Well, as I mentioned frequently enough in previous journals - I don't like standby days. Standby days are days I don't work, but I am expected to be available for work within an hour if they need me. But they virtually never call. If they do, it's immediately obvious as my phone will say "Unknown Caller" - which in my case is usually synonymous with my employer. Yesterday morning at five I woke up to one of these Unknown Callers, a woman telling me I'm expected at the airport ASAP to do a flight to Edinburgh.

Apparently, a flight from Wroclaw in Poland going to Edinburgh in the UK had diverted enroute to Hahn for reasons still not entirely clear to me. The crew wasn't allowed to continue the flight to Edinburgh the next morning because they had gone "out of hours" (simply put: they'd been on the job too long already and weren't legally allowed to fly anymore) and so that's where I came in.

The idea was simple enough, fly to Edinburgh, then take the next flight to Weeze (another small German airport, near the border with the Netherlands) as passengers and there'd be a taxi waiting for us there to get us back to Hahn.

The plan would've worked great, were it not that our flight out of Hahn got delayed by 40 minutes and we missed the flight to Weeze. So after landing in Edinburgh, we arranged with the company to fly as passengers to Memmingen (yet another small German airport, this time in the far south, near the Alps). Two rental cars were waiting for us there (we had a full crew, six people - so needed two cars) and after having some lunch (I hadn't eaten since the cornflakes I had pretty much inhaled in the morning before leaving for work) we drove back to Hahn - a four hour journey. Did all the driving myself as only two of us had a driver's license with us, but it wasn't so bad as the two others in the car were good company. Besides that, I'm used to driving long distances - and thankfully went to see a friend that lives not too far from Memmingen a while back so despite not having a good map it wasn't a challenge finding our way back; not a single wrong turn. Thankfully the company paid for the cars (as they should, obviously), as the bill for our two small Corsa's was a good 540 euros.

Today I was supposed to fly to Malaga, but this time it's me who's "out of hours" so I'm standby again. Thankfully no Unknown Caller so far, so hopefully I can go back to the Netherlands later this afternoon.

I did watch someone new, from Iran - who has (amongst others) some really cool shots of Iranian Air Force material. The IRIAF operates a very diverse selection of aircraft from various countries, some of the types flown being quite exotic (note the blue aircraft here below for example, the HESA Saeqeh; a rare Iranian-built twin-tail variant of the Northrop F-5). Hence, it's an interesting gallery worth checking out if you're an aviation enthusiast!