Some of you asked about my flight simulator set up, so here's a geek post on the details. The computer is a Toshiba laptop with dual Pentiums at 2.16 GHz and 2 GB of RAM running Vista. I only have the
That's me: lost in watching TV and not blogging. Aren't television series box sets awesome? I started with Firefly, and that was so much fun I picked up the next box.
A few years ago I bought
Here's the loose end I mentioned earlier. As you may recall, I was almost en route to West Virginia last month, but diverted home at the last moment. To facilitate that trip, I had ordered charts from
Every once in a while I will describe a system, such as the oil pressure line running directly to a dashboard gauge, and someone will be aghast that "that's all it is?" Yes. And the less 'middle manag
When I'm in a hotel I take care to plug any chargers into visible outlets, and put a post-it note on the desk reminding me they are there, so I don't abandon chargers and batteries all over North Amer
For the second time in ten years, I was present to witness the death of a storied old name in aviation. On January 31, Northwest Airlines - the airline I referred to here as "RedCo" - ceased to exist
Oops, forgot to mark this ready after my sim yesterday.
First, an apology for all the toy flight simulator entries on here lately, and a warning that they will continue. I don't want to turn t
As long-time readers know, I have kept my flight instructor rating current so as to have an additional source of income when I'm not off in the wild beyond. So here I am, the week before Christmas, ba
I'm back at home and it's almost Christmas. In a burst of holiday spirit I drive into the city for shopping. This includes a stop at a Canadian Tire -- Canadian Tire ought to have its own blog categor
I'm being a good pilot and reviewing my regulations by reading the online AIM. I'm in the Rules of the Air section, for some reason this is abbreviated RAC. Back when the AIM (Airman's Information Man
Seeing as Sarah busted me yesterday for breaking my New Year's resolution, today's blog post is postponed until I fulfill it. Also my hands are too cold to type properly, because I just got in from a
We meet at 6:30 for breakfast according to our strategy. The rental car can be returned at 7:00, and we've left ourselves a few hours leeway for contingencies so we can still get the airplane put away
The customers have emerged from their conference call and the verdict is that they are done with us. They pack up and drive away, before any more snow arrives and they get stuck up here. It's now up t
The customers have emerged from their conference call and the verdict is that they are done with us. They pack up and drive away, before any more snow arrives and they get stuck up here. It's now up t
Some weird aviation stories have been coming out of India lately. Six years ago if you had a commercial licence and the right to work in India, you had a jet job. Airlines were expanding so quickly th
There's more work to be done here but it snowed again and the temperature keeps dropping, so the customers can't pretend that the snow is going to melt. They need less than ten centimetres of snow on
Did I get to the part where we fly the airplane yet? Seriously, did I? We did fly the airplane this rotation. Twice, even. And if you think the blog took a long time getting there, try real life.
J
I get up and do my 5BX exercises, still really simple to do in half the allotted time, but they say not to skip any levels. Then I have paperwork to do.
Naturally I left some of the information I nee
I first noticed him as I strolled up to our gate in Pittsburgh at 5:30am, bags in tow. He was wearing black polyester pants, a leather jacket with epaulet loops, and a plastic ID card on a lanyard; I
I wish I had a navigational record of how mealtime conversation got there, but there it was. Somehow it became sufficiently relevant to the conversation that a member of our party chose to mention, in
I wake up and look at the graphical weather forecast and see that the weather gods have pulled a switcheroo. The high we've been tracking has pushed south and the weather we're getting instead is a lo
I received e-mail last week from Danielle Gibeault, a Wisconsin-based flight instructor looking for some blog love. I get a lot of requests to be listed on this blog, and although I read many interest
Last week I blogged about a mystery item handed over to me at crew change and challenged you to tell me why my chief pilot purchased these. If I have opportunity to, I will edit this paragraph to mock
The weather is still not cooperating, but the high is moving very slowly towards us. Closer is good, and slow is good, I reason, because the slower it comes the slower it will leave. We'll use our new
A couple of months ago I ran a 10 km race and although my finishing time was close to what I had predicted, it was nothing like what I used to be able to do. "Eh," I deceived myself. "I'm not training
I like to send postcards when I travel -- if you're a postcard aficionado give me an address and likely you'll eventually get a card from somewhere people rarely go on vacation -- but neither the qual
It's another poor day for our work, but there's a high approaching and we're holding out help for good weather tomorrow. Today looks like a good shopping and looking around town day. We're in a hotel
The handover crew reported that the worst problem here has been heavy frost. There's no point trying to get going in the morning before nine because the frost reforms as fast as it can be taken off, a
The weather the next day is crummy so no one has to get up super early nor stay up extra late. We all eat breakfast together in the hotel lobby while the television shows images of random airplanes to
With the handover briefing comes the handover of the stuff. It fills a big Tupperware tub and I loathe the thing. The tub has the bloat of my suitcase, as various pilots add things that they think sho
The handover briefing includes socializing about progress on people's renos and relationships interspersed with details of the work, airplane quirks, new policies, customer disposition, unwritten poli
Even a pilot can only do so much sitting around and reading funny websites before she has to go back to work. I have checklists for packing to make sure I don't get to the job and not have a water bot
At first the ground is indistinguishable from the sky and I don't realize we've broken out of the clouds until a lonely farm materializes out of the blowing snow, cut off from the
Humans piloting non-pressurized aircraft are required to use supplemental oxygen for flight above ten thousand feet or so. The exact altitude depends on duration of flight and national regulations. Ge
Okay, because I was too lazy to get this all written back in December, I'm now picking up my story after the sim session in North Carolina. This is continued from December 31, 2009
I said I'd reveal New Year's resolutions, so I guess I'd better get something resolved before the new year arrives and it's time to enact them. I mostly know what I wish to achieve, and it's not reall
TSA subpoenas, threatens two bloggers who published non-classified airline security directive:I'm not sure what crime they've committed, but TSA seems to think they're in trouble December 30, 2009
airline
19:49
