Back at it

Wow, its been a while. I wonder if anyone out there is still reading this haha. The fall and winter was pretty slow for survey jobs. I spent most of it working construction to pay the bills. But it looks like this upcoming spring is going to be solid with work until mid-summer.

I've spent the last few weeks commuting to the office in Toronto for a few days each week to stay busy helping with some recent office work, and also to conduct some test flights for a new piece of R&D we're installing in the 206 I fly. The new technology is supposedly a "holy grail" for survey flying. It doesn't really mean much for me as a pilot, except that I have to spent more time on the ground before each flight doing taxi calibrations, but it is somewhat interesting.

When you're young and in flight school, or still dreaming of starting flight school you imagine being a pilot is mostly just showing up a few minutes before the flight, hopping in and taking off to your next destination. Thats only natural to assume that. Flight school trains you purely in the operation of an airplane, so thats what you spend most of your time doing. In reality however, at least in my experience, a vast majority of your time is spent in the less glamorous aspects of aviation for a pilot - lots of waiting. Pilots stand around a lot. We stand around a lot while we wait for our airplane to finish inspection and be put back together, we stand around and wait for passengers, or we stand around while the technicians wrestle with a piece of survey equipment that has decided to do something unexpected.

As soon as we get this R&D project out of the way, we'll finally be off again on some new contracts. First will be a couple days back in Kirkland Lake, and from there we MIGHT do a few weeks in Moosonee - the birthplace of my professional career, haha. I'm looking forward to going back actually, it will be fun to see that place again. After that we have a contract signed for Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. I'm looking forward to that as well. I've never been north of 60 yet, so I'll be able to check that off my list soon. Hopefully I'll see some polar bears as well.

Fires

Yesterday we started our first day of actual surveying. The day before that was spent setting up our base station (read that as my operator "W" setting up the base station and me mostly standing around assisting as needed and fanning bugs away from my face). I'm still fascinated by all this mysterious technology.

Later in the day we did our calibration flight which involved climbing to 10,000 ft and performing a series of maneuvers over a pre-selected area of land that is relatively free of mineral deposits. The problem was there was a lot of cloud in the area and we couldn't do our flying over our area at 10,000 ft and still remain clear of cloud, so we tried to improvise a bit and use the readings in the airplane to find another suitable area nearby to do our maneuvers. It was a bit of a crapshoot, but we tried it anyways since we we were already out flying, and the worse that could've happened was that the calibration wasn't up to standards and we had to go out and do it again. To our surprise our processor back in the office actually passed it and gave us the ok. Credit goes to my operator.

The survey flying has been equally hit-or-miss. Not because of weather however, but because of the raging forest fires in the area. Our morning flight yesterday was cut short after only a couple hours because smoke from fires burning nearby were both obscuring visibility and making it difficult to breath. I was doing ok for the most part, but my operator was starting to get headaches from the smoke. The afternoon flight we went to a different survey block which was a little more free of smoke, but once again cut it short as the fires burned closer and the air got thicker and thicker. We got some fantastic pictures of the fires and smoke. There was one spot where the flames were licking up WELL above the tops of the trees. I estimated they must have been at least 40 ft high at the tallest spots. You can look out over the landscape and just see hundreds and hundreds of square miles of burned out forest, as far as the eye can see. Apparently these fires have been burning all summer, and won't go out until wintertime. Fire crews are working here and there to contain what they can near the communities, the rest will just burn. This morning in our survey area most of the first seem to have died down for the most part, but there was still thick smoke in both our blocks, so we had to turn around and didn't get anything done.

I will say that the terrain we're surveying over is fantastic. Its very rocky and hilly, and lots of fun to survey, but also far more challenging then our last job, which was mostly flat swamp. There are big hills, canyons, and cliffs with differences in elevation of 100 ft or more in some places. Its beautiful. One of our survey blocks is in a bit of a valley, with big rocky hills on either ends, and a flat grassy wetland in the middle.

Another plus I like about this job is that Stony Rapids is served by an MF radio service (one step below a true Air Traffic Controller) out of Regina. So I get talk to someone when I'm coming into land and take-off, which is nice so my radio procedures don't get rusty.

Long Trip

All right, so big update. We've started our second job after a couple weeks with time off. After 5 days on the road and in the air we've finally made it to Stony Rapids, Saskatchewan, where our next job is. Its a very small job, only about 4 flights worth. The time its taken us just to get here has literally been double the the time its going to take to finish the job. But that's how it goes sometimes I guess. I don't mind, it was pretty cool to make the trip actually.

From the last job we left the airplane in Geraldton, which is a couple hours by car to the Northeast of Thunder Bay. There the airplane had its 100 hr checkup done. So we had to drive up from London again to get to the airplane. I left on Monday, spent my first night on the road in Toronto, then we spent two days driving to Geraldton. Our first flying leg took us 4.6 hrs Northwest to Thompson, Manitoba where we crashed for the night, and finally another 3 hours this morning onto Stony Rapids. That's 5 towns, 3 provinces, and 3 time zones in 5 days. A lot of miles. I was looking on a map of Canada today and we're actually closer to the Yukon now than we are to Toronto. Kind of funny. If anyone's counting thats 1300 km by ground, and 1600 km by air.

Tomorrow we stop being hotel hoppers and start getting actual work done.

Pushing the Limits

The end is in sight. We figure we have about 12 hrs of flying left, two 3.5 hr flights on separate blocks, and then a long 5 hour flight to finish off the block we're currently working on.

We did a 5.1 hr flight yesterday, our longest flight yet, and man was my butt sore! I think that may actually pass as the longest time I've ever spent sitting in one place, let alone flying, lol. We're trying to push the flights as long as possible, because we're in a bit of a race against time to finish because our 100 hr inspection is coming up due, and its gonna be REALLY close whether we run out of air time or not. So the long flights cut down on unproductive ferry flying to and from the blocks. The one block we're currently working on is almost a 20 minute flight out, so if we can fly longer flights and reduce the number of times we have to fly out there, we might be able to pull off finishing the whole project before inspection. It looks like we'll make it so long as nothing drastic happens. It'd be a bummer to have an hour or so of flying left to do but having to fly the airplane south and wait around for two days of maintenance.

From what I hear my boss is really happy with my work. So far we've only had to re-fly one line due to not flying accurately enough, which is apparently pretty good for even seasoned survey flyers, and as far as quantity goes we're going to finish 20 days ahead of the time originally alotted for the project. My operator and I broke the company record a couple weeks ago for number of line kilometers flown in a single day, which was due in combination to long grid lines which mean less time-wasting turns, and flying our butts off. I heard through the grape vine that my boss mentioned he'd never seen somebody catch on so fast. So thats something I'm proud of, it looks like I may have found my niche.

Speed-bumps

We're once again sitting on the ground waiting for the weather to clear up. This is not ideal, because the client has for a third time added more work onto the project. The good thing is we've been flying more kilometers than the office anticipated we would, so it still may be possible to get out on our planned exit date of the end of June. But not if we keep sitting around waiting on weather.

Another speed-bump is that they're going to be doing maintenance work on the runway on Saturday and Sunday, so we're going to be limited to the times we can go flying. Saturday the runway will be closed from 0700 to 1200, but we're going to bite the bullet and try to be airborne before 7 AM and do a 5 hour survey flight - our longest yet. The longest we've managed so far is 4.8 hrs, but I'm fairly certain I can hold my concentration together for a full five hours before I start to go off the deep end. And hopefully we can hold our bladders as well.

I've also got word where we'll be going next - Northern Saskatchewan, right on the border of NWT. That one's just a short job, probably no longer than a week and a half. It'll be cool to go that far north, and also cool to not have to stay there for very long. That probably won't be until mid-August however. We should be finished this job by early July, and then I'll have the rest of my time off until we head up there. I'm happy with that, it should work out pretty good, cause that'll give me some time off for fun summer things which I didn't get to do much of last summer.

So far though the goal is to be out of here and home by July 7th, cause I have a camping trip on the 9th with some friends which I'd very much like to be a part of. Come on sunshine and light winds!

New Block

We started surveying a new block today. Its more west from the airport than the other survey blocks are, and you can really notice a change in the terrain. We are right on the edge of where the Hudson Bay lowlands start to end. The other survey blocks are very flat and swampy like typical Hudson/James Bay lowlands, but this new block which is about 60 miles west of the other ones is much more hilly and rocky, with much clearer water and more defined lakes. Beautiful wilderness, very much like the Muskokas, except totally uninhabited.

It made it interesting as it was my first real time flying survey in a hilly area. The hills make it a little more challenging than flatlands because you have to concentrate much more on flying the "drape" (following the contour of the land as best as possible).

I also spotted a Moose and she had 3 small calves with her. It was quite the sight. Our survey lines took us over top of them and past them a number of times, so we got several good looks - it was fantastic! They were out in a clearing by a small lake, presumably to get a drink, and our first pass directly overhead scared the mother, so she started herding her little calves back into the protection of the forest, hurredly nudging them from behind. You could tell the calves weren't quite sure what was going on. Quite the sight. They didn't go too far though, as by the time we made our next pass on the next line over they were still there just at the edge of the forest.

I have a cool job.

Cat and Mouse with the Weather

The weather has been teasing us the last two days. Yesterday it was a little on the windy side, but we decided to go and try anyways. Survey flying can't be done in winds that cause the aircraft to fly with too much crab angle, or produce too much pitch or yaw motions from the turbulence because it disturbs the sensors, nor can we fly survey through rain, because the noise created from the impact of the rain drops on the sensor pods also interfere with proper data collection. On our flight yesterday we went out to the block, flew 4 lines (about 30 minutes), and decided we had to call it quits. The winds were just too strong and producing too much crab angle.

Today we were expecting a storm to blow through by early morning, but when we got up it still wasn't looking too bad, so we thought we'd give it another try and take advantage of the calm winds before the storm came. We took off and headed out to the block, hoping the the scattered showers in the area wouldn't be over the block we wanted to fly. They were. My operator suggested we head north to another of our survey blocks that has all the regular lines completed but still needs the tie-lines done. Tie lines run 90 degrees to the regular lines, and are spaced much further apart. Judging by the name you can deduce that they're needed to "tie" the whole grid image together - they allow the processors to properly compile the map image out of the linear data the airplane collects. Or something like that. What do I know, I'm just the driver. Tie lines are spaced much further apart so it only took us about an hour of flying to get those all done before we were out of work. We at least managed to get SOMETHING done to show for our day though. Still moving forward at least.

Hopefully we'll have a semi-good day of flying tomorrow, and then I head south for the airplane's inspection, which we're both waiting for. Due to all the weather days we had at the start we've gone longer than we expected, and we're running out of groceries. We try to buy as much as we can down south where the prices are normal and there's more selection, but the last couple days we've been forced to duck into the Northern Store and bite the bullet on some groceries that cost over double the price of what it costs down south. Nine dollars for a small block of cheese, $4 for eggs, $4 for a bag of potato chips, $1.75 for a can of pop. Craziness. We get a per diem from the company, but whatever we don't spend goes straight into our pocket, so we do like to be frugal.