[Jeff Higgins]

I remember one of my trips to Wichita many years ago, to help out with 767 tankers for the Japanese and Italians, when I was staying in a second floor hotel room for an extended period of time. I was working all kinds of weird hours, on an on-call basis, so it was kind of tough sometimes to get any sleep.

About a week into this some clown shows up with about a basketball hoop sized stack in the bed of his diesel pickup. He parks it pretty much right under my balcony darn near every night. Turns out it needs to warm up for 10-15 minutes before he can pull out. Not a big deal most days, since normally I was long gone, but the couple of mornings I could sleep in, it got pretty darn annoying.

On the day before I flew home, a bunch of the Wichita boys came to my hotel room for pizza, beer, and well wishes. That goddamn truck was right beneath my balcony...

So, yeah, you've probably guessed it - most of the beer got recycled right down that exhaust stack. It got to be a game, but it was pretty darn easy to hit it from a second floor balcony. I had to leave for the airport before he had to try to fire it up, but I really would have liked to have seen that...