Canadian Pilot License format changing

Currently, my Canadian Pilot License is a piece of paper. There are 2 parts to it as well. The physical license itself, which depicts my type of license with endorsements and any specialized aircraft I'm certified to fly. Also required is another piece of paper which is my Medical certificate which specifies what class of medical I have completed, and the latest date of which it was done with a stamp signed off by the physician.

This has been quite an archaic system that I'm surprised has taken this long to be changed. The United States have a card much like a drivers license with all the pertinent information on it, including a photo. Currently the piece of paper is not photo ID for Canadian Pilots.

Current US License format:

Current Canadian Format:


What Transport Canada has decided on for the new Canadian license format is that they'll be similar to a Canadian Passport. So similar in fact, that it is made by the same people that make the Passports. It will combine both the license and medical certificates into the same document and will also have photo ID. Of course with everyone getting their passports now with the increased travel restrictions and requirements, it still might be some time before the project even begins. Eventually however I will be carrying around 2 of these little books!

the damaged WRX

I don't think I had even been in YVR on vacation for more than 48hrs when I got an email from my rommate saying that the neighbors had hit my car! I did not appreciate that one bit! They're good people so of course they called right away to say what had happened and that they'd pay for everything.

So I get an email with pictures of the damage, luckily just the back bumper, and it's only plastic damage.




So once I got back to Calgary I started going out to get some quotes. I went to places that were recommended to me and got quotes ranging from $920-$590. One of the places that quoted me $590 came highly recommended and they were able to slot me in for a late September appointment, so I went with them. The other places could not even fit me in until October and some even January.

So now I just await for my car to become whole again.

The land of Starbucks

Was a fairly uneventful 3 days in Seattle, a nice little flight with a cool little layover. Spent Aug 16-18th there and had a nice relaxing few days with one of our most senior pilots who I haven't flown with in many months.

Day 1 had us hoping to Kamloops and back, then continuing on to Seattle. Once in Seattle we arrived at our hotel which was quite nice, and right at the Seatac airport. The Doubletree, which is a member of the Hilton hotel groups was certainly a nice way to spend our 2 nights. Upon initial check in we found out we were on the 1st floor and tried to get something a little quieter, but they were fully booked. I gave them my Hilton Honor's number and then all of a sudden a couple of rooms popped up. I managed to get us on the "Hilton Honor's Floor" in one of the hotels 2 towers. This was a nice upgrade. The hotel rooms were excellent, large, clean, modern and even the soaps, shampoos and moisturizers were all made by Nuetrogena.

I also found out the hotel had 2 gyms and having just come back from Holidays I figured I should check it out. Holy cow, better than most of the gyms I've seen back in Calgary. All brand new equipment and weights, I was impressed. All the machines had personal TVs on them along with 2 big plasma tvs on the wall. I spent nearly 2 hours there each night trying it all out.

The 2nd day we decided to go downtown Seattle to Pike's Place Market and the Wharf. We managed to get a "crew car" from the facilities we used at the airport (free car for the use of airplane crews using the business). We drove down, found some parking and found out they were celebrating the 100 yr anniversary of Pike's Place Market, it was very busy and quite the event. We had a good time just checking things out and I of course found a Starbucks to consume (when in Rome!).

We left the next day for a fairly uneventful return in to Calgary. However it was rather stormy on our ride in and we had to divert quite a bit south of the normal arrival procedures, then come around from the east side of the airport to avoid the worst of the storms. We had a few good bumps coming in and I was glad I had taken the time to really cinch my seatbelt tight.

After finishing up at the airport I went to join my roommates who were at a local bar where one of my roommates was a finalist to win a pair of Harley Davidson motorcycles.. he did not end up winning however. We ended up going out on the town that night and had some fun. Not exactly the rest my liver was expecting, but it was a necessary evil and I had a good time out with some friends.

Back from holidays

Wow, what a great time it was back on the coast. A whirlwind adventure and I didn't even get to see everyone! The 2 weeks I was back was just action packed with everything from Fireworks, to BBQ's, to side holidays down in San Diego and LA, Beach Vball, Clubbing (most know I hate clubbing, but this one was much better than my last encouter - read: no near bar fights).

All in all I had a blast, and now I'm back in Calgary resting a little, and giving the liver a little time to recover too. I pretty much drank the entire 2 weeks, so now I'm in need of a little detoxing.

I'll post up some pictures from my trip soon. Anyone that still reads this blog will notice that ever since joining facebook my posting has become more and more minimal. This is mainly because the whole purpose of this blog was for people to keep tabs on me and my life in Calgary and all the places I'm flying to etc. Facebook now serves this purpose as well, so it's become redundant to post on both. However, all my more detailed stories will always be here in the blog, along with the odd think piece which seems to pop up every couple of months haha.

For now, it's back to work, Seattle to be specific. I will head to Kamloops and back on Thursday then head right back out again to Seattle to spend a couple nights there. Then it's back to Calgary. A pretty simple trip, which is good, because with being gone for 2 weeks I'm bound to be a bit rusty. I apologize in advance to whichever clients get to experience my first landing in nearly 3 weeks :).

Vacation

More slow going than usual on the blog these days, but currently I'm on vacation in the Vancouver area until August 13th. Just relaxing and soaking up what the west coast has to offer.

Slow going

Still not much flying to be had, but now I've got a couple days of flying that I can mention.

Off to Winnipeg for Friday night.. Ooooo, and then Kelowna for Saturday night which sounds much better. I'll hopefully get to meet up with Craig during my stay in Kelowna and check out his pimp new condo.

Then it is Vacation time, I'll be in Vancouver from July 30th to August 13th - a full 2 weeks. I am likely to be taking some side trips during that time as well, but hopefully I'll get a chance to see many of you at some sort of summertime functions!

9 years ago today...

I was given the fateful words by my flight instructor "ok, so, take it out for a circuit by yourself, have fun."

I took to the sky by myself for the first time and managed to take the Cessna 152 C-GPFE for a quick 6 minute flight which included a takeoff, return and landing!

Sadly I learned one day while in Castlegar during my commercial flight training I received news of a mid air collision over Surrey where some people were killed. It was that airplane and another that were involved.

It was after about 10hrs of flight instruction that I was released to fly by myself and what an experience it was. I believe I had white knuckle the whole time, the adrenaline rushing, it's a memory I won't soon forget.

So, 9 years later here I am, "livin the dream".

San Francisco and a little Mexico

We had a rental car while we were in Napa and we quickly realized that we were in very close proximity to San Francisco! It is a destination that I, and the other pilot Mike, have wanted to visit but never had a good layover there.

So once we found out we were going to Mexico for sure, we figured we'd better take advantage of our one free day and make the drive down to San Fran. It was a pretty easy 30 min drive and we weren't exactly sure what we wanted to see. We definately wanted to check out the Golden Gate Bridge and then some of the touristy places near downtown so we decided to more or less just wing it. That we did, without a map, we got lost on our first exit. Haha, it took some time to regain our tracks, but after that first missed exit ramp we were on the right track.

Click picture for photo album

Here's a photo album with some pictures of everything we did. It also has a couple of pics from our trip out the next day to Cabo San Lucas Mexico for a pick up. That happened on Saturday, then another crew took over the plane to return back to Napa to retrieve the wine auction people.

I am currently at home in Calgary getting some paperwork and yearly exam stuff done, I'm also sweating a lot as it is a bit of a heat wave here in Calgary and the afternoons and evenings are very very toasty in the house.

Back from Dallas, now in Napa Valley

Well jet training went well and I arrived back into Calgary late last night. It was straight to work though, and this afternoon I headed off for Napa Valley via Spokane for customs.

So far so good, however I must say.. as soon as you get a couple miles out of Napa it is a bit of a shady area around these parts! I'll just say that we've been locking the car as we drive around town. Haha. We're thinking of maybe driving down to San Fransisco (45mins away) but it looks like our schedule is changing every second. We may be off to Mexico on Saturday, then back to Calgary with a stop in San Diego. Then on Sunday we'll do a bunch of hopping around California, ending up back in Napa to take these folks back up to Calgary. They asked me how much wine we could fit in the airplane - this trip is all for a big wine auction going on. So I've limited them to 12 cases of wine for the way back.

As for Dallas, it was a good time. We had lots of fun in the simulator. I'll post up some pics soon from the training. All set in that regard for another year.

Heading back to Dallas

Time for my recurrent Jet training in Dallas TX. I'll be attending Simuflite at the DFW airport for the Citation Excel Friday until Tuesday, with travel days Thursday and Wednesday. It's only 1 week this time and not the 3 weeks like I had for my initial training. This is a much more manageable time away from home.

I'll take some pics again while down there of the sim unit, it is a big toy that is fun to play with. However this year they're going to try their hardest to kill us in that thing. Should be good times.

On a side note, I got a call from Ian as he was just traveling back through town after a family get together out in the prairies. He and his sister Carla had flights booked today to go back to Vancouver and spent last night with family here in Calgary. I met up with them this morning and we had coffee. I also happened to see we had an empty flight on one of the jets flying to Vancouver today, so I made a couple calls and got them on our jet instead! They got to live it up in style for an hour on their way back to Vancouver. It's great when things work out like that, sounds like they had a good time too.

Spent some time on 8 mile!

Well, not quite. But I did spend all of yesterday in Detroit, MI. Or as most seem to call it, "Detoilet". I can't say too many bad things about it though, we only saw the airport in Pontiac, MI and then to the hotel room to spend the day.

I finally got me a flight to help cure some of the boredom, however, I was flown out on Westjet all the way to Kitchener in order to just do this one flight (totaling 1hr of actually flying to Detroit and back). So, 8hrs of commercial flying for 1 hr of me actually flying. Not too impressed. Oh well, it was "something".

Anyrate, the early morning flight over was uneventful but we knew the flight back was going to be challenging based upon the weather reports for severe thunderstorms between Detroit and Toronto. After having a nap at the hotel the other pilot and I grabbed a coffee and went outside underneath the car park at the entrance to the hotel to watch a massive storm pass directly overhead. I had seen it on the radar on my laptop approaching so we went to see how 'severe' it really was. Well, it was the most intense storm I have seen. Torrential downpours and the lightning was SO close that we could feel the shock waves off the sonic booms the bolts themselves were creating. Twice I was nearly knocked right off my feet by the intensity of some of the strikes which were mere hundreds of feet from where we stood (under cover). We knew then that it was going to be a challenging flight home.

Once at the airport we, along with about 4 other aircraft crews spent nearly 1 hr studying 3 or 4 different radar sources watching the storms all around us and trying to plan our trip home. For us it appeared the weather that had passed over Detroit was due over Kitchener right upon our scheduled arrival time. So we ended up putting off our departure until the storms were right over Kitchener, which should then have just moved off by the time we arrived. We had to plan it like this, because more storms were due to hit Detroit pretty soon. After a brief complete ground stop of all air traffic out of the Detroit area(lots of storms and lots of planes = delays), we finally got approval to depart. We blasted off with our weather radar lighting up with all the storms nearby, but our direct path to Kitchener didn't look too bad. We anticipated this based upon the radar images we watched before departing. We did have to make some deviations (as seen on the image below of our flight path) and we did get into some bumpy air and gusty winds from some precipitating clouds, but the timing worked out perfectly as we approached Kitchener, the storms had just left. We followed Westjet into the airport and landed without much concern. A heck of a lot of work for a 32 min flight!


So after one day of flying, I am now waiting in the hotel lobby for my cab to come and take me to the airport so I can commercially fly back to Calgary tonight. Exciting. The long weekend does look like it's getting pretty darn busy though, so there's a good chance I could end up with some flying.

In other news - I made a rather large purchase last week, not quite an impulse buy, but certainly didn't suspect buying it that day. I now have in my house a Sharp Aquos 42" LCD HDTV. One word to describe it, SEXY. I'll post up my comments and review in the near future when I have more time to play around with it and really tweak some settings and get it operating to it's maximum potential.

Nothing happening = no posts

Well.. simple as that. There is nothing going on here, I'm not working at all, and more or less just hanging around the house in Calgary. We're getting some good weather right now, so lots of time outside and the BBQ is getting a good work out too.

I did manage to get to Vancouver last week for 2 nights, but did get called away in the middle of the trip to go back to Calgary then over to Victoria, before hopping back into Vancouver for the 2nd night.

I have a flight to Seattle booked for 5am on Thursday, but other than that... NOTHING IS HAPPENING.

I'm bored.

BORED

Oh my. Not working very much is driving me insane. Today consisted of waking up at 10:45am, lounging in bed until 1:00pm, making some "lunch", lounging some more, going to grab a coffee and lotto ticket, calculating out possible ideas for winning the $40,000,000 Wednesday draw, watching Ocean's 12, having some dinner and currently struggling with my laptop.

"And that's Tuesday" - in the Joey-esque fashion when he and Ross prank called Chandler at work when Ross wasn't working and Joey was showing him how to occupy all his free time.

As for my laptop, it appears to be a common problem with a bad connection between the dc power connector and the motherboard. Step by step instructions online tell me how to crack it all open and resolder the crappy component. I am a little apprehensive to attempt it, but I really have to choice. In order to get a charge on the laptop I have to hold the power cord just perfectly to ensure a good connection. It irks me greatly.

My boredom will hopefully be extinguished as I do have a scheduled flight to Vancouver this Thursday, hopefully it sticks!

New York Picture Album

Well I loaded these up quicker than I had originally thought. So here they are, 164 pics from my tours around Manhattan.

Check out the photo album by clicking here!

New York!

Wow. New York rocked.

I've always want to go and see the place and finally got the opportunity for free! It was a lengthy 4hr and 25 min flight to New York direct from Edmonton (we were watching the fuel gauges pretty darn closely). But we arrived to perfect weather. 28 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. There wasn't even any haze to be seen either.

We stayed in a Hilton near the Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. This is a very popular private and corporate airport that serves New York. All the major airports are very, very busy and this one is just a little more convenient. The day after we arrived we were awake pretty early and headed out to a bus stop and bussed right into times square. It was another glorious day and we took full advantage. We walked all over the damn place, probably close to 15miles by the time it was all said and done with. We checked out Times Square, the Ed Sullivan Theater (where Letterman does the Late Show), Central Park, 5th Ave, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (didn't actually go in though aside from the lobby), Trump Tower, Rockefeller Center/Plaza, NBC Studios, Empire State Building (didn't go up), Bryant Park and a bunch of other little areas all in between.

On the way back I accidentally had us jump off the bus 1 stop too quickly and that added about 15 more mins of walking to our return to the hotel. That was a tough walk back as we were already exhausted from all of our travels that day already.

I will post up a photo album in the next couple of days to showcase our walking tour of New York. If I get to go there again soon I'd like to check out Wall Street, Canal Street (China Town) and Ground Zero. All of those places were quite far down south of where we were and it was rush hour madness, so we opted to skip out.

As for right now, I'm on days off enjoying the awesome weekend weather in Calgary. Was out biking around the rivers downtown, had a beer on the patio with roommates and friends, lots of BBQ'ing and other summer activities. A great weekend!