Tuesday, October 20, 2009



Noone gets hurt, amazingly. This is why it's important to actually obey IFR rules, like sector altitudes. These people were unprepared to encounter cloud, yet they continued to valley-crawl while in IMC. I'm amazed this footage wasn't recovered at a crash scene.

Sunday, October 18, 2009


Ahh, the southern US.

We have been on tour for a few days now, but the internet at our hotels has been slow and sketchy, so I haven't been able to upload any vids. In theory we return to Toronto tonight, so I'm hopeful I'll have some fresh stuff for tomorrow.

In the interim, feast on some pics of our treasures and travels.



I got some awesome KISS M&Ms at a Wal-mart in Charleston SC. Each M&M has a little portrait of one of the band members. Kiss army ftw!




We crossed beneath a busy airplane highway on our way south. I count 7 contrails, but I might be missing one or two. This was along the Baltimore - Washington corridor, which is stupidly busy all the time.




As we arrived in Philly, I saw a rampie giving haircuts to other rampies. They'd stuff newspaper into their collars and the barber would give'er with the shaver. He did 2 guys in 5 minutes. Now that I think about it, free haircuts at the FBO might be something to advertise.



It's hard to read in the pic, but the ident of this Gulfstream is IDEAS. I assume they are very creative pilots.

Hmm, the pax just showed up so I'll cut this short.

Thursday, October 15, 2009



That's Lisa, myself and a coworker driving back to our main office after lunch. On Google Streetview! We saw the streetview car - just a regular car with some portable antennas and a camera in a bubble on the roof - and were laughing about how cool it would be if it was actually recording. Turns out, it was. Now that we've been assimilated by the Borg I'm not sure if it's a good thing. On the plus side we are immortal and that's cool, but even though we were in a public place I still feel a little freaked out. Clearly I'm over it as I'm publishing the pic on the blog and I know I should just shut the hell up about privacy, but still. I'm also quite relieved I wasn't committing some road-rage offence when our snap was snapped.

Tuesday, October 06, 2009



Last but not least, this is us riding the localizer backcourse into Ottawa a few days ago. Basically we line ourselves up with the runway about 10 miles back, then descend when the charts tell us there are no mountains / buildings / cel towers in the way.

I have flown maybe a thousand IFR approaches but I still get a thrill when we bust through the cloud base and the runway is in front of us like it should be.

I would write more but I'm tired after a long flying day (I'm in Providence at the moment) and a week of packing and unpacking. I'll youtube some vids of our new house soon; in an effort to make sure we unpack in a timely fashion, Lisa invited 25 relatives over for Thanksgiving this coming Sunday. No pressure ;)


Watching ice form on the wings and dealing with it. Also on our Ottawa trip last week. Icing isn't really an issue for most jets - we can either climb or descend through it a lot more quickly than most piston-powered aircraft, so we generally don't spend much time at altitudes conductive to icing.

The cool part is about 3 minutes in.


Hit the HQ button for hi-def goodness.

Surprisingly, the whine during engine start isn't a pilot, it's an inverter we use to power laptops etc while in flight. It yelps during engine start, but a reset makes it all better.