Happy New Year!  Oh, it's Spring already?  Hmm.  

Enroute to Regina this morning.  The sky was a delicious blue, and the prairies went on forever. The passengers were early this morning, we were able to depart from the closest runway at Pearson, we got a direct clearance and the winds were light.  A good start to the day.

Life is full and complex and busy.  We have 5 planes on the OC now, with 2 more signed and awaiting Transport Canada approval to start flying for us.  Another one is on the horizon, so that's also pretty cool.  

What's less cool is our impending Transport Canada audit, currently scheduled for the week of June 9th.  I may move to Argentina before then - I checked online and they appear to have no extradition agreement with Canada :)

Nolan is 2 1/2 now, and continues to be incredible.  We are a week into toilet-training - I'll spare you the details, but let's just say I'm glad we have hardwood floors rather than carpet.  This was breakfast yesterday. 

I'm currently in Regina, Saskatchewan, waiting on some very nice people to show up so we can take them back to Toronto.  I still manage to fly a bit here and there, but as the number of planes increases, so do my office duties.  I'm currently whinging to my boss in the hopes that he'll let me hire a full-time office assistant.  I offload a fair amount of work on the other pilots (everyone here pulls their weight on the operational side) but the amount of paperwork is increasing, and never-ending. 

Anyway, that's me.  Now here's a fun thing.

We got our own call-sign last week, and we can start using it at the end of the month.  Getting a callsign isn't that hard, but what's hard is that most of the good names are taken, and once an operator has a callsign, no other operator in the entire world can have the same one.

I had the pilots make suggestions, and we voted on the ones we liked the best.  

These were the suggestions:

Gangster

Sundog

MotherGoose

PrettyBird

Pterodactyl

Gone-Quick

All-Gone

Chiefs

Air Chiefs

Moustache

Monster

Nimby

Jetset

Skyboss

Major-Tom

Ninja 

Halo

Spark

I asked the pilot who submitted Major Tom what he was thinking, and he said "Imagine getting your clearance from Ground Control".   I laughed.

Anyway, we voted the list down to a few, and submitted the top three to the authorities.

All three were rejected - they had been claimed by other operators since the master list was updated.

Curses!

So I asked one of the FO's randomly what he wanted to call us, and he replied, with a one-word answer.  It didn't suck, so we submitted it, and it was accepted. 

In my next post, I'll tell you what our callsign is, but until then, check this out.  This is the master list of all the callsigns assigned to all the air carriers who have applied for one. 

https://www.faa.gov/air_traffic/publications/atpubs/CNT/3-3.htm

If you click on Section 2, you can see every callsign in the world, sorted alphabetically.  There are some real gems in there, from Airgoat to Hoagie to Swissboogie.  

Have a look - what callsigns do you admire?  What would your callsign be?