Standby Surprise

The worst part about reserve is the standby assignments.  Once, twice, sometimes three times a month, you get the exclusive invite to come to the airport and sit for 6 hours at a time to be ready to go somewhere at the last minute.  This month I have done two standby's and counting.  Last week I was about 45 minutes from the end of my assignment when I was called to be part of the crew of a very delayed turnaround to Belize City.  The original crew had gone illegal so I was going to be paired with a reassigned JFK crew to work the turn.  The crappy part of the whole deal was that the trip was scheduled to leave 5 minutes before my assignment ended.  The nice surprise in the whole deal was that I got to fly with my friend Roz.  We were in the same initial training class 12 years ago.  The last two months I've managed to catch up with a bunch of people I hadn't seen in years.

We were full going down and had some rowdy guys going to a bachelor party, but coming home it was light and everyone slept since we were about 4 hours late arriving.