Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Memorable Melbourne Trip...


It was a memorable visit to melbourne to give a talk for Semi-Permanent design conference. First off the trip getting to Australia was very, well.... LONG. Usually it is a long trip, but this one was made a bit a longer all because of a single bird....
     Shortly after take off from LAX our Qantas 747 struck a bird, right in the nose cone of the plane. No only did it cause a huge crater in the nose of the craft, but internally it took out the planes weather radar. So once the plane got to cruising altitude the pilot announced, "we struck a bird after take off, unfortunately it damaged our weather radar and we can't fly across the ocean without it, so we'll need to return to LAX and assess the damage, but first we need to dump our fuel over the ocean, that will take about an hour. Also you'll need to stay overnight in L.A. until we can get a new plane into service..."  D'oh!
    here's a photo of the damage one little bird caused to a huge 747.....

But once we finally arrived in Melbourne we had a great time. The conference was held at the brand new Melbourne Convention Center which was pretty cool in it's self!






    I had a great time talking with LA artist Jeff Soto, the guys from Three Drunk Monkeys, and the rest of the speakers as well as Murray Bell and Andrew and the crew of organizers. I also had a chance to speak to some of the attendees at the after party. 
    It was a great event and I  hope to be able to speak at future events!
-Alx 

2 comments:

DESIGNOVA Creative said...

Wow Alex-
Did you feel the impact? I was taking off from Munich in a 737 just last month, and did a double-bird stike (a la the Hudson folks) just as we were leaving the runway, and the pilot slammed on brakes and put us back down barely before the end of the runway. Blew out tires in the process. I was right over the engine that one bird ( it was a hawk, saw it later) went through, and it was quite an impact. Amazingly, after cleaning the victims out of the engines (one on each wing), and putting on some new tires, we took off again in the same KLM jet two hours later, and it took us all the way to Amsterdam. Nuts.

RossT said...

WOW!!!! He looks like a small version of you!!! Thanks for sharing!! :) Lovely joy! :)

 

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