Back at it

Wow, its been a while. I wonder if anyone out there is still reading this haha. The fall and winter was pretty slow for survey jobs. I spent most of it working construction to pay the bills. But it looks like this upcoming spring is going to be solid with work until mid-summer.

I've spent the last few weeks commuting to the office in Toronto for a few days each week to stay busy helping with some recent office work, and also to conduct some test flights for a new piece of R&D we're installing in the 206 I fly. The new technology is supposedly a "holy grail" for survey flying. It doesn't really mean much for me as a pilot, except that I have to spent more time on the ground before each flight doing taxi calibrations, but it is somewhat interesting.

When you're young and in flight school, or still dreaming of starting flight school you imagine being a pilot is mostly just showing up a few minutes before the flight, hopping in and taking off to your next destination. Thats only natural to assume that. Flight school trains you purely in the operation of an airplane, so thats what you spend most of your time doing. In reality however, at least in my experience, a vast majority of your time is spent in the less glamorous aspects of aviation for a pilot - lots of waiting. Pilots stand around a lot. We stand around a lot while we wait for our airplane to finish inspection and be put back together, we stand around and wait for passengers, or we stand around while the technicians wrestle with a piece of survey equipment that has decided to do something unexpected.

As soon as we get this R&D project out of the way, we'll finally be off again on some new contracts. First will be a couple days back in Kirkland Lake, and from there we MIGHT do a few weeks in Moosonee - the birthplace of my professional career, haha. I'm looking forward to going back actually, it will be fun to see that place again. After that we have a contract signed for Rankin Inlet, Nunavut. I'm looking forward to that as well. I've never been north of 60 yet, so I'll be able to check that off my list soon. Hopefully I'll see some polar bears as well.