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!!! :)