What do the Florida Primaries and flying across the Atlantic have in common?

When we're flying across the Atlantic Ocean we have two things on our mind:

1) Where are we?

2) Where are we going?

and

3) Who won in Florida?

OK, maybe that's three things but that last question is still very important when you're 700 miles from the nearest shore line and are completely out of touch with the ground. Usually when you're flying over the United States you can ask a friendly air traffic controller and, if he's not busy, he'll give you the latest score or primary result.

But what do you do when there no way to communicate with the ground?

With the advent of satellite communication we have the ability to receive messages from our dispatch, usually weather related, regardless of where we are on the Earth.

On our way to Amsterdam we did just that! Since the computer only accepts bold letters and doesn't have a question mark our question looked like this:

WHAT IS THE RESULT OF FLORIDA PRIMARY <SEND>

And about 5 minutes later, on our printer (yes, we have a printer on board), we received the following message:




Now that the results of the Florida Primary were firmly in our hand, we could go back to the business of answering the first two questions again.....Now, what were they again? I forgot.