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!