Back Home

Well I'm back home in London for the winter. The last week or so has been fairly busy, and I've been preoccupied with moving so I haven't written, so I apologize.

The last few days before I left it was snowing intermittently, not a whole lot of snow, but enough that I was sweeping off the Twin Comanche wings every chance I got to keep it from freezing into a solid block of ice. My day of escape was a little hectic, as I still had some last minute packing to do, and for weather reasons I planned on getting away in the afternoon, but my boss came by and asked if I could do one last trip, because my replacement pilot couldn't show up until later. Actually technically the season wasn't over, it was me that bailed out early. We've had such a late start to winter that I probably could have stayed for another month before the winter road goes in, which kills the flying business. I don't think I could have stayed and still had time to finish my instrument rating though. I wrote the written exam almost 2 years ago now, and if I don't finish the rest of the flying portion and do the flight test before the 2 years is up, the exam will expire and I'll have to write it again. Its a tough exam, so I'd rather now have to tackle it again.

These past 8 months have been a pretty cool adventure. The company was great to work for, and I've also grown as a pilot quite significantly since I first went up. I really did learn a lot.

But now I'm back home. The flight home was relatively uneventful. The weather wasn't ideal but I knew I couldn't expect perfectly clear VFR days for an entire 500-some-odd mile trip this time of year. I still made it home in good time however. I was surprised how busy the London airport is these days. I knew it got changed to a Class C airspace (same level as Toronto) several months ago, but they've even got multiple tower frequencies now. I came in and they lined me up to land and then handed me off to a new frequency I had never used before. Crazy. It was quite fun to fly in such a past-paced environment like that again, but I felt a little rusty. Its been almost a year now since I've regularly operated out of a towered airport, let alone come in a night, and I also haven't flown the Twin Comanche very often lately, so my cockpit procedures weren't as greasy smooth and as second-nature as they used to be. I'm looking forward to regulary flying it again as I finish up my Instrument Rating.

As for now I'm home, living with my parents again for the next few months (its been a while), enjoying seeing family again, and enjoying the things that Southern Ontario has to offer that I missed out on up north.

So for the next few months my blogging will have a change of pace as I'll mostly focus on writing about my IFR training.