Cat and Mouse with the Weather

The weather has been teasing us the last two days. Yesterday it was a little on the windy side, but we decided to go and try anyways. Survey flying can't be done in winds that cause the aircraft to fly with too much crab angle, or produce too much pitch or yaw motions from the turbulence because it disturbs the sensors, nor can we fly survey through rain, because the noise created from the impact of the rain drops on the sensor pods also interfere with proper data collection. On our flight yesterday we went out to the block, flew 4 lines (about 30 minutes), and decided we had to call it quits. The winds were just too strong and producing too much crab angle.

Today we were expecting a storm to blow through by early morning, but when we got up it still wasn't looking too bad, so we thought we'd give it another try and take advantage of the calm winds before the storm came. We took off and headed out to the block, hoping the the scattered showers in the area wouldn't be over the block we wanted to fly. They were. My operator suggested we head north to another of our survey blocks that has all the regular lines completed but still needs the tie-lines done. Tie lines run 90 degrees to the regular lines, and are spaced much further apart. Judging by the name you can deduce that they're needed to "tie" the whole grid image together - they allow the processors to properly compile the map image out of the linear data the airplane collects. Or something like that. What do I know, I'm just the driver. Tie lines are spaced much further apart so it only took us about an hour of flying to get those all done before we were out of work. We at least managed to get SOMETHING done to show for our day though. Still moving forward at least.

Hopefully we'll have a semi-good day of flying tomorrow, and then I head south for the airplane's inspection, which we're both waiting for. Due to all the weather days we had at the start we've gone longer than we expected, and we're running out of groceries. We try to buy as much as we can down south where the prices are normal and there's more selection, but the last couple days we've been forced to duck into the Northern Store and bite the bullet on some groceries that cost over double the price of what it costs down south. Nine dollars for a small block of cheese, $4 for eggs, $4 for a bag of potato chips, $1.75 for a can of pop. Craziness. We get a per diem from the company, but whatever we don't spend goes straight into our pocket, so we do like to be frugal.