London and Back Again

Just got back from a visit back down in London. I was lucky enough to get to go home on a long weekend, when all of my friends were free/home as well, and it was awesome weather.

We took off Friday morning in the Twin Comanche, first bound for North Bay, as I was dropping a friend off there for the weekend so she could visit her friends as well. I've decided that I don't like North Bay. Its such a huge airport (that I'm not really familiar with), and there's no control tower to tell you what to do. There's only a radio service, which means its up to you to find out where you need to go and how to get there to take-off or park after you've landed. Its strange taxi-ing around such a huge airport without the reasurring clearances issued by the controllers. It makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong.

After I dropped my friend off I started back up again and picked my way through the taxi-ways back to the active runway.

I had a great weekend. Went camping for a night, then canoeing, spent a day at the beach playing volleyball, played some tennis with my Dad, and helped out with some farm chores. All in all a pretty full weekend. Good times. Today it was time to head back up and back to work. I was planning to leave around 9:30 in the morning but London was fogged in, and didn't get away until around noon to head back up to North Bay again for the first stop. It was a relaxing flight. I only had about a 5 knot headwind, and it was pretty smooth above the clouds at 7500 ft. I had the airplane cruising on autopilot and managed to read a couple chapters of one of the books I borrowed.

When we got back we gathered all our stuff and parked the airplane and by that time the fuel truck showed up with the Ops Manager and the other pilot - we each had one freight flight up the coast, so off I go to the races.

The flight up the coast was fairly uneventful, the flight on the way back started to get interesting about 20 miles from the field. I was just about to key the mic and call the radio service to advise I was 20 miles and about 9 minutes out when a big Hawker freight plane beat me to it. He also called inbound and although he was still behind me estimated the field about 45 seconds before me. The other pilot in the C-206 was also about 3 miles behind me, so we were all planning on landing within the span of about 2 minutes. Could get interesting. We were all instructed to report 10 miles out, and there were a few minutes until that point where none of us were entirely sure how it was all going to pan out. I watched the mileage to go tick down on the GPS and tried to find the Hawker coming up behind me. He stayed at a higher altitude then me so I wasn't worried of a risk of collision, but more so whether he was going to pass me in time to make his descent and land before I started my approach. We all planned to the use the runway that allowed a straight in approach.

At 10 miles back I called the radio service again and advised my position and also made the suggestion that if the C-206 behind me had me visual I could slow down a bit to give the Hawker more time to get in front of me. So that was the plan. By the time I spotted the Hawker I realized even with me slowed WAY down it still didn't give him enough time to pass me, so I advised that I'd join the circuit on a left base instead of final. I watched as I crept closer and closer to the airport dragging the airplane along at 90 mph while the Hawker rumbled along its approach on final parallel to my flight path. I could slowed down further, but I also didn't want to push my luck with the C-206 following behind me. Even adding a base leg into my circuit left me fairly close behind the Hawker. As I was turning short final he was just starting to clear the runway. The Hawker is a big airplane, bigger then a Dash-8-100, so I was concerned a little bit about the possible wake turbulence. I made a mental note of where the Hawker touched down, and made sure to keep my approach higher and land beyond it. I must have just grazed the wake turbulence area on short final because for a quick second the airplane waggled and shuddered before smoothing out again. I touched down without incident and rolled to the end of the runway to quickly clear for the last of the three of us landing.