Chapter 9: A Date with Sofia

I breathed a big sigh of relief when we were finally standing on the ramp. Not so much for me, I had flown enough bad weather approaches, but I could see that Sofia was really rattled.

“I’m sorry, love, I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that,” I grovelled.

“It’s okay, you had enough on your mind,” she dismissed my apology. “But I’m not so sure I still want to be a stewardess any more.”

“That wasn’t the bumpiest one I’ve ever had,” I told her. “So if that scared you, you should perhaps not do it. The weather can get a lot nastier than that, even if it looks like judgment day outside.”

“I’ll be scared whenever you go flying,” she admitted.

“It was perfectly safe, just not very comfortable,” I assured her. “Planes are built to take a lot more punishment than that.”

I left Sofia inside while tying down the plane in torrential rain and hefty winds. What I needed now was a hot coffee and a warm, dry room.

Of course the unexpected arrival caused a bit of paper work and additional fees, but the friendly guys at the FBO were very helpful. Once I had changed into dry clothes, I looked at my pone and saw three missed calls from Mark.

“Ian,” he said, audibly worried after I had called his number. “We’ve seen on the news that all hell broke lose over there. Are you two okay?”

“We are safely back on the ground, and we can even use the plane again. But we’re in the wrong city in the wrong country. We had to divert.”

“Where are you?”

“Groningen, Netherlands. Guess we’ll be stuck here for a day or two. Such a weather front doesn’t just bugger off again after a few hours.”

“We have friends in Groningen. They can give you a ride.”

“We have visa for Germany, not the Netherlands,” I told him.

“You have a Schengen visa. It’s valid for half of Europe. You know Femke right? She’s riding on your dad’s team, or more like your team now.”

“I’ve seen her at the races dad took me to.”

“I’ll call her right away. Where are you – at the GA terminal?”

“Yes, and thanks Mark. Really appreciate it.”

I had seen Femke Ten Hage a couple of times, but usually only from a respectful distance. Now that she walked up to me, smiling, I noticed that she was quite the cutie, even though she looked like she could break me in half if she wanted.

“Ian,” she greeted me and gave me a short hug, then hugging Sofia as well. “Mark asked me to get you. You’ve chosen one hell of a day to arrive.”

“Indeed,” I said. “We’ve flown across all of Russia and on the shortest flight of them all we ran into this weather front.”

“Heaven knows where it came from,” she told us. “Even in the morning news they still predicted a sunny day.”

“Good to know. I was already beginning to doubt my ability to read weather reports. None of this was predicted when I filed the flight plan.”

“Do you want to stay in our place or would you prefer a ride to Emden?”

“If it isn’t too much inconvenience, we’d actually prefer Emden,” I said. “The storage fees are not too bad here and I’d rather have the plane in a place that I can get out of in bad weather. I can take a taxi in a few days to collect it.”

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s no inconvenience. And my boyfriend Jonjo is in Emden anyway next week. If you don’t need your plane that urgently, he can give you ride here to collect it.”

We thanked Femke and watched her leave. A rather eventful day came to a close. I didn’t care much for the apparently rather gaudy taste in furniture that my predecessor had, but there was enough time to change the interior to something less kitschy. I would leave that to Sofia. Since we were both tired, we just knocked down the sofa, grabbed two pillows and a duvet from our bags and went to sleep.

The tumultuous flight into Groningen had apparently bitten more out of me than expected. When I woke up, Sofia was already busy in the kitchen, wearing my favourite outfit – bugger all. And the smell of fresh coffee and toast could only mean she had gone to the shops.

“Did you walk several miles into town to go shopping?” I asked, rubbing my eyes.

“You’re a corporate bigwig now,” she explained and picked up a pair of car keys from the counter. “What did you think the garage was built for. You didn’t only inherit the job but the company car too.”

“What do we have? A Beemer?”

“No, the biggest Merc I’ve ever seen,” she said with a chuckle and brought me a cup of coffee to the sofa. “Breakfast or blowjob, sweetheart?”

“Today I’ll have to go for breakfast,” I said with a chuckle. “I haven’t eaten anything since we left Esther’s hotel, except for one Bratwurst in Dresden.”

“I’ll fix you some scrambled eggs,” she said and gave me a kiss.

“Do they even accept our American licenses here?” I asked as she put on an apron.

“For six months,” she replied. “We will both have to take a driving test before the end of the year. After six months you have to have an EU license.”

“I’m sure Lydia’s sister can sort that out for us,” I said.

And Lydia’s sister was quite good at sorting things out. She arrived three days after we had, with Fred and Jack in tow, who looked very second-hand. Apparently they had gotten hogwashly bladdered celebrating Mark’s fatherhood and were still hung-over.

The next two weeks were a right ol’ slog. Dealing with German authorities was a job worthy as punishment for someone who had killed and eaten his nan, especially if one didn’t speak German to begin with.

That was changing though, albeit slowly. Beatrice had booked us – that was Fred, Sofia and I – into a German language course at the local college. Sofia had learned German in school, but she had quickly realized that it had become somewhat rusty during her years in the states.

Slowly, ever so slowly, things started to fall into place. Fred and Jack had passed their tests for an instructor’s license, which meant they were now certified flight instructors by EU standards as well. I wasn’t even sure if it had actually been necessary, but we just did it instead of having another wild goose chase through the German authorities to find out if their American licenses would be valid.

Our PC-12 was now in Emden as well. Femke’s boyfriend, a hilariously funny bloke of Jamaican descent had given me a ride to Groningen and I had flown the short hop to Emden airport in much better weather than the one we had arrived in.

Mark had kept his word and put a good word in for us and we were now the proud tenants of two rented offices in the main airport building – one for Fred and Jack, and one for Beatrice, Sofia and myself.

We made the deadline to actually start the company on September 1^st, but we were still lacking an AOC. Quite un-German-like the authorities were three days late to issue it. Now we could finally start hunting for aircraft.

“I think I’ve found one,” Bea said and came over to my desk with a stack of papers.

“Sun-Air of Scandinavia,” I said, skimming through the print-outs. “Not the Dornier we were looking for, but pretty much the same mission profile. I don’t get it. Fred said everybody and his dog has one.”

I thanked Bea and walked over to Fred’s office.

“Can we work with that instead of a Dornier?” I asked him.

“Jetstream-41? Sure,” Fred said. “30 instead of 32 seats, but in every other aspect more or less the same parameters. Still no luck finding anyone who sells a 328?”

“Nada, zilch,” I answered and shook my head. “They all hold on to them like they’re made of gold. And the few that were on the market were gobbled up by a charter company in Berlin. Private Wings – do you know anything about them?”

“They are more or less direct competitors in the charter market,” Jack chipped in. “They’re concentrating on the east European market though. Back when I was still in Ramstein, they only had a Cessna G-IV and two Beech-1900. They’re flying the Volkswagen works traffic between Braunschweig, Györ in Hungary, Poznan in Poland and to Manching.”

“Looks like they’ve expanded quite a bit,” I said. “They bought five Dorniers and now the market is empty.”

“Problem is,” Fred explained. “Both the Dornier and the Jetstream 41 have been on the market for 6 years. Not too many have made it to their first D-check yet. That’s when most companies store their planes or get rid of them.”