Summer

Its been hot this past week, especially before I figured out that there's air vents at my feet that open.

A couple days ago even though we had flights we took the afternoon off because it was 32 degrees C. I suppose in addition to cooking the pilots and any passengers, the amount of weight the airplane can take no longer makes sense to do the trips from a business standpoint. Personally I don't mind cooking in the airplane. Once I figured out the vents its actually not too bad anymore, and its either sweating it out in the airplane, or sitting in my house on the ground sweating it out.

Yesterday I got to see something new. There's a small forest fire burning about halfway up the coast on the way to my usual stop. Its not really anywhere near any civilization, so they're just letting it burn. I managed to snap some pictures.

The smoke was drifting across our route of flight, you could catch a sweet scent of campire if you flew through it. For the most part I tried to climb above though, I'm not entirely sure how much smoke it would take to cause me to starting becoming hypoxic, and while it would be nice to know, I'm not about to try.

On one trip the other pilot who flies the other airplane, a Cessna 206, was coming back from a trip at the exact same time as I was, and we managed to move in close enough together to snap some pictures. He got some video of me as well.

Today I couple a couple flights in, but by around 2 pm we called it quits, probably for the day, as there is some low cloud/possibly fog moving in. Much of my last trip coming back from the north was spent at 4-500 ft agl under an overcast cloud layer. I would have probably tried it again, but about 30 miles north of base when coming back I passed an Air Ornge medevac heli heading north, and about five minutes later he turned around because of the cloud, so it must have been getting worse behind me.

On Saturday we go south all the way to Toronto Buttonville to pick up a new Cherokee 6 we just purchased. I'm excited to see the new airplane (well new to us) - its far better equipped then the one I currently fly. It even has an autopilot and a stormscope. I love the stormscopes, its been an awesome tool in my Twin Comanche, even just flying VFR. Hopefully the autopilot works too, those are great fatigue-reducing tools on long flights.

Unfortunately even though we pick in up on Saturday, it won't be ready for a few weeks because the engine is timed out so we have to drop it off at maintenance on the way back up.

Today I retired my first logbook - all the pages are full at 739.5 hrs - whoo hoo! Its a good thing too because the binding threads were starting to all come out. It wouldn't be able to take much more abuse before the whole thing fell apart. The next flight I do will be entered into the larger professional style logbook I bought. With about 50% more pages and more lines to the page, it should be a LONG time before I fill this one up. I liked the size of my old one better, but each page would only take 11 entries, and each time the page is filled you have to do a bunch of totalling and carry it over to the next page, which is time consuming - especially if you're doing up to 12 entries per day. My new logbook can take 23 entries per page. One thing I'm not too sure about, and perhaps any 1000+ hr pilots can let me know, is how you manage to enter 5 digit flight times (0000.0) in those tiny little boxes? I have a hard enough time writing small enough for my current 4 digits to be legible! Hmm, maybe I should hire one of those asians who can write your name on a grain of rice to be my book-keeper.

Ok I'm rambling now, blog over.