With Thanks to 12207 Kevin McCarthy
I had just finished a posting as an Aircraft Accident Investigator/Flight Safety Officer at NDHQ in the mid-1990s and was due to get another flying tour. As Ottawa was our home from before joining the CF I was hoping to stay put for a while since we had a nice place; my wife had a job and was working on a university degree; and the kids were well settled. Not seeing the big picture of how the air force was downsizing aircraft fleets I sought a posting on the CC109 Cosmopolitan at 412 Sqn at the CFB Ottawa airport. As its days were numbered no one else was being posted to a fleet that soon would be no more.
To my surprise however I was posted instead to fly the CC144 Challenger VIP executive jet - also flown by 412 Sqn. It was slick, speedy and could quickly get you across the ocean or the continent to many different and interesting locales.
At that time computerized flight planning was just becoming available. Instead of manually creating flight plans and logs using pencils, paper and handheld circular slide rules all you had to do was fax off a form to a company in California with things like aircraft tail number, load, departure and arrival points, time of departure etc and a computer generated flight log with all the calculations would come back to you fairly quickly. The capabilities of this program were amazing and we were just scratching the surface of what it could do. Obviously more training with the company could help us improve.
And so I found myself with a few other pilots in San Jose, California visiting JetPlan for training on their system. After arrival we had rented a minivan from the airport and used it to get to and from the hotel and the company.
One evening we decided to make the short drive to Fishermen’s Wharf in San Francisco to enjoy some of the sights of that famous city. After touring around a little we chose a restaurant and were waiting for a table when I remembered that we needed to feed the parking meter to make sure we didn’t get our rental vehicle ticketed. I went back and paid for more parking. After dinner we walked back and I was surprised to look back and see that the other guys were getting in the car meaning I had obviously put money in the wrong meter. Ah well, no ticket; so all was good. I had driven there but was in the passenger seat now.
After about 25 minutes of driving I glanced over at the console in front of the driver and noticed that oddly there seemed to be more gas in the tank than I remembered. Simultaneously someone in the back asked who owned the Macy’s shopping bags and where did this camcorder come from. Sensing something was amiss, we very quickly pulled over for further investigation. We had rented a dark blue minivan but we were now in the exact same type of vehicle except it was dark brown. Close comparison of the license number on our keys to the actual plate on the vehicle showed they were the same but for the last number. According to the bumper sticker we had rented our vehicles from the same rental company at the same airport. And, we all reached the same awful conclusion at the same time - we had been driving a stolen vehicle and who knows if the cops were out for us yet! Maybe Harry Callahan and his Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum hand cannon were not far away or perhaps Frank Bullitt in his souped up green Mustang was mere moments behind us.
We skedaddled back and amazingly the same parking spot was available. We dropped off the borrowed minivan and found ours which was just down the block. There was still time on the meter from when I had added more coins.
We could only figure that the rental company had inadvertently given us a master key they would use to move vehicles around the lot or that when they made a fleet purchase of 10 identical vehicles they got them all with the same key. Maybe they thought the chances of two renters going to the same location and mixing up the cars in the dark was too remote to worry about.
We slunk off, nervously looking over our shoulders and in the rear view mirror to make sure neither Dirty Harry nor Frank Bullitt were hot on our trail!
