Getting high on a spiritual trip!

Around the late 80s, I was importing Koflach ski and mountain boots into the United States and frequently visited Austria for my work.

Once, while sitting on the tarmac at Vienna airport, I observed two Austrian Airlines planes, with their tails facing each other as they were parked at their respective gates. I couldn’t believe what I saw, next to the international civil aviation code for Austria, “OE”, where the letters “LDS” on an MD-81, and “LSD” on a Fairchild Metro.

For those of us living in Utah, we all know that LDS is the Mormon acronym for their preferred name, Latter-Day-Saints, and LSD is Lysergic acid diethylamide, a famous hallucinogenic drug. Two unlikely acronyms united by fate, I guess. I’ve always regretted not to have a camera at my fingertip then, so today I did some research and traced back the two unlikely neighbors.

Yeah, what an explosive combination these two planes next to each other created! Both acronyms offered their own highs in and out of any airplane, but both were highly incompatible, the stuff of what memorable “trips” are made of!