Greetings to all. This is my first post and I’m really excited about discovering Airliners.net. I am passionate about commercial aviation and although at times I have become obsessed with certain aspects of my “hobby”, I’ve always enjoyed everything about it. I hope to learn as much as possible from what goes on in these forums, even from the infamous A-vs-B discussions.

I was born in Medellin, Colombia (100% paisa and proud to be Colombian), raised in New York City, spent a lot of time in London, and now live in a small town in rural Connecticut, USA.

I have travelled extensively throughout the world and during my “peak” I routinely reached British Airways Gold and American Airlines Platinum. I have flown on many airlines, in all classes, on many types of aircraft, and all at my expense (no business travel)! I have survived 456 takeoffs & 456 landings, flown almost a million miles, and spent almost 2,000 hours in the air. My trip log includes the following roundtrips from my “base” in New York: Trans-Atlantic: 37x, South America-Mexico-Caribbean including Colombia: 36x, Transcontinental USA: 31x, Trans-Pacific & Hawaii: 9x, Round-The-World: 2x, as well as many shorter domestic roundtrips within North America.

Why username “Avianca707359B”? Some of my earliest childhood memories are of travelling to Colombia to visit relatives during the summer. The joy that I felt boarding that white-and-blue or red-and-silver Avianca 707 as a kid and as a teenager was indescribable. I have many snapshots of “my” jets at the PanAm Worldport, at Eldorado, and of me in front of the plane on the tarmac at Olaya Herrera in Medellin. Almost all those early flights were on Avianca 707’s, and many of those were on their flagship 707-359B’s: HK-1402 named “Sucre” and HK-1410 named “Bolivar”. Even though 747’s and other wide-body jets were already in service, to me my –359’s were really special, as if they were my very own Air Force One's.

Throughout my “career” I’ve flown on many interesting “classic” aircraft, including most of BA’s 747-136’s, almost all of Avianca’s 707’s, 720B’s, and 727-100’s, PanAm’s 747-SP21 “Clipper Lindbergh”, Eastern L-1011’s, a Varig Electra-188A from Rio-Santos Dumont to Sao Paulo-Congonhas, most of American’s DC-10-10’s, numerous DC-9’s, a United DC-8-71, an Air Tahiti ATR42 to Bora Bora, and on tons of current airliners as well. My two biggest regrets: giving up a trip on a DC-3 to a small town in the “llanos” or flatlands of Colombia because I wanted to go to a party with my cool cousins in Bogota (what a fool!) and using my British Airways miles for First class flights to Europe instead of on Concorde (what an even bigger fool!)

I have a bunch of memorabilia including old boarding passes, timetables, 35mm slides and snapshots, trip reports (JFK-MDE in a 707 from 1980), mileage runs, a virtual airline that I planned when I was bored ("Colombiana de Aviacion") and much more. In time I’ll scan and upload whatever I think might be appropriate throughout these forums. Anyway, that’s it for now; I have to get busy posting.

Have a nice flight…..

[Edited 2006-01-13 04:30:51]