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!!! :)