The Auriga Blizzard by Graham Lipson

Rob Jewell and I were on our way to New Hampshire to visit Noyes to receive recognition that AURIGA is the most successful distributor in the world of their ground-breaking Quad Wavelength Handheld OTDR.

“Ladies & Gentlemen, we’re setting off for Boston, but if I was a betting man, I’d say we’ve got about a fifty-fifty chance of getting there” was the encouraging pre-flight announcement from our British Airways pilot as we prepared for take-off from Heathrow at the beginning of December. He did go on to say that he had plenty of fuel in case of needing to divert, but the problem was appalling snow storms down the north eastern seaboard of the USA – he wasn’t kidding!!!

At various stages on a basically uneventful flight the Captain gave us updates, and eventually confirmed that Logan International was still open, just a few minutes later he announced that it was closed again, but only to allow the snow ploughs chance to clear the runway!!! Having held off for those minutes, the motion of the plane changed as we clearly began our final descent through the clouds. The cross winds caused the plane to lurch around, but onwards and downwards we went, till suddenly with no warning or apparent external indication first one wheel and then the other, crunched onto the runway. This was quite a surprise because of the white-out caused by the blizzard, we all felt we were still hundreds of feet in the air! Add to this the minimum use of the brakes, the maximum use of reverse thrust from the engines, and the wheel noise from the badly rutted runway, and you begin to get some impression of the landing.

We began the next stage of our adventure, a one hundred mile journey up the I93 interstate highway. They say that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun, but only idiots like us would even have attempted this journey. The major highway was reduced to a single lane demarcated only by gaps in the trees to indicate the general direction and pairs of tyre marks from preceding vehicles, which got fewer and fewer the further north we got.

To add to the fun, night fell half way through the journey, which made things even more interesting, and it got even better when we turned off the I93 to go the final 10 miles across local roads which were as you can imagine were even worse.

The time taken from check-in at our hotel to the Bar must have been close to another world’s best!

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