TUG’95 at St. Petersburg Beach — a Personal View

Saturday July 22nd. Brussels airport, hot, not enough head wind, and our DC-10 just stood there on the runway, waiting for that little breeze that would allow us to go up into the sky (it seemed the plane was too heavy to have enough velocity at the end of the runway to safely take off). We saw all those other planes fly off and our pilot must have thought, after half an hour or so, that what the other pilots could do, he could do also, and just after 12 pm we also became an albatross on our way to next year’s host of the Olympic summer games, Atlanta. At takeoff the estimated arrival time was announced to be 15:26 pm local time, and with head winds between 60 and 100 km per hour we landed, believe it or not, at 15:24 pm.