Jet lag, jet fires & proposals

Boston Logan (Jan 31, 2005)

Resurfacing...

I am finally back with an overdue post after a week of absence. In Boston, even though it wasn’t easy to get back due to the continuing struggles I am having with airplanes.

I was supposed to get back last Wednesday, with an Air France flight from Turin (northern Italy) to Paris, and then from Paris to Boston. The flight to Paris went well (in fact I made a lot of aerial photos of the snow capped Alps, which I will post some day) and I even boarded the connecting flight in time. All seemed well. We took off and I was leisurely watching the French countryside from my window seat when I noticed that the aircraft was just doing a 180 degree turn. What the hell? Then the commander said in a mixed french and english that we were returning to the Roissy Airport (Paris main airport) to check a “certain smell” that the passengers noticed at the back of the airplane (I am not very good in smelling things, so I didn’t notice anything). People of course were making irony of the affection of French people for smelly cheese...

Apparently it turned not to be that funny. When we landed we where immediately surrounded by fire trucks, and other passengers later told me that they actually heard frightening rattling coming from one of the engines, that was supposedly on fire (and they were scared as hell)... This was quite a new experience for me, as the only other emergency landing I made was (again with Air France in Lion) because of some structural problems in the aircraft tail (and that time I did notice the string vibrations while we were trying to land). Anyway, the net result of all this was that i had to spend the night in a very crappy hotel in Roissy (in the middle of the airport complex, no way of having internet access with and a long fight to activate the telefone line to use my phone card). I finally managed to get back to Boston on the same flight next day (fortunately it was a different aircraft).

Of course I didn’t really like the delay, not only because I really wanted to get home, but also because I had a very hard deadline on Saturday at 4PM EST for proposal submission for the Spitzer Space Telescope. So I spent the next two days and nights (I was helped in this by my lingering jet lag in waking up early, even though I got a hard time in staying awake after 6PM) writing my own proposal and helping others in which I was collaborating, to propose observations of everything from star forming clouds, brown dwarfs, extrasolar planets, a dusty quasar and mass losing binary stars.

A final note: the Spitzer Space Telescope Center newsroom today sports a nice picture of a planetary nebula (the “Ring Nebula”, for this occasion specially dubbed as the “Valentine flower”) on which I have worked on (there is my name in the list of observers that collaborated on the project, at the bottom of the page). Happy Valentine day....