Wow... busy busy.

After my last set of days off (when Natalie was in town) I have flown a lot. Much more than average. Which is great in that's exactly what I want to be doing - getting lots of hours under my belt. But at the same time, it's quite exhausting!

Since August 14th I've flown a total of 44.6 hours. This is JUST the time spent in the plane, and does not include the pre-flight and post-flight duties and any waiting around inbetween for passengers.

That 44.6 hours equates to approximately 21,400kms worth of travel! Here's a breakdown of just how hectic my last few days have been.

August 14th

Calgary to Calgary - Maintenance Test Flight
Calgary to Saskatoon
Saskatoon to Calgary

August 15th

Calgary to Inveremere
Inveremere to Kelowna
Kelowna to Sechelt
Sechelt to Vancouver
Vancouver to Inveremere
Inveremre to Calgary

August 16th

Calgary to Kelowna
Kelowna to Calgary
Calgary to Inveremere
Inveremere to Calgary

August 18th

Calgary to Penticton
Penticton to Vancouver
Vancouver to Seattle
Seattle to Calgary
Calgary to Red Deer
Red Deer to Calgary

August 19th

Calgary to Salmon Arm
Salmon Arm to Vancouver
Vancouver to Calgary

August 20th

Calgary to Reno
Reno to Calgary

August 21st

Calgary to Salmon Arm
Salmon Arm to Vancouver
Vancouver to Seattle
Seattle to Kelowna
Kelowna to Salmon Arm
Salmon Arm to Calgary (Springbank)
Calgary (Springbank) to Calgary

August 22nd

Calgary to Reno
Reno to Calgary

So as you can see... it's been quite a busy time! And although I was in Vancouver quite a bit, they were always quick turns there. I was supposed to be staying the night on the 18th when we got the call to go to Seattle... grrrr... oh well, that's the job.

Now it looks like I've got a couple of days off, which I need to use to get updated on some paperwork and prepare for some recurrency exams and flight tests which are approaching rather quickly.

Vancouver Layover

Heads up! I'll be in Vancouver Thursday afternoon until Friday afternoon. For any Vancouverites that wish to meet up at some point.

And here's a neat pic of a mountain peak near Inveremere with some glacier action that I snapped the other day flying through some mountain valley's as we approached Inveremere from the West:

NAT Attack!

I had a visitor in Calgary this past set of days off. Just after returning home from Wyoming, the next day Natalie arrived at the Calgary airport for a 3 day visit! She had spent the last couple of weeks in Vancouver and was on her way home to Toronto when she took a small detour and came to visit.

Unfortunatley the weather was not it's best. Rainy and cold when she arrived. But we attempted to make the best of it. As she entered the house it was only then that she recalled that we have 3 cats, and only then that I found out she was allergic!!! Oh boy. Luckily it didn't kill her, but certainly added a little complexity to the trip. She was sniffling most of the time in the house.

Here's proof she actually did visit.. see, Calgary in the background!


The second day we took a day trip out to Banff! It had been a while since I had gotten to drive for more than a few mins, so I enjoyed the drive out there immensely, especially as you start to get closer and closer to the Rocky Mountains... some great views to be had!


We did the tourist thing and checked out a good chunk of the sites... the bow river falls here where pretty darn cool:


The nicest hotel in all of Banff is the Banff Springs Hotel (a Fairmont Hotel) quite the place I tell ya. There was a big premiere conference going on at the same time, we didn't see any of the premiere's but did see a lot of the media covering the events. Here's me in front of this posh Banff resort:


Later that night upon our arrival back into Calgary we headed off to the airport to see what it is I do here in Calgary. We went and checked out one of our airplanes that was parked outside on the tarmac. Checked out the posh interior's.. played with some of the bells and whistles (and very loud warning annoucements of which I'm sure Nat can attest to). Here's Nat posing with one of our planes (perhaps a new employee??)


We hung out at the house at night, drank a little booze as it is one of the few times I'm able to drink (on days off) and watched one of her favorite movies that I've been hearing so much about over the years... "Newsies". Not a bad flick, an older Disney musical that she has fallen in love with due to one cast member in particular.. :)

Then on the day of her departure we shopped around for some cheap booze for her to take back to Ontario and took a little cruise around the outskirts of Calgary. My house is right up in the far north of Calgary and therefore it only takes a couple of minutes worth of driving to reach the city limits, and then the prairies begin.

It was great to see her as it had been a long time, and later last night she was back on a plane Toronto bound.

So... when are the rest of you buggers gonna come and visit!?!? :)

Ahhhh... Jackson Hole WY

At first read of that town you might think it's a bit of a dump... but oh how I was proven wrong.

It's a massive tourist type town like Banff or Whistler... nestled right up against some massive mountains and deep down in some valleys with spectacular views of the surrounding terrain. So great in fact that we saw AirForce 2 there with vice prez Dick Cheney and we were also told that Tiger had recently bought some property as well. It really was quite the place.

Very expensive as well. We stayed in a VERY basic motel and it went for $110/NT US! The whole place was very touristy so that also added to some extra expenses for the trip.

The best thing about this trip was we had 2 aircraft with 2 crews down at the same time. It was a rather large group of ppl that wanted to go and they had us staying there for 2 nights. So we really got to live it up the first night, we actually lived it up far too much... far too much. We went to a couple of different bars, the first of which was a bit of a cowboy bar and had a lot of bikers around! We had a little dinner and 4 rounds of drinks there. Then it was off to wander the town looking for something to do. We found another bar that had a bunch of pool tables. There's where it got out of hand. The pitchers kept coming.. 6 in total! And after a couple of shots it was bad news bears. I'm not sure how we made it back to the hotel, but we did. We were all hurting the next day after a night on the town. It hurt to move up to about 4pm the next day. The other crew got called away to get some extra maintenance done on their aircraft, so they had to fly to Denver the next day for the night... poor bastards, if I had been required to fly it wouldn't have been pretty. We did however find a really good pizza place that was very very busy, it was the perfect thing to be eating after that gongshow of a night.

The rest of the stay was fairly relaxing and uneventful. We just toured around the town and flew back home on Tuesday. A nice little trip. I'm going to attempt to post a couple of pics below.. wish me luck.



and another:



here's one of the town like atmosphere (this is one of the bars we visited that first night:

Speculation.. when in doubt.. speculate!

So my trip westbound was changed a bit, to include me pulling a very long day on Tuesday, the maximum allowable for pilots. 15hrs on duty with nearly 10 of it flying. We left Sechelt and headed off to Masset on the Queen Charlottes, but instead of staying, we were off to Vancouver to do another pickup and then fly to Calgary and later continue on to Saskatoon before proceeding back to Calgary to end the night.

Where does my title of this blog come into effect? Right about the time we landed in Vancouver. We walked into the executive terminal and the TV was tuned to the AirFrance crash in Toronto. It was only a few minutes old by the time we had arrived so information was little other than an aircraft had run off the end of the runway in bad weather.

What do I see/hear on the TV? The media/supposed eye witnesses and so called experts giving all sorts of opinions on to the "what coulda" and "this mighta" happened scenarios. They were interviewing people that had little to know experience with anything related to this event for their expert opinions. Asking a hobby pilot about all sorts of technical and specific information related to the conditions and aircraft involved. This person proceeded to explain how lightning could damage the aircraft's ability to operate the brakes and a few other ridiculous scenarios. All in all it was a gongshow for the first couple of hours before ppl really knew what was going on. Especially when people said it was hit by lightning as it rolled down the runway and many other things.

I find this to be all too common of an event when you take an industry like aviation where so many people are involved and effected by the daily ongoings and then everyone assumes they are an expert or can make good judgement on something that they know absolutely nothing about. I imagine this is similar to some other industries as well, but it is very evident with aviation. I heard one report that was citing the experience of the pilots. They judged that based upon the 10,700hrs of experience one of the pilot's had and based upon the amount of maximum flying a pilot can accomplish in a year (1200hrs) that this individual had approximately 10 years of flying experience. WHAT!?! EXCUSE ME!?? This pilot was 49 years old I believe, or at least somewhere in his 40's. He did not start in aviation when he was in his late 30's! It takes a lifetime to build up flying hours in excess of 10,000hrs just based on the type of flying that one starts to do as their careers advance. Such as those Air France pilots who likely flew on average about 40hrs a month just due to the type of flying (long haul) they would be doing.

It just irks me. Hopefully as time goes on we'll find out the true cause of this accident. My opinion is pretty simple, the aircraft hydroplaned upon landing after recent torrential downpours. Is it safe to fly in those thunderstormy conditions? Yes and No. The type of thunderstorms that produce that type of weather are generally isolated in their intensity. So where it may be chaos at one end of town, it is far less significant at the other. At one end of town it isn't very safe to attempt a landing and at the other, perfectly normal. Looking at the camera shots of the recent weather around the time of the crash it is bad weather but the pilots have a lot better of an idea of what lays ahead of them. The onboard weather radar can quickly point out to a pilot all of the weather hot spots ahead of them. It is their final decision if it is safe to continue during inclimate weather like thunderstorms. We do it all the time in my company. We approach in the vicinity of thunderstorms all the time, it's that time of the year to see them in Alberta and the Prairies especially. We use the information from reports of planes ahead of us, forecasts for the areas and our own weather radar on the aircraft to plot out the best approach or if it is not good enough then we will either hold for the weather to get better, or proceed to a more suitable airport.

Like I said, it's not just aviation, but it's such an easy one to make all these speculations on because everyone's been on a plane or seen a plane or known of a plane to do this and that and... well.. you get the picture.

But in the end, of course leave it to the media to blow everything out of proportion. I eagerly anticipate the findings of this incident and am glad to hear nobody was killed or seriously injured.

Another trip.. this time westbound

I'm off to Sechelt Monday for a night layover there on the sunshine coast and then I head over to Masset on the Queen Charlottes for a 4 night layover there. This should be a great little trip as there should be quite a lot of scenery and little things to do while we're there. After we get back then I'm off the next day to Jackson Hole Wyoming for a 2 night layover.. that should be an interesting trip as well. Jackson Hole seems like a pretty big place for winter fun and even summer fun, it appears that there are some neat things like white water rafting and huge tours and excursions in the area. The unusally neat thing about that Wyoming trip is that there will be 2 aircraft and 2 crew going as it's a big group of people so we are sending 2 planes. So there will be 4 pilots all hanging around looking for trouble.

Well, if I have internet I'll do some posting on the road, but not sure when that will be next as I don't believe Sechelt or Masset has high speed internet in house.

Back from MN and into days off...

Well, we finally returned from Minnesota last week and it was fairly uneventful. Thankfully there were no big waits for custums or anything like that... We did end up having to do another flight though after we brought the folks home from MN. We hopped over to Salmon Arm where the weather was 'perfect' and then proceeded to head back to Calgary where the weather was far less than 'perfect'.

It was cold, cloudy, thunderstormy in the distance and 13 degrees out! A bit of a climate change. Oh well, the trip was over. As we were putting the plane to bed an emergency type flight came up to go to Kelowna, but we could not fly it because we had legally timed out for all the flying we could do that day. So the plane was taken from us by another crew and they raced off to Kelowna to pick up a couple of ppl to bring back to Calgary as one of their relative was unfortunately on their death bed. Sad to hear/see, but I'm glad that we were able to get them here fast so they could spend as much time with them as possible.

On to more happy thoughts, my roomate and I were out shopping around and I was looking for an olive oil bottle for the kitchen. We ended up at Ikea and I walked out with an olive oil bottle and a bed frame! I decided I have slept on the floor long enough! So I took the Ikea special ($99) for a double sized frame for my mattress. (Unlike Justin I did not feel the need or have the drive to go to the lumber store and make my own frame!)

I've been sleeping well ever since. On to more stupid things... on that same fateful shopping trip my roomated Mike and I went to Walmart where we were looking for a good set of earplugs for when we're out and about on the tarmac at the airport. It can get very loud with jet engines all around and so a good set of earplugs that stay hanging around your neck is a good investement in our industry. We didn't find anything that suited our needs... but what we did find was a whole lot of trouble when we both decided to invest in this little toy:



It's a little pump action air gun that shoots little plastic BB's. It came with a little target and mesh screen to collect the BB's so they can be reused. Mike and I wondered for a long time if getting hit with one of these things would actually hurt much. So we took turns shooting each other. Well... it stings, but is not that bad. I close shot will leave a little welt for a day, that's about it. So now we've littered the backyard with a whole bunch of these orange plastic BB's and can't find nearly as many as we've shot! Oh well, another trip to Walmart to buy some extra ammo will be in the very near future. We both had a few drinks last night and had a bit of a shootout in the backyard. Eye protection a must, but even still we both ended up with shots to the head and all over our bodies. How easily we are amused.

Flights on the horizon for me appear to be another 6 day trip to the West West Coast. I spelled West twice on purpose. With a one night layover in Sechelt we then head off to Massett on the Queen Charlottes for another 4 nights. I actually am looking forward to it, there is quite a lot to see out there and I'm excited to check things out. I doubt I'll have internet up there but we'll see, ya never know. Until next time...

Halfway into my most interesting Minnesota layover

Howdy folks.

It's currently Friday afternoon and I'm sitting up in my hotel room at the Radisson in downtown St. Paul looking out into the busy streets below as the lunch hour is upon the city. From the 11th floor I can see quite a bit, including a parking lot across the street on top of a lowrise.. but the rest of my view is of high rises and a hot summer day. I take of my sip of my starbucks and reflect on how this trip began, because it was not as peaceful and relaxed as I am now.

We had a great flight here, had a nice tail wind and arrived early. But then everything went downhill. We arrive to the airport and are sent taxiing all over the place at the airport to arrive at the customs building and we proceed to wait... and wait... and wait. We are now quite a ways past our customs time and both our office back in Calgary and some of the St. Paul airport people are trying to figure out what is happening with customs. They should have been at the airport to meet us. Well, it turns out they went to the wrong airport! It was now going to be 40mins for the inspector to make it over to our airport and we were not allowed to disembark our aircraft. So we actually closed everything back up and started the engine so we could get the air conditioning working. It was a hot evening in Minnesota that night. Finally.. after about 1.5hrs of waiting our inspector shows up, apologizes and we are on our way fairly quickly. We unload the plane and get the more than drunken passangers underway (what else is there to do on the airplane while waiting.. drink booze! all of it!)

So we get a ride from the airport service people to the hotel. We arrive at about 11pm and are told by the front desk staff that the hotel has been oversold that night due to a major glitch with central reservations and they are looking for another hotel for us to spend the night free of charge. There was a huge Best Buy convention in town and therefore every single hotel was booked solid that night! They found us a bed and breakfast historic inn way on the outskirts of town to spend the night. So after a 30min drive into the boonies we arrive. At the historic Afton House Inn. Not a bad little place, but certainly not the classy Radisson I was expecting. It was a long night and there was no way I was going to make the "breakfast" portion of this accomodation. So at the last possible second we check out of the bed and breakfast at 11am and call a taxi to take us back to the Radisson as they now have rooms for us.

The gongshow continues.. 2.5hrs later and after many irrate phone calls the taxi finally arrives! We weren't in a rush anywhere so we were just checking out the local little shops in the quaint little town. Had an icecream cone while we waiting.. mmm.. Mint Chocolate Chip. So then the cabbie gets lost on the way back to the hotel, it's quite the gongshow.. but whatever.. we helped him find it and eventually did make our way back to the Radisson. The hotel was paying for the cab ride back so we didn't care, we were getting a good look at the Minnesota countryside and city.

So when we check in they are very apologetic about the whole gongshow we had to go through and then this trip took a turn for the "much" better. They gave us upgraded deluxe rooms with business setups (chairs/desks/hi speed) I also have a kingsized sleep number bed and a great view from up top high. We also received coupons for free breakfasts for the rest of our stay ($7.50 value times four) and 4 free drink tickets for the bar downstairs! So... not a shabby deal out of all of this!

That first day back in the Radisson we just took a little walk arond downtown (so hot though) so we came back to the hotel for dinner and drinks and turned in early. Yesterday we awoke early for our free breakfast and then hopped on a bus to head to the biggest mall in the world... the Mall of America. It is one huge assed mall. It makes the West Edmonton Mall look small!! We walked through the mall and checked it all out and ended up going to Famous Dave's bbq for a late lunch/early dinner. Had a huge assed beer with it as well... ahhh.. layovers.. :) We then opted to go for a movie and watched "Wedding Crashers" pretty damn funny. Then it was back on the bus and an early night back in the hotel room. Watched the tv for a bit and then it was off to bed.

Today has been pretty relaxing as well.. breakfast again this am, then off to do a bit of food/drink shopping around the downtown core here and now I'm back for a relaxing afternoon in the room. Might get the exercise room a little later, have a nap and then I do believe I will get sloshed out of my mind tonight.. :) I still have some free drink tickets remaining!

We leave on Sunday to head back to Calgary so still a couple of days to tour around the city a bit more, some neat buildings around here with quite a bit of history. Very warm too. A nice trip all in all... feels more like an all expenses paid vacation though.. ahh she's a difficult job.. but somebody's got to do it!

Off to the Twin Cities

Well... I know I haven't posted in a little while and quite a lot has happened! Some great little trips around here and we just had Stampede in Calgary! So I'll have to post up some details at another time.

Tomorrow I'm off to St. Paul Minnesota for 6 days and 5 nights! I have no idea why the client is going down there, but it should be an interesting trip. We will be closer to our eastern bases so if they get really busy there we might be called in to relieve some of their flights which would be great, I'd love to fly into DC or New York or many of the other places they travel to from our Eastern bases.

So that's a quick little blip on the latest, not sure if I'll have internet in St. Paul, hopefully I do and I'll post some more.

Guns are scary stuff!!

Howdy Howdy...

Today my roommate Mike and I went out to an indoor shooting range here in Calgary (The Shooting Edge). We were both quite interested in going to this place to shoot off handguns to see what it really is like and all about. This place will let you come in and use their equipment and all you do is sign your life away saying you're not going to sue if you get hurt, you pay an entrance fee of $32 and you can pick any gun they have in their rent out case and then you buy the ammo. Mike and I both picked 9mm handguns and the ammo was $25 for a box of 50 bullets.

Mike first chose a Glock 17 (quite common in law enforcement) Pictured below:



I then picked a SIG Sauer 226 (I remembered reading about SIG's somewhere) also pictured here:



So we get a safety briefing, and they show us how to load the ammo into the magazine clip and give us a target and pretty much let us go at it. So we set up or targets on one of those zip lines and sent the targets out about 7 meters. We then proceeded to load the magazine clips with 10 bullets, load the clip and my favorite part was to load the barrel where you pull the top part of the gun back and then release it quickly to load a bullet into the chamber.

Now Mike and I were both a little nervous. Mike fired first and holy crap was it loud. So loud that I was now even more nervous. I line up my sights and pulled the trigger. BAM! Holy crapola!!! What force. Never expected that much recoil. I then looked at the target and saw that I hit nothing!!! I was blown away (not literally of course) at the amount of power these guns had. Between the noise and recoil it was certainly an eye opener. I will never look at one the same anymore. I was holding on hard with 2 hands and there was no way I was going to try and fire one handed as it was just too forceful. Forget all those gangster rappers out there holding the guns sidewayz and firing with ease. Pff... I had two hands steady and aiming at a target not far away and I was missing the freaking thing altogether. I have no idea where those bullets were going.

Mike and I switched guns for a little bit and had a try at each. The Glock was a much lighter gun, but had a hair trigger and packed a bigger punch than the SIG. The SIG was heavier and was a little easier to shoot, but both of these guns demanded respect and constant attention. We shot for about 15mins as you had to reload the clips after every 10shots, which is good because it gives you time to cool down as the adrenaline was pumping as we shot these destructive machines.

It was a great experience but I must say, I was very intimidating by the gun while we were there. Mike and I of course couldn't stop talking about it afterwards and we had grins ear to ear, but while we were in there it was quite a different story.

I hit the target 29 times out of 50 which is freaking awful!!!! Don't give me no gun! These are pretty hard to shoot accurately and if I was going to do it again, I'd research and get tips on how to fire them more accurately (stance and holding techniques etc.)

Here's a pic of my target:



So it was quite the experience. I wasn't quite expecting the force and scariness of these guns. They are certainly not to be toyed around with, and to think if you had to quickly pick one up and aim and shoot at someone... wow... good luck is all I can say... aim for the center of the person because there is no way in hell you're going to be able to shoot a leg or foot to just injure someone slightly... you'll miss everytime. I tried 10 times for a head shot and just look above at how many times I came close to the head!

Anyways... I'll likely do it again sometime in the future... but man oh man... it opened my eyes.

Pictures!!!

I keep on neglecting to post my pics... well I've had an Imagestation account for a long time.. so here are a couple of albums I've put together really quickly.. I'll continue to take pics and add more and more stuff over the long haul..

Firstly... Pic's of my room!!

Here are some pics from a trip we took to the Dino Museum out in Drumheller (1.5hr drive away) Take a look here

Finally some pics from a flight I did to Sechelt and Regina last month... See them here

I'll continue to add more photos and post up links here.. I do have a bunch more that I'd like to put in and so at least you guys can see what I'm doing out here visually.. =D

Back in rain soaked Calgary

A bit of a climate change in a matter of 5 hours of flying from Texas home to Calgary.

It is currently 7 degrees outside, on the day I left Texas it was around 37 degrees!!! Not only that, but when we opened up the plane which had been sitting on the hot tarmac in Texas after 3 days, the inside cabin temp showed 55 degrees! It was unbearable, luckily we were able to hook up to an external power source and run our air conditioners onboard for an hour before the passengers arrived. That still only brought the temp down to 42! It was very very hot until we got to about 10,000 ft and then the air conditioners were able to work at max capacity. Crazy crazy hot.

It was an interesting stay, there really is nothing around the Midland area. It's primarily there for oil. Nothing else. This isn't a place you'd go to vacation that's for sure. The Hilton was our only saving grace. I ventured out of the hotel once for a couple of hours on the first day and nearly died in the heat... I walked around the downtown financial district for a little while and then into the suburbs looking for something to eat or do. I walked thru a couple of different "comptons" and actually got scared walking thru some areas! We stuck around the hotel most of the time after that, they had food and stuff there. I suntanned (sunburned) out by the pool each day reading some magazines.. then retreated to the sanctity of the air conditioned rooms. Each night the other pilot and I went to the patio outside for some dinner and beers. Not too bad at that time of night, still really hot, but no sun to really cook you.

We were supposed to do some little hops into New Mexico on Thursday, but that didn't happen, and that decision was only made after we had already gone to the airport early in the morning to get the plane ready to go. Oh well, on the drive back to the hotel we convinced the shuttle driver to stop by a grocery store and we grabbed some extra drinks and snacks. (I picked up 16 cans of starbucks doubleshots which are only available in the US - Canadian food and drug people say it has too much caffeine! haha... mmm.. they're good... a nice chilled 2 shot of espresso with cream, milk and sugar all in a little can... I highly suggest anyone that goes into the US to pick one up and try it. They come in super handy for early early morning flights. The cashier looked at me funny when I walked up to pay.)

So as we got closer and closer to Calgary we kept on getting weather updates and it wasn't looking good. It was actually extremely piss poor! Thunderstorms all over the place and torrential downpours all over the place. Low cloud ceilings, lots of turbulence and massive delays at the airport as it takes a lot of extra coordinating to get the flights lined up so they can all land via the ILS "Instrument Landing System". This navigational aid allows aircraft to follow down a line drawn in the sky right to the runway, all the way down to 200ft if necessary. When every aircraft needs to take advantage of this it really backs things up as they all need to be spaced and lined up to come in at 5 mile intervals to each other. So over Montana we were told that there was going to be big delays so we slowed down and likely added an extra 25mins to the flight as a result. The descent into Calgary was very turbulent and all over the place.. we got rocked around pretty good. The winds were very very strong on the surface so once we broke out of the clouds at about 400 ft it was quite a fight to get the aircraft onto the ground without being pushed off the side of the runway.

That wasn't the end of our flight, we were only landing in Calgary to get some fuel and to also clear customs. Our clients needed to be dropped off in Red Deer which is halfway between Calgary and Edmonton. Oh man, after refuelling delays due to lightning in the area we ran back to the airplane in a torrential downpour and started up. Upon taking off we knew we were going to be dodging more thunderstorms and as soon as we were off the ground the controllers started turning us and sent us right inbetween too massive thunderstorm cells before we were able to turn on course to Red Deer. It was a bit of a ride. We got to Red Deer 20 mins later and the weather was a fair bit better there. We dropped everyone off and then got back in the plane to fly back to Calgary but they wouldn't let us leave because of all the delays in Calgary so they gave us a time to take off and we had to wait 45mins in Red Deer before leaving.

Finally back in the air this day was getting long! We got set up on approach (ILS) into Calgary and they informed us that aircraft before us were reporting weather down to minimums. This meant the weather was right on the boarder for getting into the airport. 200ft cloud deck with only 1/2 mile in visibility. At 202 ft we finally got the strobe approach lighting for the runway in sight and committed to landing. A second or two more and we would have had to pulled up and aborted the landing. I'm glad we didn't have to, but quite a change in the weather to make it even more worse.

Well, got back to the house late, and slept in quite a bit today as well. It's pissing so much rain out there it's quite crazy. Not exactly a normal 22 degree Calgary summer that's for sure!

Well, this has turned into a long post. So, if you read it this far, congrats!

Holy Humidity!!!

I'm in Texas.. just checked into the Hilton. From the long drive in from the airport it doesn't look like there is much to do near by! Oh well.

As soon as we stepped off the plane at midnight Texas time, it was 26 degrees and the air was soooooo moist. It's crazy!

Well, the hotel room is pretty darn good as can be imagined with the Hilton, I've got a nice office desk and chair with hispeed internet.

We now have a flight on Thursday around New Mexico, a bunch of real quick hops around to a bunch of no name areas so this client can visit business contacts. And we now leave Texas back to Alberta on Saturday... so I'll be doing some cooking here in all the heat!

Texas... yee haw!

I'm off to Texas this week. Midland Texas to be exact, home of Dubya.

Leaving tomorrow afternoon and then returning on Friday. Hopefully we'll get to stay down there. We're staying in the Hilton downtown, with all the goodies, so it should be a good stay. The only things I'm concerned of is the heat... way up there.. 35's on average. Yowza. And they get some big thunderstorms down there, that last all night.. and by the looks of things, we're going to be arriving in the middle of one. So we'll have to plan that out well.

If I get the chance I'll post from down south, it appears I'll have internet access and I'll take my camera too.

Visiting home was great

Nice to see all of you that I managed to bump into during my layover in Vancouver this past weekend. Opportunities like that are hopefully going to arise a couple more times in the summer.

Before seeing you guys I had gone to Portland and North Bend Oregon the day prior (Saturday) and then spent the night in Victoria. The next morning (Sunday) it was just a quick 12 min flight from Victoria to Vancouver. Too bad it was kinda rainy and what not. But lunch with Cindy, Bonnie and John was great, followed by a dinner/poker/foosball get together at Tsang's. That was a blast... we've definitely got to get a foosball tourney up and running the next time I'm home! The next day was nice and relaxing at home, and we were scheduled to depart out of Vancouver and head straight back to Calgary and that was to be the end of the day. Well, shortly after taking off out of Vancouver we developed a very noisy window in the cockpit. And when I say noisy, I mean nearly unbearable. One of the seals on the window was in rough shape and so some air was managing to get into the seal and create a massive noise vibration noise. The passengers weren't too happy with it and neither were we in the cockpit. The plane was completely safe, just noisy.

Upon landing back in Calgary we got messages saying that we needed to get back in the plane asap and head back to the coast. (Qualicum Beach to be exact)

One of our other planes had some problems getting one of their generators to operate on the ground and so they couldn't take off. So we grabbed a mechanic to take with us, who also temporarily fixed the seal problem by putting some special aircraft tape on the edges of the suspect window and we blasted off for the coast. Landing in Qualicum Beach was some of the most fun I've had in the aircraft. It's a very sharp and steep approach to the short runway to avoid some noise sensitive areas. You dive and turn at the same last second over the edge of the runway and as soon as you're on the ground it's full reverse because the end of that short little runway is racing towards you! We dropped off the mechanic so he could work on the other aircraft and then we transferred all the bags into our plane and loaded up the six ladies who had been stranded for 4 extra hours. They didn't seem to mind a whole lot, they had been boozing it up pretty good while waiting and they were all in quite a happy mood. :)

The flight back was into very miserable weather. Very low clouds, lots of rain and very windy when we landed at 12:45am Calgary time. It was so miserable that even the autopilot didn't want to fly the approach for us and we had to take control and manually fly the approach in (no problems and we do it all the time).

It was a busy night. We cleaned up the plane and by the time I was home it was 2am!

The past couple of days have been pretty relaxed. I've been in a recurrent (refresher) ground school course that we're required to take every year about the airplane and all it's systems. The pilot who was teaching us gave a great class and I actually ended up learning some new stuff that wasn't covered in my initial training last August.

Today's going to be nice and relaxing and if I don't fly tomorrow I'll have that off as well and then my days off this week are Sat, Sun and Mon. There's a bbq party tomorrow night that a coworker is throwing, so I'll likely go to that and have some fun... I don't think the weather is going to cooperate though... it's just been miserable here lately. Looks more like Vancouver here than Calgary!!! :)