Sliding along the ILS on approach to Teterboro on a recent wet day. My camera's batteries die about 30 seconds from touchdown but I still like the video for showing all the rain across the windshield and for giving you an idea as to the noise level of light rain. When the rain is heavy it can be deafening.

Sometimes the mountains wave.

My Mickey Mouse impression. Please don't sue, Disney.

Don't worry, nothing bad happened - I flew a demo flight for a prospective buyer on someone else's Citation 550. They ended up buying it right after the flight, so I can only assume it was my awesome landing that sealed the deal. Actually, my landing was more like dropping a shopping cart off a sidewalk curb, but maybe the prospective buyer was so impressed that the aircraft held together despite my spine-crunching arrival that he decided to purchase her for her demonstrated resilience in the face of hardship. All airplanes are female, btw.

I have been flying a whole lot lately, and have taken a bunch of video and pics. I'll spend the rest of the day uploading some so I can finally post them.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This was taken during a STOL contest at the May Day Flyin in Valdez, Alaska. STOL is pilot-geek for Short Takeoff Or Landing, so the aim is to get airborne in the shortest distance after applying power, or stopping in the shortest distance after touching down.

The aircraft featured are generally used to get in and out of small unimproved places in the bush, like sand bars or teeny clearings.

Take a close look at the little yellow plane at 1:30 into the video for a gentle little prop strike right at the start of his takeoff roll. I'm amused / horrified that the pilot chose to continue the takeoff despite kissing the runway, but maybe I'm getting cowardly in my old age.

The video ends in pretty much the way I expected it to.

Ps: We just got back from the lawyer's office where we signed the final paperwork on our new (to us) house. We take possession in only 2 more sleeps!

This is the jet I flew westward the other day while Kitsch was taking our jet eastward. Just to be clear, I'm NOT cheating on my regular plane; I may hang out with other airplanes from time to time for business purposes, but our jet will always have my heart.

Apologies for the seizure-inducing flashing on the EFIS instruments - the refresh rate of the video cam is some harmonic of the refresh rate on the EFIS screens, thus the flashes. In real life the images are totally smooth.

Oh, and in non-aviation-related stuff, we move into our new (to us) house in 5 days! I'm nearly barfing with excitement! Predictably a flight just came up for that day, but Kitsch has generously agreed to cover it while Lisa and I (and her parents, bless them) move all our heavy, sharp furniture from our old place to our new one. I got the certified cheque for our closing costs done up this morning and I think I worried the bank teller a little bit when I stared at it and giggled for a solid minute. I explained why and she visibly brightened - I think she was worried from the way I was acting that I was about to blow it all on crack. No way, my drug of choice at the moment is called 'house' and it sure is a hell of a rush.

I got a shout-out on the radio from a controller yesterday! Unfortunately I wasn't in the airplane at the time, but Kitsch passed it on to me via phone last night, so thanks for that :)

I was actually headed west in a different aircraft yesterday, and that's the subject of today's post.

Suppose another operator (who we are pals with) needs a crew member on a jet that Kitsch and I are qualified to fly, but only for for a few days per month. Also suppose "In these harsh economic times blah blah" our flight department could use an extra few thousand bucks a month for vodka and bingo cards and whatnot.

A flashbulb went off in my head: For a monthly fee, Kitsch and I can make ourselves available to fly that particular jet for a set number of days per month. It lets Kitsch and I fly a different airplane from time to time, the other operator gets crew coverage for the few days a month they need it, and the company I work for gets to offset part of our operating cost with the monthly fee we charge the other operator for our pilot services.

See, it's a stroke of genius! Really, it's win-win and it only bites us if both jets need to fly on the same day. That never happens. Well, practically never. Well, what I mean by 'practically never' is 'It happened yesterday'.

Fortunately we had a few days heads-up on the scheduling conflict, so we made a few phone calls and arranged for an outside pilot to come in and save the day for us. The outside pilot is already checked out on our jet, so Kitsch took the outside pilot eastward in our jet, while I went westward in the other jet with the other operator.

Anyway, long story short, that's why I missed my Air Traffic Controller shout-out yesterday - I wasn't in the jet I normally fly. Kitsch assured me that I would have felt like a rock star had I been on board, so that's cool.

I still had an interesting trip yesterday though - the FBO we used at our destination is owned by Wal-Mart, and every employee there is actually a Wal-Mart employee. I asked the line guys to do the Wal-Mart song, but they were strangely shy. I'll have more on that when I upload the vids to Youtube later today :)

Lisa allowed me to record this, it's her take on being hitched to a pilot.

We got up crazy early last week and headed west, taking some people to do some things, likely involving money. That part is normal, but after we landed I saw an airplane type I had never seen before, so I got the video camera out. I bet Aviatrix would have more info on some of the unique features I observed on the aircraft. Strange little bird! I mean the plane, not Aviatrix ;)

Go full-screen and click on the red HD button in the video player for hi-def yumminess.



The aircraft certainly has a 'unique' look (I'm being kind) but looks aren't everything and as it turns out this airplane has some pretty good performance figures, considering what it was designed to do.

A quick online search shows the aircraft is a PAC 750XL. It was initially designed for skydiving - the website says it can take off in less than a thousand feet, climb to 13,000', chuck the jumpers out and land, all in 16 minutes. Actually, the performance figures on the plane are pretty impressive - it only weights 3,100 lbs and can carry a load of 4,400 lbs, more than twice the empty weight. Not many aircraft have that capability. For comparison, even though we have a high-gross-weight takeoff kit installed on our jet, our baby jet's empty weight is 8840 lbs, leaving us a useful load of about 6,000 lbs. On a regular Citation II the useful load is more like 4,800 lbs with about a 8700 lb empty weight.

Anyhoo, Google also tells me that UTS Geophysics is owned by a Canadian company called Aeroquest International Ltd. I wonder why it came over from New Zealand and where it's going? That must have been a series of pretty interesting flights.

I started flying when I was 16, and have held a flying license for 22 years now. If I was to retire at 60, that means I have another 22 years to go. I mean, I would like to retire tomorrow, but I think 60 is a little more realistic. Actually, the Canadian courts recently found that an Air Canada Captain's civil rights had been violated when he was forced to retire at 60, and it looks like the age will be bumped up to at least 65. While I respect a person's decision to continue to work as long as they can/want to, there are some pretty serious consequences to that decision.

If I retire at 60, I will likely live to be 77 or so, at least according to the latest data. However, if I retire at 65 I will likely live to be only 68 or so, which would put a serious crimp on my plan to sit on the beaches in Jamaica for twenty years, drinking pina coladas and tending to my hemp farms.

Dr. Ephrem Cheng did an actuarial study of life span vs. age at retirement, based on pension cheques sent to employees of Boeing Aerospace. Yeah I understand that only a small chunk of the employees were actually pilots, but that also tells me the stats likely hold true for everyone, not just flying guys. I swiped one of the tables from the study to show you:



See what I mean? For people who retired at the age of 50, their average life span is 86; whereas for people retired at the age of 65, their average life span is only 66.8! If you do the math according to the actuarial tables, you lose about 2 years of life expectancy for every year you work after age 55.

The Boeing experience is that employees retiring at age of 65 receive pension checks for only 18 months, on average, prior to death. Similarly, the Lockheed experience is that employees retiring at age of 65 receive pension checks for only 17 months, on average, prior to death. Dr. David T. Chai indicated that the Bell Labs experience is similar to those of Boeing and Lockheed based on the casual observation from the Newsletters of Bell Lab retirees. A retiree from Ford Motor told Dr. Paul Tien-Lin Ho that the experience from Ford Motor is also similar to those in Boeing and Lockheed.

I understand that there are many varied and complex reasons for this: People who retire early tend to be more wealthy with more access to high-end healthcare, while people who retire later tend to do so either because they need the money (which could be stressful) or they just need to work all the time (which is also hard on the body).

In my case, I'm hoping that careful investment coupled with Lisa eventually taking over the world (she has a particularly keen business sense) will give us the financial ability to depart the working world while we (mostly me, as I'm 13 years old than her) are still young enough to enjoy retirement.

Alright, I'm off to go check my RRSP balance and plan for July 2031 :)