Chapter 27: Ira’s Request

The take-off was no problem for our plane as we had no passengers in the back and were therefore relatively light. We did it at maximum weight configuration and took to the air with at least eight-hundred feet of runway to spare. As we had promised, we did a straight-out departure so that Martin and his next student wouldn’t have to wait too long.

After a relatively uneventful flight, we made a nuisance of ourselves again by clogging up the approach path into Düsseldorf airport, sending at least two jets into a holding pattern, even though we landed with reduced flaps and much faster than was normal practice on this type.

“We’ll definitely use the Dash-7 only when we need to,” Jack said with a chuckle, when we had arrived at a remote stand on the busy apron. “It’s a good thing planes don’t have horns, or everyone would be honking at us.”

We tied the plane down and went to inspect our third new base. It was the same arrangement as in Berlin and Nuremberg. Air Berlin had a number of offices, and one of them had been made available to our staff. It was an efficient setup that saved us a lot of costs as we didn’t need to hire IT staff, because we were sharing the already existing infrastructure.

The original plan had been to do a test flight from Düsseldorf to Courchevel and back, and then on back to Berlin the next day, but we changed our plans as we were not sure if we would make it back within the available duty hours. Just slightly murky weather could have stranded us in Courchevel at the height of Winter season, which would have made finding a hotel a rather costly adventure.

Instead we decided to do the short hop over to Emden to show Jens what our premises looked like. Finding a hotel room for him was much easier there.

After our tour of the Air Berlin offices and a nice meal in one of the airport restaurants, we went back out to our plane for the short hop over to Emden. At just over 130 nautical miles the trip would only take about an hour. I had called Bea, asking her to find a hotel room for Jens and she agreed to stay an hour longer so we could give Jens a tour of our offices.

The flight was largely uneventful. The only hiccup was that we had to hold in the pattern for a while because an OLT Cargo flight from Husum and the shuttle flight from Borkum were coming into Emden. Considering how many others had been inconvenienced by us trundling down glide paths at a glacial speeds today, it was a case of epic karma.

I finally sat the plane down on the piano keys and taxied our plane to the apron, careful not to knock over the Cessna Caravan and the Britten-Norman Islander which had just come in before us. Emden was not a big airport and the Dash-7 was bigger than anything that normally landed here.

“I take it you’re a fan of Russian aeroplanes?” Jens asked when he saw the models of a Yak-42 and a Tu-154 on my desk.

“They are horrible from an economic point of view,” I replied. “But I like the sleek lines and the sound of those Russian engines is glorious. Perhaps, one day when we have money to spare, I’ll buy one of them. But that’s not something that will come up in the foreseeable future.”

“You would definitely score big in the exotic stakes,” Jens said with a chuckle. “We had an airline in West Germany in the eighties, General Air, who flew Yak-40s. They had a rather exotic appeal, but they inevitably went bust. Those planes guzzled more fuel than Boris Yeltsin.”

We all chuckled.

“So what do you think about our modest shed?” I asked him.

“It’s a fine place, and whoever did the interior design has a fine sense of taste. It looks a lot less sterile than our offices. Unfortunately our folks don’t care much for details like making the office a bit more friendly by something as wasteful as potted plants. They don’t show up on a balance sheet as a black number, if you catch my drift.”

“I thought after your promotion you’d have a bit more pull?” I wondered.

“You bet I will make my offices a bit more homely, but the base manager is a few notches above me in the food chain, and he rules by balance sheet.”

“That’s exactly why I didn’t get involved with my late father’s company. I don’t care much for all the corporate politics. I’m on the board of directors and I hold the majority of shares, but I leave the nitty-gritty to people who feel more comfortable with it. And besides, when it comes to computer systems, I’m a Luddite. I can’t lord over an IT business when I barely know how to shutdown a Windows system.”

“But I guess they will come in handy when it comes to connecting your systems here to ours,” he mentioned with amusement.

I nodded. “O’Connor Consulting is already working with your people to establish the secure lines. I think they talked about something called a VPN or some such malarkey.”

“I’m not an expert myself,” Jens said. “Our IT people explained it as a sort of tunnel within the normal internet traffic. A secure protocol. So even if someone where to plug into that line, he wouldn’t be able to make sense of it, as all network traffic is encrypted.”

“As long as it is safe,” I said. “So, unless you have any further questions, I would ask Bea to give you a ride to the hotel. She will also bring you back in the morning. Do you want to have breakfast in the hotel or do you want us to prepare something?”