Nowhere fast — that’s how you might describe the MagAO run so far. This post should have been “Day 0” (our traditional day before Laird arrives at LCO), but as you can see we’re moving backwards.
Laird, Katie and Jared tried to leave Tucson today, but, well, they just decided to close the runway 15 minutes before our scheduled departure. We’re not entirely clear what was going on in the tower at TUS today, but it is clear that they started maintenance on the runway before all the planes that needed to use it had left. To be clear, we were in our seats, buckled, doors armed, ready to push, when they closed the runway.
So, anyhoo, we’re still in Tucson. At least we get to spend our travel delay at our own homes, rather than in some random airport hotel in some random city. This happened to Laird, Victor and Jared way back in May 2012, on our first unpacking run.
Quotes of the day:
“Well, we used up our travel contingency. We only have our O-ring contingency left, we better not use that up.” — Katie, commenting on the Gantt chart implications of today’s events. Don’t worry, as long as we don’t forget to grease the O-ring this time, we’ll be fine.
“It means we’re f#@*ed.” — Laird, commenting on the practical implications of today’s events.