Hi all. I fished 'Stranger to the Ground' on Friday evening...

The part of the story in which Richard faces a thunderstorm on his last leg to Chaumont Air Base it's simply more than thrilling. It's not an exaggeration at all: I perfectly know what thunderstorms can do to any type of planes.

In 1980, a B747 from the then Iranian Air Force crashed 15 minutes before arriving Madrid/Barajas AD, her destination, one of her wings completely teared off from the fuselage by a heavy thunderstorm over Cuenca province...

AVOID thunderstorms ALWAYS, whatever is your pressure to arrive at your destination. If you don´t, you will probably be killed. Richard Bach played with the Universe not turning back to safer skies. He was really pressured, who doubt it?, but a handful of documents in a bag stored in her plane's ammunition bay probably didn't deserve the loss of a human life, whatever important they may be, even at that time.

My first contact with a fighter, of the same type shown in the picture, but with a plain livery (a North American F-86F Sabre flying with the Ala 6 at Torrejón Air Base, near Madrid) took place when I was 12 or so...

I will never forget that afternoon... In some moment, I was sat down in her cockpit, with a lot of dials, switches and a few levers in front of me that I couldn't understand what they were for. But I perfectly knew, in advance, that it was a Jet Fighter, an F-86 Sabre... I learnt it from  a school magazine, in which a Sabre cutaway appeared about 2 years earlier...

Our host, an Ejército del Aire (Spanish Air Force) captain, Pablo Martínez Peral, standing on the wing and leaning on the left side of the cockpit, lean ahead a little bit more, flicked some switches on, and lowered the plane's flaps... They made some sound when lowering, of course, and my dear mother, who was standing by the plane together with some other relatives, almost fainted hearing that...

She really hated, and was very afraid of aircraft. That came from long time ago in her life...

Have a nice night. I love you all