABQ (Albuquerque International Sunport) next Thursday. I have also done some general aviation flying. I like small planes. You can fly at an elevation that allows you to see what's below. If you want some fun airports to fly into and out of in a small plane I can make some good suggestions. Lake Tahoe is really fun to fly into in the winter, so is Aspen. But on commercial airliners you are at 30-40,000 feet. So it not really the trip, its the destination. Places that I have been for pleasure have mostly been by sailboat. But if you want to fly you can. I really enjoyed Costa Rica and all of the Caribbean islands I have been too were fun. I would enjoy flying into the Island of Saint Martin. Great Beach views.
I think I would like to try the Canary Islands. It would be fun to meet up with some of the European Setizens. Many vacation in the Canarys. Pick a destination and do it. Today if you are flying alone the air fare can be less than it cost to park your car at the airport. I don't jest. Last time I few I paid $85 for my RT tickets. You have to love Southwest. But paid $120 to park my car.

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I fly a fair bit for work, and then spend the air miles (or whatever the airline calls them) on holiday flights, so I've visited lots of places, many of which I have no desire to return to.

So, my favourite place I've flown to?

That's got to be Barra, a tiny island in the Outer Hebrides, off the West coast of Scotland. Why? Well its got hills (not really big enough to call mountains), sandy beaches, a couple of hotels, wind, sun, dark skies, an airport. Actually the airport is an adventure in itself, on one of the beaches, it is flooded by the tide twice a day and is the only tidally swept airport with scheduled services. And very friendly folk.

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?

I used to make a couple of trips by air each year for the civil engineering firms I used work for but none in the last 20 years or so. The fact that I love flying makes this fact even sadder. My longest flight was from Seattle to Tokyo in a Northwest Orient 747 sometime in the mid 1980s. I would love to go back to Japan again but my current situation and condition makes such a trip very unlikely.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

I think I would like to try the Canary Islands. It would be fun to meet up with some of the European Setizens. Many vacation in the Canarys. Pick a destination and do it. Today if you are flying alone the air fare can be less than it cost to park your car at the airport. I don't jest. Last time I few I paid $85 for my RT tickets.

I paid about that for a Louisville/Chicago roundtrip in 2001, but the Canary Islands???

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

I think I would like to try the Canary Islands. It would be fun to meet up with some of the European Setizens. Many vacation in the Canarys. Pick a destination and do it. Today if you are flying alone the air fare can be less than it cost to park your car at the airport. I don't jest. Last time I few I paid $85 for my RT tickets.

I paid about that for a Louisville/Chicago roundtrip in 2001, but the Canary Islands???

Sorry no that $85 RT was not to the Canary Islands. That was a trip from Sac to Orange. A RT from Sacramento to Tenerife is more like a $1,000. But if you could probably get a free trip if you crew on a sailboat returning from Florida to Europe. Try Crewseekers

Sorry no that $85 RT was not to the Canary Islands. That was a trip from Sac to Orange. A RT from Sacramento to Tenerife is more like a $1,000. But if you could probably get a free trip if you crew on a sailboat returning from Florida to Europe.

Lol, ok, that makes sense. Sorry, I didn't read your original post carefully. As far as crewing goes, I have shades of getting marooned Gilligan's Island style in my mind. I'm sure it's a fun journey, though.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

Me? The last thing you would see is a big fin in the water as this fat dinner snack disappears. Think Shark Week.

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Me? The last thing you would see is a big fin in the water as this fat dinner snack disappears. Think Shark Week.

Oh I love sharks. Grilled with just a touch of butter or as ceviche they are great.

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Me? The last thing you would see is a big fin in the water as this fat dinner snack disappears. Think Shark Week.

Oh I love sharks. Grilled with just a touch of butter or as ceviche they are great.

What, no professional courtesy? ;-)

Me? The last thing you would see is a big fin in the water as this fat dinner snack disappears. Think Shark Week.

Oh I love sharks. Grilled with just a touch of butter or as ceviche they are great.

Sharks? Like Håkäring?
You are not allowed to transport that delicious fish when flying.
As Surströmming!

@ Carlos
I think sharks like their meals rare.

@ Moomin
I can get frozen Thresher shark fillets for a meal locally.

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@Gordon: I'm not that keen on flying. My dad had a Cessna (Skywagon I think it was) when we were in Zambia which I came to dread being in from the first moment I ever was. All sorts of reasons contributed to that. And my first experience of flying in a commercial airliner wasn't great either to be honest. It was kind of unexpected in that my twin and I thought we were going back home for dinner with my mum, except we weren't. Two years later though, we got handed over to a complete stranger and taken onto another big plane, this one completely full of strangers. It's frightening being not quite six and not knowing why you are where you are just that you are - but at the end of that flight, we finally got to have that dinner eventually :) just in a completely different country to any we'd ever been in before.

I've been on quite a lot of flights since, but I don't think I'll ever truly enjoy flying. Weirdly though - I'd have liked to learn to pilot a plane myself :) and it's only when I think along that line of thought I get qualms about planes crashing. The hairiest flight I've been on as an adult though was an internal one from Thessaloniki to Athens, the landing, particularly so.

@sharks:

Me? The last thing you would see is a big fin in the water as this fat dinner snack disappears. Think Shark Week.

Oh I love sharks. Grilled with just a touch of butter or as ceviche they are great.

What, no professional courtesy? ;-)

I've not eaten any. I'm not planning to either. I'd like to think they'd reciprocate ;)

It's good to hear from you again, annie.

Personally, crashing has never been a worry of mine. I'd actually like to go up in a hot air balloon, and I know those are not the safest flying vehicles, but I think it would be fun.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

@annie, I like little planes. That despite my brother crashing one, and my father having to declare emergencies a couple times. Worst though was at Flagstaff airport when we were getting ready to enter the traffic pattern. Idiot 1 got on the downwind end of the runway and called on the radio he was taking off. Idiot 2 was on the upwind end of the runway did the same thing. They missed. Unicom operator said he was done for the day. I think he just had to change shorts. He was back on the air after about ten minutes. I don't remember any radio traffic from the idiots after they got up. I assume they were too busy changing their shorts and putting their jaws back in their mouths. You would think when everyone is on the same radio frequency, you might listen as well as talk.

Flying is hours of sheer boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

Got some time in the pilot seat but didn't pass the medical so I couldn't get a license. Long long story, and it boils down to a doctor retired and records were missing. Then the most interesting thing was the stall practice and the cross wind landings. One time in the stall practice we must have just hit a small pocket because one wing stalled before the other and we started to enter a spin. The instructor was a bit more forceful with the rudder peddle than I was, but I did put the nose down quick and kept the wings level. So we did about 1/2 a turn. I'm not sure if it was from all the time flying with Dad but I had a pretty good idea what to do.

Somehow crosswind landings weren't an issue. First one I did with an instructor he kind of looked at me like, why wasn't I having to yell and take control from you and how come the nose wheel was on the centerline. I actually kind of enjoyed the challenge. But we never did any near the demonstrated limit of the plane. And I've seen some of those youtube videos of the jet jockeys who need some time in a Cessna 172 to practice their technique on a runway that barely has room for the tires.

@ Gordon Awww... thank you. It's really nice being back and catching up with what everyone's been chatting about :) Loads still to go though.

I'd like to go up in a hot air balloon too :) I don't know for sure if I'd find looking down over the side as much fun as I think it would/should be, but doing it would be the quickest way of finding out. Parachuting has always appealed to me enormously. Not so much from a hot air balloon though ;) If I was to find out, just before flinging myself out of a plane that I'd been wrong thinking I wanted to, I'd like to think someone would be kind enough to throw me out anyway. Not without a chute though... no...

@annie, I like little planes

I particularly like the ones I can throw ;) but in many ways I think I would have liked the full-scale versions of them too but for the experiences that led off from them. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of airfields dotted all over Africa - and then there were long stretches of really bad/potholed dirt roads that maybe saw traffic once or twice a day if that - and loads of space without any roads at all, and areas of cleared (firebreak) bush around properties, so it was never quite clear what to expect arriving back on the planet's surface, but he only actually crashed once with my sister and I on the plane (during a middle of the night airfield landing, so we weren't pasted from a great height or anything) and on the scale of crashes, it was probably no biggie. It was amazing just how much stuff could be spread out over such a wide area and how it seemed to appear, and then disappear in the flashes of light from a single, solitary emergency vehicle that eventually turned up with a desultory interest in finding out what had happened.

Flying is hours of sheer boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

I think you're right. Even without me at the controls of something that was :)

It's a shame about you not getting a pilot's licence though.

Parachuting has always appealed to me enormously.

In my younger days, I thought about that, but nah... I definitely don't want to do that nowadays. I think it is neat though, how professional skydiving teams can form designs together while falling.

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The mind is a weird and mysterious place

Third flight in a week. Sunport to Salt Lake.

Not flying anywhere anytime soon, but these will be over London on the 10th of July.

I hope some of those flights are to do with having a holiday and/or seeing friends and family, Carlos :)

I don't know if anybody can help me with this, and it doesn't really matter if no one can, it's just an idle hope :)

I've been going through some photo's that were amongst my mum's mum's things (and that passed to my mum) of which few ever saw the light of day afterwards, and this is one I'd never seen before.



On the back of it, in my mum's handwriting from many years ago, is written "Hanno. Taken by Dad, 1940 - before boarding."

I wiki'd Hanno - and from the top of that page, it said this about Imperial Airlines.

The Handley Page H.P.42 and H.P.45 were British four-engine biplane airliners designed to a 1928 Imperial Airways specification by Handley Page of Radlett in Hertfordshire. The H.P.42/45 were the land-based backbones of Imperial Airways and along with the airline's later flying boats are well remembered. Eight were built, four of each type; all were named, with names beginning with the letter "H". The three survivors were pressed into Royal Air Force service at the outbreak of the Second World War. No lives were lost in civilian service (a record thought to be unique for contemporary aircraft) but by 1940, all aeroplanes had been destroyed.

When I first saw it, and before reading what was written on the back, I'd just assumed it was a plane that one or both of my parents had perhaps travelled on, because Imperial Airlines were mostly, as far as I know - used to reach the colonies, just a lot faster than travelling by ship. But they didn't leave England and venture to Africa until 1961 or 62 - which threw my assumption straight in the bin on reading the Hanno had demised some twenty years before that and been sequestered by the RAF at the outbreak of the war so had stopped their colonial passenger and mail runs a year earlier.

What I do know from family anecdotes over the years is that during the second world war, her dad (my grandad) was a serving officer in the submarine corp (if that's what it was called) based in and around the Mediterranean towards North Africa and possibly Suez although the details were vague because after returning from the war, he refused to ever speak about that time in his life, to anyone as far as I know. He wasn't conscripted but had volunteered to serve (after trying to enlist at the start of the first world war but being only fourteen at the time, and so was refused. When they finally accepted him - it was as the lowliest of the low - bottom rank - on a submarine - from which his aptitude and desire to learn helped him rise from).

I don't know why it's bothering me so much that I don't know where the picture was taken, but it is and I can't make out the writing on a building in the background at all. I've even looked at old photo's of Croydon Airport (where the planes leaving London used to fly from before the war, in case the airport had also been turned over to military use - but they didn't help me either. It doesn't look like Samakh, in Palestine either (which is where the picture on wiki was taken). Anyway :) If anyone knows, or knows of a way to know, I'd quite like to know it too... but if not, as I said up there - it doesn't matter.