Last night I flew from New York to Hahn, Germany via Dover Air Force Base in Washington DC. It was both my first flight in the 747 and my first time flying over the Atlantic. Come to think of it my first time in Germany as well. It was a long day, and a very short night since we were going eastbound and the sun started to come up around 100 miles or so prior to reaching land over Ireland.

The flight out of Kennedy was typical of the type of flying I've been doing for the last 6 years in that it was pretty short; a little over an hour including taxi time. Since it was my first time in the airplane I was the "pilot monitoring," meaning I operated the radios and assisted the the Captain as he flew. The view from three stories up is quite a bit different, and I really noticed it when it we started taxiing.

After a few hours in Dover where our cargo was loaded, we were off to Germany. It was dusk by this time, and my turn to fly. The flight over went well, and I felt pretty comfortable in the airplane. My Captain had me switch back to the "pilot monitoring" role when we were out over the water so I could practice giving position reports over the HF radio, something I had never used before. There is an amazing amount of traffic crossing the Atlantic in the middle of the night, and we had to "slop" (off set our course) 2 miles to the right in order to get out of the preceding aircraft's wake turbulence.


Since it was nighttime there wasn't a whole lot to see during the crossing. Shortly after the moon came into view the sun started rising, and I saw that it was pretty cloudy down low. We crossed over Ireland and Belgium, and then into Germany where we landed at the Hahn Airport outside of Frankfurt. I can't say I greased the landing, in fact it was kinda ugly. But, as I've already mentioned, the sight picture is drastically different then what I'm used to seeing and its gonna take a while to get used to it. My Captain assured me he's seen worse, which I'll have to take as encouraging.

I knew adjusting to the time zones would be a difficult thing to get used to, and it appears I was right. I was pretty fried after getting to the hotel, and slept for a bout 5 hours before getting up to have dinner. Its now about 9:30 pm local, and I've got to try and sleep again soon.

I did get out for a short walk around town (Morbach) before dinner, and have decided that I like Germany. Here's a few pictures from the church across the street from the hotel. Oh, yeah, the beer's pretty good here too!

Tomorrow I'm off to Bagram, Afghanistan and then Almaty, Kazakhstan for a short over night. Until then, be well....