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Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
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And then there was the time I brought a parachute with me on a Pan-Am flight from JFK to San Juan. True story.
Carried it on board, would not let the Sky Waitress take it from me to stow it away.
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OK Paul Harvey. How about the rest of the story...
Well, since you asked . . .
It was in the 1950s. I was in the Navy, stationed at NAS (Naval Air Station) Roosevelt Roads, Puerto Rico. I had a bunch of leave time accrued and decided to go home, the NYC area, for a visit. There was room on a P2V Neptune that was going to NAS Floyd Bennett (now closed, it was near Idlewild, the original name for JFK on Long Island), but there was a regulation requiring a parachute for each occupant and they did not have a spare on board.
I got permission to check a parachute out from our squadron's parachute loft, signed for it, and I was made to understand that the penalty for not returning it would be severe. Uneventful flight from Puerto Rico to NY. I rode the subway to Grand Central, then a commuter train to the suburb where my family lived, and a bus to my street, all with a Navy parachute.
With my leave time approaching an end, I called every military aviation outfit that I could think of, to see if there was anything going to Puerto Rico, looking to hitch a ride back. Nope. Nothing. So I paid for a seat on Pan-Am. Boarded the flight, and the Sky Waitress (reference to "Third Rock From The Sun") wanted to stow the parachute.
I was concerned that somebody might get to it before I did when we arrived in San Juan and mindful of the warnings about not returning it, I was adamant about hanging on to it. I did get some questions from fellow passengers, so I played the role of the nervous flyer and said that I since Pan-Am did not supply parachutes I brought my own, to increase my chances of surviving the flight. I drank a lot, too.
The flight was uneventful (drat!) and I made the trip from the San Juan airport to Roosevelt Roads in a
publico (sort of a cross between a taxi and an inter-city limo in Puerto Rico). The final "adventure" was the security inspection by the Marine at the gate to the Naval Air Station. He did not believe my story about the borrowed parachute, he wanted to confiscate it, and I had to call the duty officer at my squadron to come and get me.
And that's the rest of the story.
הרחפת שלי מלאה בצלופחים