Friday, March 11, 2011



Last night's return flight to Toronto was a bit more interesting. A low-level jetstream was causing severe turbulence in a line south of Rochester NY to Buffalo NY, and we were flying right along the northern edge of it. We didn't get anything too bad, but I kind of hate sitting in solid cloud for 2 hours, waiting for the bumps to get bumpier. I was a bit under the weather so Kitsch flew us home. The ceiling in Toronto was better than forecast, it was 400' and 5 miles visibilty while we were expecting 200' (or lower) and 1/2 a mile vis, so it worked out fine.

We landed on runway 05, which is my favorite in Toronto because a) it's close to our home base FBO and b) it has pretty wickedly bright runway lighting. Our rules say that we can continue our approach if we see the runway lights, and I have yet to encounter clouds in Toronto that were so thick the runway lights weren't visible through them. I mean, if we did we'd go around and either try again or go somewhere else, but it has yet to happen.

I started the video close to the decision height - the previous 2 hours was solid cloud with occasional rain and that's not very fun to watch.

You can hear the GPWS (ground proximity warning system) voice call "five hundred" (feet above ground) about 20 seconds into the video.

Oh yeah - my camera's batteries croaked just as we were decelerating on the runway, but you get the idea.


//I'll work on a non-landing-video post today.

6 comments:

mexprof said...

Did you hand fly the whole thing or do you let the autopilot help you line up?

Anonymous said...

Glad you got your runway ... I put the request in while you were still 50 miles outside my airspace!

Sulako said...

Kitsch hand-flew the whole thing. He likes to hand-fly approaches. It makes it feel more like flying and less like aiming, or something.

@ Anonymous - Thanks eh! I chugged an energy drink before the flight and by the end I had to pee in a ferocious fashion; runway 5 saves us a good 10 minutes of taxiing from the south end :)

Global Express Pilot said...

you almost need sun glasses for those runway lights.....

miamiflying.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

The two white buildings you passed just leaving shore are built on the site of the Squantum Naval Air Station, lots of early avaition history there,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squantum_Naval_Air_Station

Spent lots of time there as a kid, our sea Scout boat was based there,

BR, John

Christopher said...

Is there no Papi on that runway?