Soggy

Well I'm back from a couple weeks of glorious time off. My medical is renewed for another year, my recurrent training is complete, and I'm ready to get back at 'er.

We left the airplane at a maintenance base just north of Winnipeg, where they had a grass strip that I flew into. After a Westjet flight to Winnipeg, and then a long taxi ride out to the airport, I had a chance to meet my new operator, who meets me there after driving out in the van.

Our plan was to meet there Monday afternoon and fly out to Thompson for the night, but as always plans never go as planned. Southern Manitoba had a couple days of rain a few days ago, and the grass runway was very soggy. We loaded the airplane up and taxied out to the runway. I always love flying into private airstrips. This one has the long gravel driveway doubling as a taxiway that goes out behind the two houses and the shop hangar out to the runway. I taxi past a row of evergreen trees/hedges on one side and a car graveyard on the other side. There's a narrow culvert bridge crossing a drainage ditch that takes me onto the runway. I make a mental note of a spot on the runway that will serve as my go/no-go decision point.

As soon as I get into the grass and on the runway I can feel the airplane nose-wheel sinking into the muck. I add power to keep a fast paced backtracking taxi down the runway to avoid getting stuck. Even with 20 degrees of flap set and pulling fully back on the controls to keep as much weight off the nose as possible, I can feel the wheels just bogging down. I look out the window and the main wheel I can see is splashing through water and tall grass. Getting to the end of the runway I do my final takeoff checks still rolling, add more power and swing around to line up on the runway, and then add full power. The acceleration is lethargic. At a third ways down the 2500 ft runway I'm still barely faster than a fast taxi, but the acceleration is getting better as the weight slowly comes off the wheels. Two thirds behind me and I finally have an indication on the airspeed indicator at 40 mph. Even with the Robertson STOL (short takeoff and landing) kit I need a bare minimum of 55 to get airborne, and then I still need to fly in ground effect for another several hundred feet. I pass my go/no-go point and am still bouncing along on the ground - no good. I pull the power off and abort the takeoff. There's no need to use the breaks, I slow down and sink into the boggy grass almost instantly.

I tell my operator we'll give it another attempt, and hopefully we can find a path along the runway that isn't quite as boggy. I wonder what he's thinking. He's very experienced with survey operating, but all of his flying has been in helicopters. This is his very first flight with me, as well as in a light fixed wing piston aircraft. He seems calm and lets me do my thing. What an introduction to fixed wing flying though!

We line up again, and the runway is wide enough that I shift to the left just a bit, hoping to catch some higher ground that is less saturated. Throttle in, confirm full power, gauges green, and off we go crashing through puddles and ruts as I keep the controls back and the nose out of the muck as best I can. The end result is the same, and we taxi back in. I never thought I'd get to be a swamp boat driver. Its very close, we're very light on our toes as I pass the abort point. If I was ballsier there'd be a decent chance that I could have gotten airborne and clear the bushes if I continued with the takeoff. But the risk outweighs the reward. I'm confident that I could get the airplane airborne no problem if we empty our gear out. There's a paved runway a half hour down the road, but its too late to go there today and still make the 3 hr flight north before dark. We pack it in for the day and go check into a local hotel for the night. The underside of the wings and the side of the fuselage are splattered with mud being kicked up from the wheels, and the back door step has collected a pile of wet grass blades.

The next morning I'll go swamp boat driving again with an empty airplane - with better results.

Flight Planning

We have finally finished our first job here, finally. We had a long stretch of bad weather, and then a broken airplane so we had to wait for an AME to arrive with a replacement part, but after 3 weeks of sitting we finally finished the job. We have another job in Nunavut that is an hour flight south. We're still tecnically waiting for authorization from the client to demobilize, so in the meantime we've been making the 50 minute ferry flight south to survey the blocks on the next job.

We might have a job coming up on the other side of Hudson Bay in Eastern Northern Quebec, so they asked me to plan a flight from our current location so they could do a cost estimation. It was an interesting problem to solve.

First of all the most apparent problem is that a direct route would take me directly across Hudson Bay. Obviously in a single engine airplane that's out of the question, so the question became whether to take the northern route over the top of the Bay, or go south all the way down around Hudson and James Bay. The northern route is almost 600 miles shorter - 900 nm vs 1500 nm. That's a huge difference. The problem, there are only a small number of communities where I could potentially land and refuel. I looked all of them up, and none of them had Avgas except for Iqualuit. The flight from here to Iqualuit would be a grueling 6 hrs. The airplane could do it, but that's almost a full hour longer than I've ever done in one leg. Furthermore, the northern route would require crossing a number of stretches of water between the islands that would be well beyond gliding distance. Legally it could be done if I brought along the proper survival equipment, but even with a liferaft onboard and a maritime survival suit I'm not sure I'd want to have to swim in Arctic water. The southern route was longer but it seemed safer and better.

Even heading south I can't just pick the most convienent place to land and expect they will have fuel. A lot of airports up here are little more than a stretch of gravel and a small terminal building with limited operating hours, so you have to do your research if you expect to land and just pull up to the pumps.

At the end of it I came up with 2 stops, one in Gillam, MB, and the next in Moosonee, one airport I know VERY well...

I'm not sure if we'll even get that contract out east, or if we do I'll be flying from where I planned it from, but it was a fun scenario to plan out.

The Far North

Well we have made it to the far north. I flew up on Monday, while my operator made it up by Airline the next day. We managed to get our FOM flight done with our last day of great weather, and then one survey flight. And then we spent the next couple days sitting. With springtime comes bad weather. The fog here rolls in quickly without warning, and then just like that clears out a couple hours later. I'm going to have to keep a close eye on the temperature/dew-point spread. When the temperature is close to the dewpoint, that means the relative humidity is high, and therefore so is the possibility of fog.

Yesterday afternoon the snow and low cloud seemed to have cleared enough that we decided to try a flight. We got out to the airplane and by the time we got it ready for flight it had started lightly snowing again. We started up and taxied out, and I called for a weather report before taking off. It was still calling 7 miles visibility, ceilings 1500 ft, so off we went. Well the flight didn't last long. We got out to the block and it was terrible conditions, fog on the ground with multiple other cloud layers below 1000 ft. It was an easy decision to turn back. By the time we got back to the airport, it was snowing heavily and we landed with visibility around 2 to 3 miles. I have a feeling this will be a common scenario for the next few weeks.

Today we finally got up for a couple hrs survey in the afternoon, and it looks like the weather is going to be decent for the next few days, so hopefully we can get some work done. My operator and I weren't prepared for how cold it turned today however. It was close to 20 C below. Up until now the heater knob in the airplane has hovered somewhere around the quarter to halfway out position. Today it was full on the whole flight, and still the cockpit stayed JUST warm enough. By the time we landed it was almost 8 pm. Fueling the airplane and putting it to bed was miserably cold. We are fueling out of barrels, so its a huge process to refuel the airplane. We have to unpack the fuel pump, assemble it, roll a barrel over from our cache, set the pump up, fuel one wing, slide the barrel over to the other wing, fuel it, and then disassemble the pump and put it away. And then we have to put the wing covers on, and engine blanket, and make sure the space heater is plugged in to keep our survey equipment in the back warm. We both ended up putting on our winter overalls that we keep in the back of the airplane. I even broke out a couple hand-warmers, and my fingers were STILL numb. Holding a metal fuel pump nozzle with sub-zero temperature fuel flowing through it can suck the heat out of your hands insanely fast.

Welcome to Nunavut I guess. Tomorrow I'll be sporting the long underwear and an extra sweater, along with my overalls standing by. Being a pilot is so glamorous.

The town itself isn't bad to live in. Its comprised about 50/50 white people and Inuit, and everybody seems friendly enough. Its quite a difference to some of the reserves in Northern Ontario where there is almost hostility against us "whitey's". There are a few restaurants here as well, so we have a bit of variety, although much of the selection is still your typical diner style food. There are a few good dishes I have discovered however that are reasonably healthy and a good change from greasy food.

Don't Blink You'll Miss It

We finished up our second small job, and quite quickly. Luck was on our side this time and everything in the airplane is working beautifully, and we've had almost a week now of fantastic blue sky weather.

Now we're back in Thunder Bay. Today we both started and finished a third small job that popped up here. It only took us one flight, and we continue to have great weather. The Thunder Bay job was very small as well, we finished it in one flight today. We didn't have to do an FOM (calibration flight) for it because the one we did on the last job was geographically near enough to count for this job as well. The survey block was small enough to bang off in 4 hrs even. Tomorrow we finally head to Rankin Inlet.

I enjoyed flying out of Thunder Bay, if only for a short time. Thunder Bay while not a large city by Southern Ontario standards is a large city for Northern Ontario, and is therefore a major air carrier hub. Its quite a busy airport, complete with its own control tower and all the fixings of a major airport. Its been a while since I've flown out of a busy towered airport, and it was good to get back into that fast paced environment of busy airports and clean the rust off of those skills. I do really enjoy the fast paced atmosphere and wish I could spend more time here. But oh well, duty calls.

My next task for the moment is planning my exact route up to Rankin Inlet, and also look into how my operator is going to get there as well. I'll probably do it in a couple days. We're not going to drive the van all the way up there, and we have too much gear to bring it all in the airplane, so my operator is most likely going to have to fly commercial air service up there, along with much of our gear.

To the best of my memory, the trip up to Rankin Inlet will be both the furthest north I have ever been, as well as be the longest continuous cross country trip I will have taken. Only by a few miles though.

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.

Touring the North

Well I have changed towns again. Quite the story. Due to a huge hockey tournament going on, I could only get a hotel room in Sioux for that first night. Then I was out of luck. Thursday morning I stopped by the AMO shop to drop off some paperwork, then spent the rest of the morning trying to devise a plan to find somewhere else to stay for the night. All the hotels were full, so I tried the Bed & Breakfasts. Those were full too. I looked into maybe taking a bus to nearby Dryden, but there was no such thing. The lady at Greyhound tried to sell me on bus ride that got routed through Thunder Bay, making for almost a 16 hr trip just to get to Dryden which is only an hour and a bit drive. I'm pretty sure the booking service was based probably down south and the lady obviously had no geographical knowledge, otherwise she would have seen the ludicrousness of her solution. I'm not impressed with people who out of their own ignorance of the industry they work in cannot at least point me in the right direction to find a practical solution. Granted not a whole of people in souther Ontario know exactly where Sioux Lookout and Dryden are, but you'd think that at least someone working for Greyhound booking bus routes would have a working knowledge of where all these towns were that they served. I pointed out that Dryden was only an hour and a bit drive from Sioux, so I wasn't going to go all the way to Thunder Bay (5 hrs one way) and then all the way back to Dryden on the bus. She didn't seem to grasp the sillyness of the routing, so I said thank you and hung up the phone. I could probably take a taxi for less, or even rent a car. Besides, if I was going to go to Thunder Bay I might as well just stay there and meet my operator there, who was at that time en-route in the Van.

So I tried the one car rental place in town. Nothing available. Looked like Thunder Bay might have to be an option. It wouldn't be that bad if I made it there anyways. Its a nice big town, and thats where my operator would be anyways. I looked up the bus line in town and called them. It was just an answering service with scheduled times and rates, but there was a bus running. I touched base with my operator to let him know my plan as it stood at that moment, and then called a cab and off I was to the bus station/convenience store. I was chatting to the cabby on the way there, and he mentioned that last night he had driven a guy who was in the same boat as me to Dryden, and then elsewhere as there weren't even any rooms in Dryden. Crazy.

I got to the bus stop about 2 hrs before the bus was scheduled to leave, and I was lucky to get there when I did. I got the LAST ticket available on the bus, which was actually just a big van. Soon enough I was on my way to Thunder Bay for the 5 hr drive. Just to find a place to sleep for the night, sheesh. But now I am successfully in Thunder Bay, with a place to sleep, and have rendezvoused with my operator - and we are chilling for the next couple days until the airplane is finished inspection. After that, onto the next job. Never a dull moment.

Next!

Well after having to do a quick flight to re-fly one line that we somehow missed, we got the ok to move out. Next stop, Sioux Lookout for maintenance, which is where I am now. It was a long 4.5 hr flight with headwinds, but the weather was great the whole way there.

This was my first time at the Sioux airport, and the runway sits at a lower elevation than the main ramp, and there's a taxi-way that winds its way up the hill almost like a mini mountain road. It was kind of fun going up. I imagine it will be even more fun going downhill, its almost like a go-cart track. Hopefully the winds are such when I depart that I'll get to use it going downhill.

After landing and parking I couldn't find my wallet for the life of me. It was not a good time. I had already called the cab and had my bags loaded, and after searching my bad a dozen times and tearing apart all the nooks and crannies in the airplane that it might have fallen, I still couldn't find it. I had to tell the cabby that I was going to go walk the parking area where I had been walking around after landing to see if I could find it, and told him I'd call him back. He didn't seem happy but didn't say much. What could I do? I couldn't pay him.

The owner of the AMO (Maintenance Shop) came by as I was looking around on the ground for my wallet. It was after-hours but he knew I was coming so I guess he swung by to see if I made it. He asked if I needed a lift into town and I gratefully accepted and told him of my predicament. When I got to the hotel thankfully when I booked the room I gave them my credit card, so I still got to check in and had a place to sleep for the night. I wasn't sure how I was going to get dinner though, I hadn't really eaten all day as we were in a bit of a rush after our morning flight to get out of there.

After calling my operator and have him tear apart the van to see if I left my wallet in there, I found it - stuffed behind a flap in a pocket of my flight bag. I felt dumb, I don't know how I didn't find it the previous 12 times I searched my bag, but also I felt relieved. Losing your wallet while you're in a strange town 1000 miles from home sucks. It probably took 2 years off my life with the stress, lol. But all is well again. Happy ending.

On a side note, I ate dinner at a place called Dick and Nellie's Bar and Grill cause I heard it was wing night. The wings sucked. They were nice and saucy, but very small and overpriced, especially for "wing night". On the plus side their nachos were huge, and loaded with cheese and stuff. That made up for the disappointing wings. I couldn't even finish the nachos. They'd be a full meal in themselves for 2 big eaters. Just sayin'