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Flying during the late morning hours in the equatorial tropical zone just about ensures having to deal with some weather. In the case of our flight from Chiang Mai in northern Thailand to Phuket in the south, we had almost 700 nautical miles to go and arriving in the Phuket area at noon, we had a bunch of heavy showers to circumvent. The approach controller at Phuket was nice but I...

It was close to noon when we landed in Calcutta. Do to the monsoon weather delay, we were a day behind on our schedule, and we really had no desire to spend another night in India. The unimaginably irritating bureaucracy here is infuriating to deal with- and we have professional handling. All we wanted to do was get to Thailand and get out of India. Three and a half hours later, after...

The rain has been coming down steadily for most of the day. The drops make circles in the small puddles outside our hotel window. It's a good thing we went to see the Taj yesterday when we had reasonably good weather. After a three hour hold up at the airport in Agra this morning, much debate over the weather amongst our group, and the fact that the monsoon has apparently arrived...

Our journey over the past week or so has been over and in some places you would never think you could as an American pilot. From Luxor, Egypt we flew across Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Tunisia as well as skirting by Libya to the country of Oman. Did we have any problems? Absolutely not. All the controllers spoke fairly good English (some exceptions of course) and all treated us the same...

We flew into Muscat, Oman, not really knowing what to expect. It was planned as a technical fuel stop for a few days on our way to India. I had no idea what Oman was about other than I'd heard the name before and knew it was 'somewhere over in the Middle East'. I had hazy memories of watching some old movie with guys wearing robes waving swords on horseback across the desert. I was...

Welcome to the new first world, it struck me as we drove through busy rush-hour traffic on the way to our hotel. Dubai City is more than a city, it's almost the entire country - just one point three million people live here (that number is rising all the time), seventy-five percent of the world's construction cranes are in operation here, and the majority of the population are...

A visit to any foreign land is merely a slice of time in the life of a particular country, a snapshot of what that place was like during the few days or weeks of one's visit. As travelers we naturally tend to freeze a place in our minds once we've been there, forgetting that long after we've left, time continues. It was a different place before you arrived- it is a different place...

Egypt is a land of uneasy leisure- a country who's most important industry is tourism and who's constant fear is terrorism. Egypt is still in a holding pattern of sorts, still under marshal law and heightened security measures stemming from the 1997 attack that saw sixty-three tourists gunned down in front of one of Luxor's most famous archaeological attractions- the temple of Queen...