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Le Dauphin
You can tell that your company is doing well when the rooftop helipad is suddenly needed for something more than just golf practice. Although I think that Arthur would disagree as his swing is likely to suffer but I doubt he wants to be up there when the CEO's SA 360 Dauphin 2 civilian transport helicopter comes in to land.
Within a week every member of the board had found an excuse to take a trip somewhere in it despite the ridiculously prohibitive cost of having a repair crew and crew chief on permanent stand-by. It reminded me of the apocryphal tale of the Rolls Royce mechanics that appear halfway up a Swiss mountain to fix a faulty gearbox then refuse to charge the owner for the repairs because a Rolls Royce never breaks down.
The Dauphin 2 will comfortably seat eight passengers and is most easily described to the wide-eyed, slack-jawed incredulous customers as "that one from the start of Baywatch that skims over the ocean between shots of Pamela Anderson's tits". I say incredulous because such an overt extravagance makes justifying our costs to clients nigh impossible when we've just set three wheels down at the nearest heliport to visit them with the CEO tagging along for the ride.
Needless to say it was a tough sell but I managed it, and the client drove us back to the heliport just to see the forty-foot twin turboprop machine. We shook hands and I climbed back aboard to rejoin our CEO. There was the lurch of takeoff and the coffee and pastries I'd had during the meeting got friendly with parts of my body I'd rather they stayed clear of.
Gazing whistfully out of the side window as we flew over the suburbs of London my CEO seemed forelorn and distant. Over the cruising purr of the rotors I could just barely hear him mumbling something about how peaceful the world looked below. How people didn't even look up when a private helicopter flies overhead. This from a man who rides a 989cc Ducati in his spare time and dates supermodels.
"What next? What next?" he murmured rhetorically.
I suggested he invest in some air to ground missiles and hardpoints, a chaingun attachment for the front and a copy of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyrie, that'd cheer him right up and solve congestion in London in one easy stroke.
May. 7.2004