Going to the Caribbean!!!

Well we seem to be going further and further with the jet's lately, and on Thursday I'll be going as far as I've ever travelled while at the controls. I'm off to St. Martin in the Caribbean!

This picture is a very famous one showing how close the airport is to the waters edge and popular beach and tourist area. I even had this picture on my wall in college. In this instance, the aircraft actually ended up hitting the airport fence and dragging some of it down the runway with it. It's just an amazing sight that I hope I get to see in person while I'm down there.

Move over Jack Sparrow, Matt's coming to town. :) The only downfall, is that it is only a one night stay. Another crew took these folks down a couple of weeks ago, and this is the pickup flight. Still, I'm looking forward to it! I've never been so far away from the mainland either, and with the jet we are able to go much further from shore than with the our other single engined turboprop in the fleet. It will be a lot of flying over the two days however. On our way out we'll be spending Wednesday night in Palm Springs and then leaving Thursday morning to go to St. Martin via a fuel stop in Jacksonville Florida. Here's a map showing the distance of nearly 6000 kms! It will take about 8hrs of total flying time to get there.

We will depart at 10am on Friday morning and make a couple more stops on our way to Edmonton. We will first go to Wilmington, NC and then up to Montreal, then Winnipeg and finally Edmonton. It's not a very direct routing, and I don't have the trip information yet, but I imagine that it's at the clients request we're going up to Montreal for some reason. This will also be a long day, of likely 10hrs in the air flying with 7000 kms travelled. Here's another map showing the journey.

Anyone ever been there before? Know of any hotspots to check out there? I'm in town for about 15hrs so time is limited! And the next day will be a full 14hr day of work, so unfortunately we won't be able to go and really hit up the town. We'll be landing at night, so there won't be much of a picture opportunity, but we depart in daylight so I'll snap as much as I can on the way out.

One of our PC-12's is actually there right now, and they've been there for a few days already. It'll take 2 days for them to travel back up to Alberta, but they got to stay there for a whole week. Now that would be a layover to even trump my other great weeklong layover in Mexico!