Random Untold Stories

So in the past few months I've had a bunch of other interesting experiences/stories that I haven't yet blogged about mainly due to the reason that they're not big enough events to dedicate an entire blog entry to. They're still fun to mention though, so this blog entry is dedicated to all the short little random stories I have, explained in no particular order, with no particular continuity, nor with any particular point.

I transported a coffin up the coast once, complete with a body inside. The coffin arrived at the airport early however on the back of a pickup truck, and we couldn't take it until later in the morning. So the driver of the pickup ended up cruising around town doing his errands for 3 hrs with a casket and dead person riding around in the back. Yep, we're up north. When we unloaded it from the airplane we muscled it out of the airplane and loaded into the back of another pickup truck, and off they went.

I've also hauled gravestones on a different occasion, earlier in the summer. Those things are HEAVY!

A couple days ago I did another sightseeing flight, which is about 4 for me this summer. I like doing them, because my passengers have all been very appreciative which makes my day. I also haven't done so many that it becomes "just another flight" however. My latest tourists were a couple guys from North Bay, I think a father and middle aged son. They thanked me after we landed and said it was great. I also heard from our dispatcher afterwords (who gave them a ride back from the airport) that they also had lots great things to say about my aviating, how they could tell I was a really good pilot and the landing was very smooth. Complements like that always make my day and give me warm fuzzies. There was another older tourist lady I took up earlier in the summer, just by herself. It was a bumpy day, but she didn't care because she said she was determined to go for a "bush plane ride". She was so thrilled and thankful, and when we landed she told me her life was now complete.

Today during my landing flare the nose cargo compartment door became unlatched and flew open and up. There was nothing in the compartment to fall out, so no harm done, but is awfully distracting when it happens. That's the 3rd time its happened in the last 2 months. The Last time was also during my flare just before touchdown, the other time was during my landing rollout after I touched down. Last inspection the AME's looked at it and ordered a new latch for it, and also in the meantime made an adjustment on the latching mechinism in the hopes that it would help. We're due for inspection in another couple days, so hopefully the new latch is in and it'll get changed out. Its kind of embarrasing when it happens and I have passengers onboard.

I've finally passed the 1000 hr mark. As of my writing this I'm at 1014 hrs total time. Pretty exciting.

I've encounterd some interesting things on the runways up here. One time a pack of some sort of canines crossed the runway just as I was coming in to land, so I just added a bit of power for a second to extend my touchdown point. After I touched down however, there was a large flock of seagulls milling about on the runway in front of me. So after making the effort to lengthen my landing I found myself having to brake quite heavily. All turned out ok. A few weeks ago there was someone on an ATV trucking down the side of the runway. Technically he wasn't on the runway, he was just on the other side of the row of lights, so I didn't see any harm in landing. He was trucking along at probably 40 km/hr in the same direction I was landing, and we bothed looked at each other as I cruised past him on my rollout after landing. It was an odd feeling. It felt exactly like that scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Cruisade where the Nazi pilot flies into the tunnel, rips off his wings, and goes sliding past Indy and his father as they're driving through the tunnel. Except lucky for me I still had my wings and landing gear.

I finally received my spiffy new Canadian Aviation Document pilots license. The new passport style booklets. They look much more professional then a tattered piece of blue paper, but the ratings on my license are no longer spelled out in english, but have been given a acronym code. "SMEL" doesn't sound nearly as impressive as "All single pilot non-high performance single and multi-engine land airplanes". Oh well.

I'm sure there are others that I have since forgotten about, but I'm gonna start making notes now and when I remember/aquire more mini-stories I'll compile another post like this.