Standby – Day 2 and 3

As I expected nothing much happened during the days of my standby. I spent the first night in a low-priced hotel with some Thai food from the airport and checked out really late the next day. After a good rest, I was refreshed and ready for any task that lay ahead, but there weren’t many… As the weather outside was brilliant, I decided to go out on the apron to take some photos! There was only one MD-11 sitting around and I took the chance to take some “creative” photos. After that, I was waiting for another aircraft to arrive (four hours later) at position 216. And what a coincidence this was! 216 is the parking position right next to taxiway “Papa”, where all the planes that landed on runway 25R have to taxi past to get to the terminal. So while sitting around, I really could not avoid to take a few snapshots. Maybe I even had to climb one of those passenger stairs… 😉

After a while a good friend called me. We had done the assessment center in Hamburg together, flew together in Phoenix and now we are both flying long-haul. He is on the Airbus A330/A340-fleet of Lufthansa in Frankfurt and just came back from New York the day before. We had not seen each other in a while and so I gave up spotting to meet with him. After dinner at the Lufthansa base, we decided to check out the A380 maintenance hangar on the other side of the airport. Off we went and paid a visit to one of the biggest aircraft hangars around. He had never been inside an A380 and as there was also a MD-11 standing around, we took a quick look at it as well. I did not have my camera with me and was only able to take a very mediocre picture of the A380 using my mobile phone:

It was getting late and cold (winter is approaching fast!), he went home and I went back to the Lufthansa Cargo area. I sat down on the couch to watch some TV in our break room and soon fell asleep…

The next day I went home on an early flight. From now on I will be on “Reserve 12” duty, which means I have to be at the airport within 12 hours minimum. Getting from my home town Dresden to Frankfurt within that time-frame is no problem at all and I prefer to spend my time with family and friends, instead of sitting around in Frankfurt.