The article below from NYTimes.com has been sent to you by psa188@xxxxxxxxx /--------- E-mail Sponsored by Fox Searchlight ------------\ GARDEN STATE: NOW PLAYING IN SELECT THEATERS GARDEN STATE stars Zach Braff, Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard and Ian Holm. NEWSWEEK's David Ansen says "Writer-Director Zach Braff has a genuine filmmaker's eye and is loaded with talent." Watch the teaser trailer that has all of America buzzing and talk back with Zach Braff on the Garden State Blog at: http://www.foxsearchlight.com/gardenstate/index_nyt.html \----------------------------------------------------------/ Finding Adventure in Puddle Jumpers August 17, 2004 By PERRY GARFINKEL Robert Cullinan, a marketing consultant in San Rafael, Calif., takes almost masochistic pleasure in recounting the ordeal. But who could blame him for accepting an invitation to Tonga to attend the 50th birthday party of the Pacific island's crown prince six years ago, even if it did mean starting in San Francisco, changing planes in Los Angeles for a flight to New Zealand and then puddle-jumping over the Pacific to islands with names like Nuku'alofa and Ha'apai? Mechanical delays at Auckland, New Zealand, put the plane behind schedule, Mr. Cullinan says, and continuing problems forced it to land at Nadi in Fiji. Hustling to keep moving, he boarded a Tongan Army PT boat for five hours, battling 15-foot waves "and the worst case of seasickness you can ever imagine,'' he said. He then talked his way onto a rickety DeHavilland Twin Otter, a 30-year-old twin-engine 16-seat airplane operated by Royal Tongan Airlines, rather than continue by sea. Luckily for him, the birthday party was still in full swing by the time he arrived after four days of travel and five hours of sleep. "The prince is playing Gershwin on the piano and, to the best of my recollection, I'm singing backups,'' he said. An unusual adventure? Perhaps. But Robert Miller, an official with the Population Council in New York, tops it. While working in Nepal in the early 1970's on a family-planning program, he and several colleagues took a flight on a seven-seat Pilatus Porter to see the sights in the Langtang Valley near the Tibet border. The pilot dropped them off on a remote airstrip and took off, promising to pick them up the next day. Overnight, a snowstorm hit. The next day, the plane returned, "buzzed our heads and dropped a note out the window,'' Mr. Miller said. "It said, 'Can't land in the snow; I'll be back when it melts.' " The group, now out of food, "scrambled back to the runway, gathering up the orange peels we had dropped the day before, picked dandelions, mixed in some ginger candy we had saved and made a delicious tea,'' he said. "We traded socks to passing Tibetans for some potatoes.'' They slept for three days in a yak herder's stone cottage that had walls but no roof. Ah, the good old days of puddle jumpers - the real ones. The term, which originated in the 1930's, "has since become archaic,'' said William A. Schoneberger, an aviation historian and author in Malibu, Calif. "But it still evokes romantic memories of when aviation was a great wonder and landing strips and runways were just as likely to be grass and dirt, open fields and pastures." And, often, puddles. Then, puddle jumpers were propeller-driven single- and twin-engine planes made by Cessna and Beechcraft and Stearman that seated two to six people, including a pilot. Today, Mr. Schoneberger said, they are called general aviation and commuter aircraft and include turboprop planes that can seat 16 or more. While they have their drawbacks, like cramped and loud interiors and frequent cancellations, they remain an essential, often the only, means for business travelers to connect smaller destinations to larger cities. Valarie D'Elia, host of "The Travel Show'' on the WOR Radio Network, said travelers could find some solace if their flights were canceled: Under Rule 240, the airlines will compensate travelers for missed connections caused by cancellations or delays with vouchers for future travel, so long as weather was not the culprit. Some travelers manage to find silver linings in dire situations. Last winter, Barry Rosenthal was waiting at Boston's Logan Airport to take a 40-minute Cape Air flight back to his home and office on Martha's Vineyard, wearily tracking the progress of an impending snowstorm. When the flight was canceled, he and several other Vineyard-bound passengers took a Cessna nine-seat twin-engine propeller plane to Hyannis, on Cape Cod, with plans to take a taxi from there to the ferry terminal at Woods Hole. They landed at Hyannis to raging weather and had to wait for several hours for two cabs, both of which lacked snow tires. "That 30-mile drive was one of the scariest trips I've ever been on, land, sea or air," said Mr. Rosenthal, the president of BR Creative, an ad agency. "At least three times the taxi swerved into the oncoming lane. At one point we were skidding perpendicular to the road." The silver lining? "The experience bonded our group so much that I made several lasting friendships from it," he said. Some flights that start grandly end in quiet desperation. As the only passenger on a short sunset flight on a six-seater from Bellingham to the San Juan Islands in Washington State, Bernard Ohanian, an associate editor at National Geographic Magazine, in Washington, D.C., was looking forward to a scenic journey. When the pilot invited him to sit beside him, "I thought, 'Cool, I've never sat in a cockpit before,' " recalled Mr. Ohanian, who was doing research for a story. "As twilight quickly turned to nighttime, just to make conversation, I innocently asked, 'Is this your last run?' He said, 'Well, I hope so. I can't see in the dark.' " Mr. Ohanian says he vacillated between offering to take over the control panels, even though he is not a pilot, and asking the pilot to land immediately. He did neither, and the plane landed safely. A Honolulu publicist, Sheila Donnelly Theroux, president of Sheila Donnelly & Associates, used to fly the Royal Hawaiian Air Service from Honolulu to Kaanapali on Maui. "Six-seaters, high winds, we'd circle the airport time after time," she said. "One time, the wind made the plane dip so drastically we almost slammed into the ocean right off the coast of Maui. I always had a bag poised. I'd arrive for meetings looking green and smattered.'' Finally, she learned how to hypnotize herself by counting slowly backwards from 100 until she fell into a deep sleep that kept her blissfully unaware of any turbulence. Amy Schultz had a white-knuckle brush with disaster on a puddle jumper in 1996 - and is glad she did. Ms. Schultz, today the director of special events for the University of Texas at Arlington, was the sole passenger on a Piper Warrior four-seater that was making a one-hour hop from Daytona to St. Augustine six years ago. The flight was uneventful until the pilot came in for a landing and misjudged the runway. The propeller hit the ground "with a loud sound somewhere between a thud and clunk,'' Ms. Schultz said. The pilot pulled up on the rudder and lifted the plane back up, but there was more to come. Two nearby planes with military pilots at the controls, summoned by the St. Augustine air-traffic controller to check on the propeller's condition, zoomed in seemingly out of nowhere and pressed within 20 yards of Ms. Schultz's plane, frightening her even more. "I can't say I saw my life flash before me, but I did wonder how I would explain it all to my family from the hospital later,'' she said. The propeller was fine and the pilot brought the plane down safely. After it landed, "First I kissed him and then I kissed the ground,'' Ms. Schultz said. "We sat in the airport lounge and collected ourselves. He was so calm and comforting.'' Six months later, the pilot, Brian Schultz, proposed. James Phillips has a sadder tale to tell of escape from disaster. Four years ago in Ghana, a last-minute change in plans kept him off a plane that crash-landed in Accra, the capital, killing eight passengers and injuring many others. "I was stunned, as were many of my colleagues who thought I was on that plane," said Mr. Phillips, who also works for the Population Council. "In typical African style, our hosts threw a huge party celebrating my survival." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/17/business/17puddle.html?ex=1093775117&ei=1&en=2a91eb557f93c098 --------------------------------- Get Home Delivery of The New York Times Newspaper. Imagine reading The New York Times any time & anywhere you like! Leisurely catch up on events & expand your horizons. Enjoy now for 50% off Home Delivery! Click here: http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/HDS/SubscriptionT1.do?mode=SubscriptionT1&ExternalMediaCode=W24AF HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact onlinesales@xxxxxxxxxxx or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to help@xxxxxxxxxxxx Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company