Light shows, and lack thereof

Spent the weekend back home in London, which was nice, since the flying has been slow this month. I flew the Twin home Friday morning which was very enjoyable as well, if not a little long. It doesn't matter what kind of airplane it is 3.4 hrs is long. However I think I'm finally adjusting to switching between flying the Comanche and Cherokee now that I've got a feel for how they fly differently. I can cognatively anticipate the differences now so I'm not caught off guard quite as much when I jump into the Comanche after flying the Cherokee.

I flew back into home base Sunday night at around midnight. I haven't flown in the dark of night yet up here, it was a very interesting experience. Aside from our little town, there is quite literally NOTHING around, which meant that looking down during the dead of night revealed pure blackness. It was kind of cool, because having no visual reference save for the little town lights off on the horizon growing bigger as we got closer, it was difficult to judge altitude. I was cruising at 6500, but for all my senses knew I could have been at 500, or 20,000. The only reference of altitude I had was the altimeter. The feeling of having no gut frame of reference is difficult to describe to those who haven't gone flying - its very peculiar. It felt like I was in space. Just seeing nothingness and then our tiny little corner of civilization lit up amidst the suffocating darkness was also an interesting and lonely sight. It felt like it was the only town on earth - possibly the only piece of tangible matter on earth, and we were heading straight towards it to escape the nothingness trying to swallow us. That sounds quite dramatic but that really is how it felt. Flying at night I find always tends to give me a bit of that feeling of complete isolation - I love it actually. But until this point all my night flying experience has been in southern Ontario where even over the country there is still the odd streetlight below or lit up house - some sort of indication that I'm not the only human on earth. The ground has always been marked out below. Up here there is nothing.

But I'm back to work now. Today, admist the slowness of June, I had the busiest day yet, even if it didn't start out that way. Its downright hot up here all of a sudden, when I left on friday the daily high's didn't go much higher then 12 degrees C. Today it was up to 30 for most of the day. The skies were for the most part clear, but it got a little bit gusty in the afternoon due to the daytime heating. Near the end of the day around 9 pm there were some lightning storms that were gradually working there way south. The last flight of the day the other pilot was heading to our usual destination up the coast, with me following about 10 minutes behind. By the time I was landing there was small storm cell about 5 miles to the west of the field with lightning coming out of the clouds every minute or so. The other pilot got some pretty cool video of me on final with the lightning storm behind. Pretty cool. Needless to say we didn't waste time unloading the airplane to head back home again. The cell didn't really look like it was going to move over the field, but its still always a little bit unnerving flying in the vicinity of lightning.

It made for an interesting end of the day however. All in all logged about 10 and a half hrs today, which has finally nudged me past the 700 hr total time mark. Whoo hoo! 300 to go and I'm in the quadruple digits!