And they're off!

Finally. A good day of production. It took a few more days of snow, another test flight, and one false start where we had to turn back, but we've managed to sort out the technical problems and start biting into the survey grid.

And oh ya, that hangar that I said we put the airplane into? It didn't end up doing much. The wind ended up blowing in the right direction to send the snow right into the hangar door opening and our poor airplane was covered in snow despite being under a roof. It took me the better part of an hour of brushing and scraping and washing the remaining ice off, but I finally got it cleaned up enough to go flying for a test flight. That was a couple days ago. Its been fantastic weather since. My only complaint is that the temperature is hovering around the threshold that requires the winter fronts be either installed or not installed. The winter fronts are basically sheets of metal with slits in them that you screw onto the engine cowl intake to impede airflow into the engine cowl.

The engine is cooled by the air that flows into the front of the engine, but on cold winter days the air can actually be cold enough to do too good of a job cooling the engine so that the engine can't properly warm up. In aviation fashion the high-tech solution (yes that is sarcasm) is to screw some sheet metal onto the front of the engine intake to block a good portion of the intake air and thus impede cooling. I dislike installing and removing winter fronts. There are two pieces (one for each side of the engine) and each piece requires 10 machine screws to fasten it to the engine cowl. That's a lot of screwing and unscrewing by hand. We generally don't like to use power drills on airplanes because they have the ability to cross-thread the screws and then mangle them, in case anyone was wondering.

Today we finally completed a successful FOM (calibration) flight in the morning and then we went back and flew survey lines in the afternoon for a good 2 and a half hours. We're almost halfway done the job now, and provided the equipment behaves we should finish up tomorrow in either one long flight or two shorter ones, depending on how we feel. I love surveying in this area. We were in almost this exact spot back in the fall, and we're back again doing a block that is directly adjacent to the one we did then. Its very hilly, and keeps my interest even though it makes for very fatiguing flying. The hills add a dimension (literally) to the number of variables I have to manage to stay on-line and at the proper height. Actually two new dimensions. In addition to staying within horizontal limits, I am constantly pitching the airplane to follow the contour of the hills as best I can. The pitch changes introduce the second variable, which is maintaining a relatively constant speed which we do with power adjustments. Its constant roll, pitch, and throttle adjustments for the entire flight, and its draining! I haven't had to focus this hard in a while! Up until now this particular contract has mainly composed of fighting off boredom in between short test flights/attempts. The time of boredom is over.

After we finished the flight I got back to the hotel room and sent off my daily reports back to the office and then ended up passing out on the bed. I woke up sprawled face-down with my phone ringing (my operator wanted to go to dinner). I will neither confirm nor deny that I may or may not have been drooling...

We'll go for an early start tomorrow, finish the second half of our survey block, and then we're off to the next destination on the list.

Cockpit Organization

Well we managed to get our calibration flight in (technically called a "Figure of Merit" flight, or FOM for short) yesterday, but there have been technical problems with the data, and the techies don't seem to know exactly what went wrong, so we're into some troubleshooting.

In the meantime its been snowing quite heavily, so we're grounded anyways until the weather clears. Apart from the occasional medevac flight that comes and goes, the airport here is pretty dead. There is a lone hangar with no door that houses a small number of private ultralights, and I've convinced the airport manager to let us tuck the airplane into that as best as we can. The tail section of the airplane is sticking outside of the hangar, but we have the wings under a roof and out of the snow for the most part. It'll saves a lot of brushing/scraping snow and ice and it also means we won't need to put the wing covers on, which are annoying at best to put on and remove due to the wing pods and STOL kit (short take-off and landing).

Back in Markham I purchased a knee-board (a foldable pouch with pockets and a clipboard which straps to your leg), which I am quite happy with after having a few flights to try it out. Until now I've never flown with one. The Twin Comanche and Cherokee 6 aircraft I used to fly had room to stick my flight back in between the front seats so I had access and a place to store everything I needed for the flight right beside me. The Cessna 206 does not have the room between the seats so I've been stuck stowing my flight bag behind the pilot seat, which makes it difficult to retrieve maps and notebooks from it during flight. Until now I've just resorted to placing my maps, notebooks, and checklist on the floor in between the seats, but that has been disorganized at the best of times. In addition to those things, the engine will be going to an On-condition maintenance program soon which means I now have to fill out trend-monitoring forms during flight which record and track engine gauge readings such as oil temp, oil pressure, cylinder head temperature, exhaust gas temperature, and a number of other things to track subtle changes in engine performance. This extra piece of paper in the cockpit has finally caused me to surpass the threshold of the number of pieces of paper I can keep track of in the cockpit without an easy to access pocket.

Enter the kneeboard. I love it actually. Its a tri-fold design and carries everything I need for the flight in a handy little kit that's strapped to my knee. Its like a mini flight bag. I made up paper sheets that fit on the clipboard to record flight times, crucial flight plan information, weather, fuel log, and all the trend monitoring parameters. I also re-wrote the aircraft checklist, formatted it and had it laminated in a size that will clip to one side of the fold out flaps of the kneeboard (thanks to my oodles of free time down south waiting for the airplane in maintenance). And there's also room in another pouch to hold my map. I am proud to say that I now have every piece of information and form I need for the flight at my fingertips and I don't have to feel around on the cockpit floor for the map or piece of paper that has slid out of reach.

If I had a choice I would still prefer to keep everything in my flight bag beside me in between the seats, because I would rather not have something strapped to my lap, but the kneeboard is a close second alternative, and far superior to having to reach behind me or grope for things on the floor.

Tomorrow despite the forecast being as bleak as it was today, I remain hopeful that we'll get to go flying.

One small step for me...

...One giant leap towards finally making the company some money.

I've finally made it to our destination. We had another 2 days of mechanically-related delays, but now we're finally up and running and I landed early this evening. Tomorrow the weather is supposed to be beautiful still so we'll fly our calibration flight, and providing that is ok we'll hopefully have time to fly a few survey lines.

After living in Limbo for the last few days constantly checking out of my hotel and then checking in again and having to eat out I'm glad to finally be somewhere that I know I'll stay in for at least 3 or days. I didn't know if I could handle many more meals at the three restaurants I've been rotating through that were near my hotel down south. Tonight after I had dinner with my operator I stopped by the grocery store which just happens to be next to the hotel and picked up some milk and cereal and plastic bowls for breakfast, as well as some sandwich meat and buns for lunch. Finally I can stop eating out, at least for 2 meals of day. It saves money too.

Mostly I'm glad to be back "on the job" and feeling like I'm getting something accomplished. Technically we haven't gotten anything accomplished yet, but considering the last few days of nothing but delays, just GETTING to where I'm supposed to be counts as a big victory. Tomorrow I will go ply my trade with which I'm being paid for and we'll hopefully get some REAL work done.

Waiting to Depart

Well I was finally ready and was supposed to depart yesterday, but a low pressure system bringing freezing rain, low visibility and low cloud is sweeping across the province leaving me grounded probably until Sunday in Toronto.

Yesterday I spent most of the day trying to get a working fuel transfer pump (for fueling the aircraft out of barrels) together. I had initially thought we had one ready to go in the back of the shop, but it turned out to be more complicated than that. We did have small number of pumps and parts to go with the pumps, but they were all either worn out, the wrong voltage, and/or missing pieces.

Finally we decided to just go buy a new one, and then I spent much of the remainder of the afternoon assembling and making sure I had all the correct fittings and pieces for it. I can proudly say that at the end of the day I did indeed have a working fuel pump with all the correct pieces to fuel an airplane.

Today has been spent killing time. Right across the street from my hotel is an outdoor themed store, which is really fantastic to walk through if you're an outdoorsy person. They have some packages of freeze-dried food by Mountain House made for the purpose of camping/back-packing/survival and the like. The kind where you just add boiling water. We keep several meal packages in our survival kit. I've never had them before, so I decided I'd try a package and see what they're like and if they'd be any good for taking with me on camping trips. They were around $9 per package, which are supposed to serve 2. The "Chicken Teriyaki with Rice" that I tried, contained 580 calories per package, which seems low if you're planning to feed 2 people from it.

I took it back to my hotel room and microwaved the required amount of water to add, poured it in, and let it stand for a few minutes as directed.

It was actually pretty good, relatively speaking. I ate the whole thing, so it definitely couldn't feed 2 grown adults, at least if one or both of those adults was a man. I ate the whole package for lunch and am already starting to feel hungry again only 2 hours later. For a survival food it would be good. Tasty enough to maintain my morale if I was sitting around by a crashed airplane waiting for rescue. As a camping or backpacking ration, its easy and convenient to prepare, isn't heavy and doesn't take up TOO much space, but its not tasty enough that I would use it as a main meal source. I can imagine growing tired of eating them very quickly, so would probably only take enough for perhaps one meal on a "bush style" camping or backpacking trip where space for food was minimal. All in all, its not bad considering its freeze dried food that needs to be re-hydrated - but its still freeze-dried food.

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.

Fires

Yesterday we started our first day of actual surveying. The day before that was spent setting up our base station (read that as my operator "W" setting up the base station and me mostly standing around assisting as needed and fanning bugs away from my face). I'm still fascinated by all this mysterious technology.

Later in the day we did our calibration flight which involved climbing to 10,000 ft and performing a series of maneuvers over a pre-selected area of land that is relatively free of mineral deposits. The problem was there was a lot of cloud in the area and we couldn't do our flying over our area at 10,000 ft and still remain clear of cloud, so we tried to improvise a bit and use the readings in the airplane to find another suitable area nearby to do our maneuvers. It was a bit of a crapshoot, but we tried it anyways since we we were already out flying, and the worse that could've happened was that the calibration wasn't up to standards and we had to go out and do it again. To our surprise our processor back in the office actually passed it and gave us the ok. Credit goes to my operator.

The survey flying has been equally hit-or-miss. Not because of weather however, but because of the raging forest fires in the area. Our morning flight yesterday was cut short after only a couple hours because smoke from fires burning nearby were both obscuring visibility and making it difficult to breath. I was doing ok for the most part, but my operator was starting to get headaches from the smoke. The afternoon flight we went to a different survey block which was a little more free of smoke, but once again cut it short as the fires burned closer and the air got thicker and thicker. We got some fantastic pictures of the fires and smoke. There was one spot where the flames were licking up WELL above the tops of the trees. I estimated they must have been at least 40 ft high at the tallest spots. You can look out over the landscape and just see hundreds and hundreds of square miles of burned out forest, as far as the eye can see. Apparently these fires have been burning all summer, and won't go out until wintertime. Fire crews are working here and there to contain what they can near the communities, the rest will just burn. This morning in our survey area most of the first seem to have died down for the most part, but there was still thick smoke in both our blocks, so we had to turn around and didn't get anything done.

I will say that the terrain we're surveying over is fantastic. Its very rocky and hilly, and lots of fun to survey, but also far more challenging then our last job, which was mostly flat swamp. There are big hills, canyons, and cliffs with differences in elevation of 100 ft or more in some places. Its beautiful. One of our survey blocks is in a bit of a valley, with big rocky hills on either ends, and a flat grassy wetland in the middle.

Another plus I like about this job is that Stony Rapids is served by an MF radio service (one step below a true Air Traffic Controller) out of Regina. So I get talk to someone when I'm coming into land and take-off, which is nice so my radio procedures don't get rusty.

Long Trip

All right, so big update. We've started our second job after a couple weeks with time off. After 5 days on the road and in the air we've finally made it to Stony Rapids, Saskatchewan, where our next job is. Its a very small job, only about 4 flights worth. The time its taken us just to get here has literally been double the the time its going to take to finish the job. But that's how it goes sometimes I guess. I don't mind, it was pretty cool to make the trip actually.

From the last job we left the airplane in Geraldton, which is a couple hours by car to the Northeast of Thunder Bay. There the airplane had its 100 hr checkup done. So we had to drive up from London again to get to the airplane. I left on Monday, spent my first night on the road in Toronto, then we spent two days driving to Geraldton. Our first flying leg took us 4.6 hrs Northwest to Thompson, Manitoba where we crashed for the night, and finally another 3 hours this morning onto Stony Rapids. That's 5 towns, 3 provinces, and 3 time zones in 5 days. A lot of miles. I was looking on a map of Canada today and we're actually closer to the Yukon now than we are to Toronto. Kind of funny. If anyone's counting thats 1300 km by ground, and 1600 km by air.

Tomorrow we stop being hotel hoppers and start getting actual work done.