Final Destination

So Friday morning we got up early again and went out for breakfast. We got word from the office that our GPS tracking system, which continually uploads the aircraft's position so the office can track us wasn't working properly, so after breakfast the three of us headed out to the airport to do some troubleshooting. My operator fiddled around with it for a while and then the Chief and I took the airplane up for a quick test flight to check it.

After that we were pretty much good to go. I finished off the last bit of paperwork I needed done for my PCC (Pilot Competancy Check) and then we were good to go. I shook hands with the Chief before he headed out to go back to civilization. After that the two of us took off and flew north. It was an uneventful almost 2 hours. My operator is interested in getting his pilot's license (no suprise considering he spends so much time in an airplane) so I let him fly most of the trip up.

Once we landed we checked into our motel which is connected to the local northern store... and that's about all there is in this town other than some houses, a small school, and the native band office. On the plus side the motel is not luxurious obviously but its clean and well kept. There's only 6 rooms and we all have a communal kitchen to share. There's not a whole lot of other people using the kitchen here, just a lone police officer and occasionally a couple ground workers for an air service that flies out of here.

This morning we got up to go set up the survey base station, which is a radiomagnetic sensing unit that sits on the ground to provide a baseline for the readings we get from the airplane in the air. We can't start surveying yet. For one we're waiting for the the office to send us up new nav files because the client made some changes to the survey blocks. Also we need to perform a calibration flight first too, which requires that we climb to 10,000 ft and do a series of turns... but the weather isn't quite good enough up here to do that yet. So we're in a bit of a waiting game at the moment, which isn't all bad. We still have some equipment to get sorted out and things to get organized, so we're staying fairly busy at the moment.