Thursday's heavy rain made getting out of SBH very challenging. Thanks to St. Barts Commuter for having planes at the ready, as soon as the airport opened in St. Maarten, they had 3 planes in the air pronto.
The professionalism of the pilots were admirable -- quick, but careful to do all the preflight checks and then fly us through the rain right under the cloud ceiling like it was no problem.
We had an equally good AA pilot, who sucked a bird into an engine of our 757 on landing, inspected the engine, and upon hearing that the maintenance crew would not arrive for hours, promptly scrapped the flight and put everyone up for the night in St. Maarten. We saw her later at the hotel headed back to SXM to be sure they were really going to fix that engine. The mechanic flew out onboard the aircraft to return to Miami. Except for the burned chicken smell on takeoff, the engines performed fine (after a full power pre-flight spool-up to check them out).
Now, if we can get out of Miami on time (since our plane is running 1 hr late), maybe we'll get back to CA 2 days after leaving our beautiful island!!
-- Jeff
The professionalism of the pilots were admirable -- quick, but careful to do all the preflight checks and then fly us through the rain right under the cloud ceiling like it was no problem.
We had an equally good AA pilot, who sucked a bird into an engine of our 757 on landing, inspected the engine, and upon hearing that the maintenance crew would not arrive for hours, promptly scrapped the flight and put everyone up for the night in St. Maarten. We saw her later at the hotel headed back to SXM to be sure they were really going to fix that engine. The mechanic flew out onboard the aircraft to return to Miami. Except for the burned chicken smell on takeoff, the engines performed fine (after a full power pre-flight spool-up to check them out).
Now, if we can get out of Miami on time (since our plane is running 1 hr late), maybe we'll get back to CA 2 days after leaving our beautiful island!!
-- Jeff