10 Minutes in the Life of a Survey Pilot

I exit the survey grid. The music playing through the ear-buds tucked inside my headset is rock'in away. I'm in a groove. My operator hits a button on his nav-tracker unit to select the next line over to fly. Immediately I start a climbing turn 45 degrees to the left up to 400 ft agl - away from the next line. Wait for 1000 metres lateral displacement from the new line. This is my time for a quick breather to relax my concentration, check the engine gauges, maybe make a quick radio call to advise other traffic in the area of our presence, or switch fuel tanks if needed. I have maybe 10 seconds before I have to start my turn back in. Radio calls have to be done outside the survey block where it doesn't matter that our transmissions affect the sensor data collection.

I start into my banking right turn all the way back around, trying to keep the bank angle close to 35 degrees - any less and I won't complete the turn in time. I could give myself more space, and take more time turning, but the turns burn up enough valuable time as it is. I watch as the readout for my lateral displacement starts quickly winding down - 900 metres, 800 metres, 700 metres... I've now got another 90 degrees to go to intercept the new line. Six hundred metres, 500 metres. By now I know if I'm going to overshoot or undershoot the line and can adjust my turn rate as needed. I try not to pull too steeply of a turn however; steep turns at 400 ft agl are risky business, and the high G's don't contribute to keeping my operator happy and feeling well. Smooth flying does wonders to stave off fatigue on long 4 hr flights.

Three hundred... 200... 100 metres. I start rolling out level as I approach my intercept. Eighty metres, 60, 40, 20. I roll the airplane level and start a descent back down to 200 ft agl as I fine tune my intercept of the next grid line.

Now I'm pretty close to wings level, flying on-line, and pretty close to the 200 ft I need to be above the ground. Its just a matter now of watching the distance display count-down to entering the grid as I try to perfect my altitude and line intercept. We cross the grid boundary. Time elapsed since exiting the grid on our last line - 2 minutes.

Now its a matter of staying as close to the survey line as possible, +/- 15 metres at the greatest as I count down the distance to exiting the grid on the far side. If I wander more than 15 metres off the line, we have to re-fly it. Today is not too turbulent and I challenge myself to stay within +/- 4 metres. This particular line is 12 miles long so it'll take roughly 6 minutes to get to the other side and start another turn. Once again I'm counting down the distance to exiting the grid again on the far side. I exit the survey grid. Repeat process.