No more Florida layover, but what a trip

Well, I don't get to layover for a week anymore in Florida. Instead we are going to be doing one heck of a flight over the next 4 days. The map below helps to illustrate how far we'll be travelling!

Saturday (RED) - Calgary to Wichita, KS to Marco Island, FL to Kitchner, ON. (~14hrs flight time)

Sunday (GREEN) - Kitchner, ON to Calgary to Pasa Robles, CA. (~13hrs flight time)

Monday (YELLOW) - A quick hop north to Montgomery Bay, CA. (~1hr fliht time)

Tuesday (BLUE) - Montgomery Bay back to Calgary. (~5.5hrs flight time)

So as you can see it's gonna be a lot of flying, especially the first couple of days.. we're pushing the legally allowed amount of flying in any given 1 day period. It should work.. just barely! Then next weekend I'm scheduled to fly back to Marco Island to pick up those folks we dropped off, so it will be another couple of crazy hour days. Very good for the logbook though, lots of time building which is good.


Click on the picture to see full size

Oh, and don't forget to check out my Mexico pics.. check out the last post below this one!

Mexico pics finally!!

Took me some time to get them done, but here they are. Take a look, if you don't have an imagestation account, just sign up for a free one and enjoy!

MEXICO PHOTO ALBUM

post some comments here of what you think!

Back from out East

What a trip... I did quite a bit of flying and not a whole lot of sleeping.

Once we got the plane there (5hrs and 12mins of flying) I called the office to find out what was on the books for me. I was supposed to do that Phili trip but things were totally chaotic and the whole reason we positioned the aircraft to Toronto was just cancelled and it didn't need to have made the trip. Wow.. what a piss off.

Well, now I was there so they slotted me in to do a trip the next day which was to leave Kitchner, ON (our main eastern base) at 5:35am! So I had to catch a ride with one of our maintenance guys that happened to be out at the Toronto airport and he drove me to Kitchner which was a good 45min drive. Once there I pretty much crashed at the hotel room 'cause I hadn't slept much the night before. I awoke after about 4hrs of sleep and couldn't get any more sleep before it was time to get up and get ready for that stupid early flight out of Kitchner. I took a cab to the airport and saw our eastern base facilites. Pretty cool. So we left for Ottawa to pick up some business folks and took them to the downtown city center airport in Toronto. Pretty cool, it's on a little island right next to downtown. We stayed in a hotel for the afternoon in downtown and then flew them back to Ottawa in the late afternoon. Then it was back to Kitchner for the night.

Once back at the hotel room again I get my finalized plans for the next day. One of our jet pilots was also landing in Kitchner and needed to get back out to Alberta so he and I had flights booked on Westjet at the same time (I was going to Calgary and he was going to Edmonton). At 7:15am out of Toronto, so at freaking 4am we were on the road out of Kitchner to make the flight.. crazy. I tried sleeping on the Westjet flight but only got a couple of mininaps in. Back in Calgary it was super warm. It ended up being 20 degrees here in the afternoon. These chinook winds are great sometimes.. talk about a mild couple of days.. we should be at -5 easy by now! And there's no snow around here either, which is totally odd too.

Oh well, not my problem, I'm loving it! Now I'm on days off getting ready to head off to Marco Island, Florida. I will be leaving on Saturday morning and will stay until the following Saturday afternoon. Woo hoo! My second 8 day trip in a matter of a month! And it's another beautiful location. I'll likely spend a few more dollars down there, being that it's not an all inclusive like Mexico, but I think I can afford to spend a little bit of money down there!

Off to the East Coast!

So tomorrow morning bright and early I hop in one of the planes and head straight for Toronto. The plane is an Eastern based plane that had been brought out to the West to help cover some busy flying. Well, that busy flying has subsided. So we are repositioning it there tomorrow.

Once there, I will spend a night in Toronto and then stay there an extra day to do an Eastern flight! Woo hoo. So I'll meet up with another eastern pilot and we'll be flying to Philidelphia on Monday. Cool. I've always wanted to do some of the flying out east. So now I'll get my chance. Then either Monday night or Tuesday morning I'll be flying back to Calgary with Westjet or Air Canada.

Should be fun!

Alarm problems and upcoming layovers

Well I'm just at the end of my 3 days off and I'm proud to report that I've done sweet fudge all! Haha... every once and a while ya just need to relax and do nothing, and I did one heck of a good job at it.

I've been having some problems lately with my paging alarm system for my WRX. I've had it since I got the car back in April 2003 and in the past couple of months it has started to act pretty quirky. The most annoying of which is it doesn't always work properly when locking/arming and unlocking/disarming. I will go to lock the car and arm the alarm and it will only arm the alarm, but the car remains unlocked. And sometimes I'll go to unlock the car and it will disarm the alarm and lock the car! Quite frustrating! So I managed to track down the guy who did the install and he's always been exceptional with customer service and his work is amazing. He informed me that the alarm brain is malfunctioning and happens with about 1% of the units (lucky me). So thankfully it's still under warranty and he is mailing me out a new unit which I will have to have professionally installed and reprogrammed by a dealer out here, they have referred me to a shop nearby that will do it for about 50 bucks in labor costs. Had I still been in the lowermainland they would have done everything for free, but c'est la vie. I'm quite willing to pay the cash to get this thing resolved. So as soon as it gets here am having that all done.

Tomorrow I'm off to Winnipeg and back, just a quick trip unlike the last time I was in Winnipeg over New Years for 5 days! A Kelowna layover is up and coming as well as another week long layover in another warm destination! I've got a trip coming up at the end of November to Marco Island in Florida (Lower west coast of Florida just south of Naples). That should be interesting if it stays. Time will tell.

Well that's the latest, back to continue my last day of nothingness!

Home for X-mas!

(The pics for Mexico are still coming.. taking some time to track down Colin and get his pics!)

But as per the title of this blog entry states... I'm coming home for X-mas. I was looking through my days off schedule through December and found out that my 3 days off run over Christmas.

The days in question are Friday December 23rd to Sunday December 25th.

So I will be leaving Calgary early early in the morning on the 23rd taking advantage of a seat sale with AirCanada and returning on the last flight on Sunday Evening. So this time I will actually get to spend X-mas at home with family and friends rather than working night shifts in our company office like I did last year! So.. just confirmed all the tickets online 5mins ago so it is a go, nothing better screw this up work wise, but it should be pretty solid. I'm one of the lucky few to have his days off fall over the holidays as we have holiday blackouts from December 21st to January 5th that no employee is allowed to take off as it is a very busy time for us as our clients fly all over the place visiting family and going to company parties and stuff like that.

On a side note, my last few flights have been crazy early in the morning and I've been getting some really crazy sleep. I've had 3 05:00am flights and even one that was scheduled for 04:42am! Keep in mind that's the time that the plane takes off and us pilots need to be at the airport at least an hour before departure to prepare for the flight. So add another 15mins for travel and 45mins to wake up, shower, shave and get dressed... and you're looking at a freaking 2:42am alarm clock setting! I believe I got about a whopping hour and 15mins of sleep that night. Thankfully we then had a day room booked at a hotel so we could go and sleep and relax for a few hours before the return flight home in the afternoon.

Well there we go... so hopefully I see some of you over Xmas! Woo hoo!