A Note from Your Host:

* * * We are proud of our Volunteers * * *

On Friday, Jan 15, I received a text from Dave Johnson, Vancouver Tower.  You may know Dave from the Rules Committee and as the co-chair of the Vancouver 2008 tournament.  Dave told me he and five other volunteers from the Canadian Medical Assistance Teams were on their way to Haiti as an advanced team for their organization and needed help to charter a plane out of Miami.  (Dave's wife Donna, an orthopedic surgeon and ice hockey player, also flew to Haiti with the main CMAT group.)  I called some of our hockey pals in Florida; Tony Llabres, Dan Neubecker, Mike Vitti, and a non-hockey buddy of mine, Keith Bernard, to get the ball rolling.  Long story short, these guys got on it and Dave ended up with a Lear 55 they found...the only thing they couldn't do was get a release time that day (and it wasn't from lack of trying).  The MIA guys also helped in another big way as you'll see in the stories below.  I'm not surprised and I'm very proud of our group, air traffic controllers and ice hockey players!  Yeah, we're loud, obnoxious, and sometimes a bit drunk and smelly, but we usually come through when needed.  Read the entire account below:

Andy McGowan

From Dave, Jan 28:

Hello to All

This e-mail comes to you high in the sky. Yes we are on our way home onboard a Canadian Forces C17 (big 4 engine jet transport plane).

I had wanted to write so many times since my last but my days were long, incredibly long and there just wasn’t the time to write. On average I have had about 2 hours sleep each night for the past 14 nights. However I now have a few hours on board an aircraft where there is no in-flight service, in fact some passengers are just lying on the floor as there are no seats.