AIR JAMAICA FLIGHT SCHEDULE

That awful pun will make sense in a moment.

Last night Tim and I are playing with these little RC copters in our yard. Tim's a fan of the "High Altitude Challenge," which consists of him flying as high as he can, sometimes up to about 80 ft. These challenges end in one of three ways:

1) He lands it safely.
2) He lands it in a tree and has to buy a new one.
3) He flies it so high that it catches a wind current, gets blown out of the radio's range, and takes off down the block for parts unknown.

Guess which one happened last night.

After running a few hundred feet around the block we found the copter miraculously undamaged, having crash-landed not in a tree or someone's roof or the windshield of the Lamborghini that was parked across the street, but on a narrow patch of grass on the sidewalk.

After counting our blessings, we decided it'd be better to fly these things in the park down the street. When we got there, we noticed a firetruck parked across a large empty field, but think nothing of it. A few seconds later I noticed three firemen heading across the field towards us.

Me: Howdy!
Fireman: Hi there!
Me: Are we in your way?
Fireman: No, what are you guys up to out here?
Me: Who, us? Nothing, just flying our RC helicopters.
Fireman: Yup, you're the guys we're looking for.

I'll let you decide how relevant it is that the Federal Building is on the other side of the park, a couple hundred yards from where we're standing. Like, if Timothy McVeigh had lived in Los Angeles instead of Oklahoma City, this is the building he'd have bombed. It's not really a place you want to be questioned by law enforcement for flying little radio controlled aircraft around in the dark.

Fortunately, the firemen were cool as shit. They said some woman had called 911 to report that a helicopter had crashed, but they assumed it was just a couple of idiots like us. And it made their job a lot easier that we had seemingly been drawn to them in order to straighten the whole thing out. They laughed it off, complimented Tim's Police chopper body kit, and accused the woman who called of being a dumb drunk.

Shot this after we got back to commemorate the evening's absurdity. The police copter on the left lost most of its landing gear in the first crash, and it's little DIY LED searchlight is dangling by a piece of Scotch tape. At the moment it won't fly in anything remotely resembling a controlled manner. My Hunter on the right looks better, but it's landing gear is also busted and one of the rotor blades is destroyed.

Frankly I'm surprised it took this long to get the cops called on us.

PARWAN PROVINCE, Afghanistan - A CH-47F Chinook helicopter trails another Chinook and performs aerial movements over a snow laden Afghanistan Feb. 16. The aircraft were piloted by Company B, Task Force Phoenix, 10th Combat Aviation Brigade/TF Falcon.