The last few days have been a lot of sitting around waiting for weather. A couple days ago we managed to get up in the morning to do our calibration flight at 10,000 ft, which involves flying a box pattern with a number of pitches, rolls, and then yaws on each cardinal heading. Don't ask me what this does. Something along the lines of allowing the computer system to compensate for the movement of the sensor along the 3 axis of flight. But anyways we got that done, and then we had to send that data back to our processor at the office before we got the okay to start the actual survey flying.
Well it turned out my flying wasn't quite good enough (not uncommon apparently for new survey pilots on their first try), because the result data wasn't quite as precise as it had to be, so we had to go up and do it again. Unfortunately some bad weather had moved in, so we spent two days sitting and waiting for it to clear up. In the meantime we got kicked out of our hotel rooms for a night. There's only 6 rooms in the motel, and for last night it had been booked before we got up here, so we ended up sleeping in the common kitchen area.
There's a group of Caribou surveyors who came up here last night. Today they've headed out into the bush for a week to check up on the Caribou they've tagged. One guy we ended up chatting to and he was explaining to us what they were studying and stuff - he showed us a map of Northern Ontario with all the Caribou movements on it - pretty fascinating.
Anyways today we get our rooms back - hopefully. Its not a very well managed motel. Anybody who has spent time up in the north will know what I mean. Some of the rooms were even triple booked but it worked out because some of the Caribou team didn't make it up last night cause the weather was so bad. Its beautiful today though. We managed to get our second try for the calibration flight done, and it went much better this time. We just got the call from the office as I write this that our calibration flight was acceptable. Finally things are looking up. Calibration flight was a pass, weather is blue skies, and we can finally start survey flying.
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It's funny, when you mentioned a Caribou in a previous post, I thought of Christine, a girl I worked with at the King Edward. I loved working with her! But she is a Biologist who studies and tracks Caribou every summer. I wonder if she was part of that team . . . Keep writing I am enjoying as usual.
ReplyDeleteYa thats exactly what they were doing. It was pretty interesting actually. I've met the whole team cause they were here at the motel, and there was no Christine so she must be on some different team in another part of the province.
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