There are fascinating people and strange experiences everywhere. When we entered the gangway to board our flight, we came across one bend, and suddenly there were about 5 Turkish police or military authorities. We were never quite sure why they were there or what criteria they used to stop people from entering the plane, but they completely ignored us.
NASA is one of the places where people tend to retire late rather than early because of the unique work environment. But on this flight, we met an engineer working for a Turkish power company who chose to work on his Doctorate in Engineering rather than retire. He was working on his homework on the flight. We asked him why he still worked on equations rather than retire and travel. He said he had traveled extensively for work between the USA and Turkey and found the challenge of working on his doctorate good for keeping his mind sharp. He was equally fascinated with our work at NASA as space-related power was one of his hobbies. We shared an enjoyable discussion with him on our first leg from Houston to Istanbul.
The second leg was quite strange, but again I met someone unusual. We had departed the plane to find out we were to re-embark on the exact same aircraft and actually in the same seats we had just vacated. The woman sitting beside me in the waiting gate area had been visiting children and grandchildren in the UK and was returning home to Athens. After waiting at the boarding gate for about 20 minutes, the Turkish authorities decided that everyone for that flight needed to go through passport control. They moved us all out of the gate area and into the main hallway behind a passport checkpoint desk that had no personnel. At first, they had bunched everyone to the left side of the corridor but then blocked all access past the checkpoint desk. People who were just arriving at the gate went down the right side of the hallway leading to the gate. They had no idea that the mass of people on the left was in line to go through a surprise passport control. When these new arrivals reached the passport control desk, they just went in front of all of those who were already in line. The woman from the UK said she hadn’t run into anything like this before. Once the Turkish Authorities put two employees in the passport control desk, we jockeyed together through the mob-like line to get ourselves through passport control. Much to our surprise after all that she was in the same row in the plane so we were able to continue our conversation about raising families
