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.