Our friend Paul recently got a job as the airport manager, a terrifyingly responsible job involving lots of stuff most of us were bad at in school, such as calculating jet fuel loads, wind direction vectors and Not Goofing Around. Paul is a bit of a science boffin and outdoorsy type, so he is well suited to this job, except that he is also obsessed with gadgets, such as his new night-vision red-light torch.
He has kangaroos grazing on the lawn at night behind the manager's house, and he wanted to sneak up on them with the night vision torch (we get a bit desperate for entertainment out here in the bush). There weren't any scheduled flight arrivals, so he turned off all the airport runway & building lights to maximise his night hunting experience, and left the sat phone in the house so it wouldn't make any kangaroo-startling noises. You know what's coming.
OK, so there's Paul in his camo gear, creeping around his back yard in the middle of the night with the red-light torch, trying to sneak up on a small timid kangaroo, when he hears a plane go by overhead. "How annoying, I hope it doesn't scare off the roos," he thinks to himself. Immersed in hunter-world, it takes a few minutes for his brain to register that the plane noise keeps coming back, then disappearing, then coming back. Finally the penny drops, and he races back into the house to find the sat phone ringing - it's the pilot. "Mate, you gonna turn the runway lights on or what?" He's been circling Meeka, trying to see the airport!
Gary and I were in fits when Paul told us this story, and now at night if we hear a plane overhead we lie there listening. "I hope Paul's turned the lights on," Gary will say. "Maybe we should call him," I answer. We worry because Gary now has so many 12 volt lights strung up around the camp that if Paul doesn't turn the airport lights on, our place looks a lot like a runway from the air....
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