Hi guys,Had the pleasure of jumpseating back to Bergamo from Bahrain the other day on the 757PF. As you might expect we were rather heavy departing, around 109 tons if memory serves me right, and were stuck at FL310 for the first couple of hours flying up over Saudi. To make matters worse there was this rather nasty 140KT headwind which reduced our GS to a meager 360-370KTS. Sheer boredom in other words. We could have gone higher, but the wind was even stronger at FL330 and above. I got handed some WX charts and the performance manual to see if it would make sense to descent to FL230 where the wind was at around 50KTS. It was the classic time vs fuel problem, and in the end if would not have made sense to descent due to excessive fuel burn. Oh well, we tried.Anyways, as we got up over Jordan the wind eased off, so we asked for and got FL350. Here's the point I'm trying to make: the Rollers powered up a couple of fractions to CLB setting, and the 757 streaked up with a ROC in excess of 2000FT whilst ACCELLERATING! Amazing bird.Another funny thing happened. We had the WX radar on for most of the trip, and ever so often would get strange straight green lights on the MFD. That was interference from the ever present AWACS flights patrolling the area. Hey, for all we know our flight could have been used for target practice :)Flight up to Europe was by night, but when I went down it was daylight all the way. When we entered the dessie from Jordan the sand was red-yellowish, then as we progressed through Saudi turned into golden yellow, then to ever more pale shades of yellow until it was almost grey when we were approaching Bahrain. One of the most spectacular sights I have ever witnessed.PSDon't tell anyone about this ..... the routing we took both up and down brought us within roughly 40NM of the Iraq border with Saudi. On the A300F that brought me down there's this pax window just aft of the passenger door. Have you guessed it yet? Well guys, proud to say that the entire crew took turns mooning Saddam as we sped along the border.

I suppose you was happy that no any Tu-154s were near you :)

Not really, more pleased that the Swiss ATC now has a minimum of 2 people controlling flights at all times, and that they've got the "conflict" (or whatever it's called) radar thingy back on. The accident we had last summer was not caused by the Tu-154 crew, rather by an absent minded Danish controller working on his own whilst his collegue was on break.Now you said it, on the approach to BRU from BGY we did get an aural "Traffic" warning from the TCAS system. But only a TA, not a RA.

..Always stunning to hear of real pilots flying the 767, thank you for sharing. If you have any photos from the cockpit, while in-flight that'd sure be keen ! I know many of us 'virtual pilots' are thrilled to hear of real world adventures.Safe Journey's