Headset Swap

We spent 3 nights hanging out in Thunder Bay waiting for the airplane to get out of maintenance in Sioux. Finally after some relaxing, and a little bit of adventure (we went and climbed a nearby "mountain" outside Thunder Bay), my operator headed off to our next spot, and I took the 5 hr bus back to the Sioux, and then flew the airplane in. Most of the 2 hr flight was spent at 800-1000 agl running along under a low cloud deck. You really get a sense of the terrain you're flying over at that altitude. I never tire of watching cliff formations and little steep rocky terrain scroll by under the wings.

The weather has since turned turned great. A nice big High Pressure system has moved in from the North which means blue skies and light winds. It also has turned very cold. Today we got up and set up our base station, and then got up to do our FOM flight. So far from what we hear everything worked out well, and we should be able to get out tomorrow and start AND finish the survey. Its a very small job here.

Today for the flight I forgot to bring my headset from the hotel, but we happened to have a spare in the back. My headset is only a passive David Clark model. Nothing fancy on it. I've had it for almost a decade now, and it still works flawlessly unfortunately. The only thing I've done to it is replace the mic muff, put some fat new gel ear pads and upgrade the headband pad on it. I keep eyeballing all the new fancy ANR (active noise reduction - a feature that emits a tone that cancels out the sound of the engine to make it quieter) headsets that my operator's use (purchased by the company). The extra one we had was a Lightspeed brand (20xl or something like that I think). I was impressed with the noise cancelling - it did make the engine noise much quieter, but the speaker sound quality I found was far less impressive. My Davie headset was much clearer. I also found my headset to be more comfortable, even if a little heavier, but maybe thats just because its what I'm used to. Despite the lower engine noise, I'm not so sure I'm ready to trade in my headset just yet.

On a side note the takeoff caught me by surprise. When you fly an airplane almost every day you don't realize how much your ears tune into the tone of the engine to listen for any anomalies. Wearing the ANR headset made for a totally different engine tone as I pushed in the throttle, and it caught me by surprise. My instinct was telling me "The engine doesn't sound right! Something's wrong!" and I had to consciously tell myself it was the ANR headset. It was quite a different sound. It was an interesting feeling though, accelerating down the runway and not being able to trust your sense of hearing as an additional engine monitor. I'm sure if I wore the headset regularly my ears would tune into what normal sounded like.