12 days available, 12 days in Ontario

My schedule as an on call corporate pilot is 12 days available to fly and then 4 scheduled days off. We don't usually work all of those 12 days, maybe around 8. But this set, it would appear I'm working 'em all.

The best part of it all is because I had only anticipated those first 3 days. So now I'll be out east my full set of 12 days. I'll travel back to Calgary on Thursday and then go on my official days off Friday - Monday.

The only good news is that they're sending another pilot here today who will spend the remainder of the days in the same hotel. So at least now I have some human interaction.

I would however, much prefer to be at home hooking up my new Xbox!

Out East... for a while.

Well, what should have been a couple of days out East doing some flying has turned into a long stint. Which is good and bad. Good for the pocket books, as I'm making more money being away from home base, but bad because I hadn't planned on being away for any greater than 5 days.. because that's all I packed for.

So.. today is day 5. See where this is going? And I'm anticipating being here until Wednesday, which is another 5 days. So.. it's time to find me some laundry facilities.

I'm in Kitchner Ontario staying in a Best Western. Kitchner is one of our eastern bases and I'm here to fly the eastern jet. I got out east on Monday when I flew into Hamilton in preparation for some flying which started on Tuesday. I went down to Oklahoma City and back up to Kitchner. The next day we went down to Tucson via a gas stop in Wichita. We then headed back up to Oklahoma City to pick up the people we had dropped off the day prior, and took them down to Georgetown Texas. Georgetown is a little town just outside of Austin Texas. There wasn't a whole lot to do there, so nothing much to report. The next day we flew them back up to Hamilton and then did the quick hop ourselves over to Kitchner. All of a 13 minute flight, and it was only that long because the weather was bad so we had to fly full approaches through the low cloud and fog to get in.

That brings us to today, Friday. I was going to be heading down to Mexico tomorrow to spend a lovely night in Los Cabos, but that all changed when the jet broke. So no more Mexico. It is getting fixed right now and should be up and running for a flight out of here Monday to Hamilton to pick up those same folks once again and take 'em down to Little Rock Arkansas and then over to Indianapolis. We'll spend the night there and take 'em back up to Hamilton Tuesday. At that point I'm hoping I will hop on a Westjet or AirCanada flight back to Calgary to sleep in my own bed. In the past 2 weeks I've only slept there 1 night, but that first week was because I was in Vancouver on holidays.

So yah, here I sit in my little hotel room all weekend long, just waiting for that flight on Monday. Exciting. And it's only me here!

Today I did go out touring around and walked into the Futureshop to take a peak at all the latest and greatest deals on gizmos... and low and behold they've got a big sale on their XBox360's as a result of the big launch for the PS3. Well, I thought long and hard all day long, and actually succumbed!! I had my roommate Mike pick one up for me in Calgary (only GST in Alberta) as it was a one day sale only. So I am now the proud owner of a new XBox, and I won't be able to touch it until Wednesday at the earliest!!!

Back from holidays, for just a few hours

Got back in this morning to Calgary. What a great time I had in Vancouver. Even though the rain poured for the majority of my trip, it was still warm and reminded me of what Vancouver is all about. I'd move back in a heartbeat if it was available, but things are going well in Calgary now, so I'm here for a while.

I'm packing for a few days right now, so I can't write a big blog. Tomorrow morning I'm on Westjet to fly to Hamilton, ON. There I'll spend the day and then very early in the morning on Tuesday I'm off to Little Rock Arkansas, and then Oklahoma City. Back into Kitchner Ontario later that night and then the rest of my days are unknown. Perhaps they'll keep me out there for a few days, but more likely is that I'll take a cab into Toronto and then fly back to Calgary sometime Wednesday.

Was great seeing most of you guys again. I had some good fun playing poker (Casino and Poker night), watching HDTV hockey games, out to some pubs, just hanging out and relaxing, spraining the hell out of my foot (which is getting better thankfully) and everything else which I'm forgetting as I frantically type out this never ending sentence inbetween folding laundry. :)

Well, perhaps I'll post from somewhere out east when I actually know what the heck I'll be doing.

Holy RAIN Batman!

Come back for holidays and I'm swamped (quite literally) with the buckets of rain falling from the sky. Hopefully I'll get to see a bunch of you lowermainlanders and we can catch up... preferably in a warm and dry establishment!

November holidays in Vancouver

Just a heads up to all you lower mainlanders, I'll be in Vancouver on holidays November 4th-11th. A nice week off to relax and all that good stuff. I'm sure there'll be some poker action and other fun stuff.

Keep you schedules clear!

Back in Calgary.. for a few hours

Today was a lot of flying. The plane was fixed in time for us to depart Washington, DC and travel enroute to a fuel stop location in Salina Kansas, and then off to Scottsdale AZ for the pickup.

From there we brought the folks back to chilly Calgary. It was 25 degrees in Arizona when we left.. it was -5 degrees in Calgary when we arrived. Brrrr!! I walked back into the hangar only to find out I would be flying nonstop over the next couple of days as well.

So tomorrow (Wednesday) it's off to Port Hardy, BC and back to Calgary, then immediately off to Palm Springs, CA and back.

Thursday morning is another Palm Springs and back. Pretty exhausting. Then it would appear I have Friday off which I'll need, so I can prepare for my upcoming vacation back to Vancouver!

Still in Washington, DC

The plane we were in yesterday was only in Calgary for a few hours and then another crew took it bright and early to fly down to Florida to continue the trip that we were originally to do.

So.. that means I'm still here in Washington (actually Virginia.. right on the border). Not quite sure what is happening with the plane, but if it gets fixed tonight, then we're off at 7am to Scottsdale Arizona (with a fuel stop somewhere... damn westerly winds are killers) for a pickup and then back up to Calgary.

We'll see if that happens or not.. I'm giving it 50/50 at this point. One thing's for certain. We're not making lots of money by having our jets flying all of these empty legs, it is VERY pricey. That's the price of doing business though - $hit happens. :)

Oh, and we went and checked out the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum which is right near the airport. It is a very cool place that costs $0! It is a must see in this area, they've got all sorts of goodies inside ranging from SR-71, to the Concorde, to the Enola Gay, to one of the Shuttles.. and it goes on and on. Check it out if you're in the area, you wont be disappointed!

Florida was nice... for 30 mins.

Then it was off to Washington DC, which is where I type this message. One of our other jets had some landing gear issues when they took off out of here on their way back to Calgary. So they had to come back and land and the plane is now at a maintenance facility getting looked at.

So we brought our jet up so they could take their passengers back to Calgary. We now sit here with a broken jet, unsure of what tomorrow has in store for us. We're supposed to be in Florida tomorrow to take some people from Orlando to Tampa, but it's all kind of depending on what happens with our jet tonight.

I'll post again tomorrow night from wherever we may be!

Toronto and Florida

I got a call yesterday while lying in bed to get to the airport and hope on an AirCanada flight out to Toronto. Now in Toronto, today I do a couple of quick hops around here (in very very windy Toronto) to pick up some people and take them down to Florida. We'll be hitting up Orlando, West Palm Beach, Tampa and Miami. Then returning to the Toronto area on the Nov 1st. After that I'm not so sure what's going to happen, likely a commercial flight back to Calgary on the 2nd.

Sunny weather and warm beaches here I come!

48,934 kms young

Took the WRX in for it's 48,000 km service today. The BIG one as it's referred to. That's because it's the most extensive and also of course, the most expensive. I was not looking forward to today in a monetary frame of mind, but glad to get this service done.

When the dust settled it was a whopping $690 expense. Ouch! But it had to be done. Now she's all refreshed with all new fluids everywhere and new filters everywhere, and a few other goodies. I was not shocked at the hourly labor rate, but still a little surprised.. it just keeps going up and up! It was $98/hr and that constituted nearly $350 worth of the service.

Well now I've got another 6,000 kms before I need worry about anything else.

Our newest jet

Here's a few pics on our newest jet. It hasn't quite arrived yet. Nor has it even finished being built. One of our pilots was down in Wichita a couple of weeks ago on a seminar and he managed to get over to the Cessna plant where they make the Citation Excel. He had the opportunity to tour the production plant and got some pictures of our new jet. It is scheduled for a December 8th delivery date. I'm optimistic that it will arrive on time, but it still looks like they've got a ways to go!

Excel being built

San Diego was great!

We had a good time in San Diego. They put us up in a very nice area of town called the Gaslamp district, which had restaurants and shops all around. We spent 4 nights in the Hilton Gaslamp which was a very nice hotel.

When we checked in, we were given breakfast coupons for our entire stay. I looked at the tickets a little closer later and realized these were for Netjet pilots. Netjet's is a popular airline which is very similar to ours but is based in the states. They obviously have a big agreement with this Hilton to give their pilots free breakfasts. Well, I wasn't going to say anything because each breakfast would have been around $25! It was good eating!

The food all around town was great. We didn't have one bad meal. We had Mexican food twice and it was great both times. We also ate Thai, and it was the best Thai I've ever had! The whole trip I was either hungry or stuffed to the max. We ate way too much, but it was just all so good!

The shops were neat to see, but probably the highlight of our trip was going to check out the USS Midway which is anchored permanently right there in the San Diego harbor. They've turned it into a great museum piece with lots of history. You get a headphone set and can punch in numbers as you approach various parts of the ship and hear audio commentaries about what you're seeing. Overall it was a great way to spend a few hours. I highly recommend that anyone visiting the area should check it out.

I ended up actually buying some cheap cheap beer while I was there too. I'm not a fan of American beers, but there is one that I'm quite fond of. Coors Original. Not the Coors light you're used to seeing, but the very very rare relative.. which I've only found in select US cities. So I picked up a 30 pack which ended up costing the equivalent of $0.60 per can. :) I also grabbed a couple of packs of the Starbucks Doubleshot drink which is not available in Canada. So essentially my shopping consisted of buying and stocking up on items that are too rare or contraband within Canada. Haha. Here is a pic I took of my loot.



After our great stay in San Diego it was off to Cabo San Lucas to do a pickup to return some folks to Calgary. Some of you may recall that it was about this time last year when I had my week long layover/vacation in Cabo. Ahh memories. Well, this time would only be for an hour or so. It was nice and warm and beautiful there, and I wish we could have stayed, but we had to head back. It was a 4hr and 20min flight direct back to Calgary. Which was nicer than the 7.5hr trip flying with my old plane.

Here is a photo album of some shots from the USS Midway and also some snaps from our flight from San Diego, down the Baja peninsula to Cabo San Lucas Mexico.

San Diego

Pics from Justin's visit

After Justin told me about Google's photohosting site and also about their software for editing photo's called "Picaso", I decided to look into it a bit further. I want a place were I can easily share photos via this blog, that takes little to know time to upload and resize pictures (as all of my photo's are north of 5mb each). This program does a great job of it! I suggest you take a look, Justin is pretty impressed with it's photo editing abilities as well (I'm sticking with Photoshop though).

Anyways, here's a small collection of shots from his visit, all from the Banff area. Click on the album cover below!

Justin's write up and pictures can be found here.

Banff with Justin

San Diego for 4 nights

This jet is too fast. Tomorrow we fly from Calgary to Palm Springs, then back to Calgary then up to Red Deer then down to San Diego. It's just a lot of distance to cover in a day, and thanks to this jet it can all get done in one day.

We'll then spend 4 nights at the Hilton in San Diego, looks like it's in a great location. Can't wait to check things out a bit down there. Then on Tuesday we hop down to Mexico to pick up some folks and bring them back up to Calgary.

Should be a good few days.

New York Yankee pitcher crashes plane into NYC skyline

I was quite shocked when I heard the news that another plane had found it's way into the Manhattan skyline in New York. I quickly turned on CNN and was greeted with the latest news of the time reporting that a small aircraft had crashed into a 50 story residential building in New York. CNN news article here

It was later discovered that the pilot was New York Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle, flying in his new Cirrus SR20 aircraft.

The plane is a state of the art machine which has just as many bells and whistles as the business aircraft that I fly! I've seen a few of them around and have always admired them. With a sticker price though of nearly double some of the competition it is only available to some fairly wealthy people. Angelina Jolie is another celebrity that has one, and I saw it first hand here in Calgary last year when she flew it up to visit Brad Pitt who was shooting for his new movie The Assassination of Jesse James".

The biggest feature on this aircraft is that it has a ballistic rocket parachute system which can be used if the pilot/plane gets into a bad situation such as a total failure of some systems, or break up of the aircraft, or even if a pilot has gotten himself into some real bad trouble in bad weather (which has occurred before with successful parachute deployments). For some information on the aircraft and it's parachute system you can visit the Cirrus website here: Cirrus Design

So of course the speculation is out as to what could of happened. But weather at the time of the accident wasn't great, and certainly not the best for a fresh new pilot (7 months newly licensed). However, reports are that there was a flight instructor on board as well. So it's anyone's guess as to what was happening at the time of the accident. I wont go into much speculation, but for 2 pilots to get themselves into such trouble as to be in the New York skyline it would have to be something pretty catastrophic. Perhaps failure of the airframe itself.. we really don't know at this time. Just as I type this I can hear on the news, one woman reports not seeing any wings on the plane. Eyewitness reports are pretty sketchy at best, but if what she is saying is correct perhaps there truly was an overstress in the aircraft and the wing(s) did separate from the airframe. That is precisely the reason what this parachute is designed for, however, being this close to the ground it's unlikely that they would have had time to deploy the 'chute. But like I said before, it's all speculation and we can anticipate a more detailed report in the weeks ahead.

I will however go as far to say that this is a dangerous plane for the simple reason that it can give a pilot a false sense of security. That is to say that they might push themselves past their capabilities as a pilot because they feel they have all of these systems to help them along. The plane is an amazing piece of equipment, but the type of people flying it are going to be weekend flyers, that have a significant amount of extra pocket change, so usually only partially experienced flyers that shouldn't be pushing things like weather and other bad flying conditions. So by feeling so safe with all of these systems it gives people a false sense of security which can really get someone into trouble.

When I used to fly traffic reporters around the lower mainland and over downtown Vancouver we used to fly in almost any weather condition. So it really pushed my skills to the limit sometimes, and you have to make the right judgment calls because you don't want to get yourself into a situation where you lose your situational awareness be it because of getting into some clouds or rain showers.. the fact that I was so low to the ground all the time, adds to the equation. If I was flying in a plane like the SR20, there's a chance I might have been tempted to fly it into worse situations than I would have felt comfortable with one of the other aircraft. So it really can happen to anyone. Every pilot needs to be continually aware of their situational awareness and also know their own capabilities and limitations and not push them.

What happened today is not necessarily a direct result of pushing capabilities, we'll have to wait for the NTSB reports or more detailed news before that kind of information can be determined. This aircraft would not have had any "black box" devices on board, so they won't have that information to aid their investigation.

Regardless, a sad day when any aircraft doesn't land safely.