There are all sorts of views when flying, especially at night, that you can’t see from the ground; ski areas lit up for night operations, the moon reflecting on hundreds of lakes and rivers, single lights isolated in unpopulated areas and the endless streams of headlights on roadways below.

Tonight we headed into LGA from Dayton. After holding two times and getting vectored all over the place we finally rejoined the arrival over Allentown, PA and headed in. The arrival comes in from Allentown, east towards the Jersey shore and then directly across the Verizono Narrows and then direct to LGA, just east of the East River over Brooklyn. The winds were very strong out of the west so as we headed north-north-east towards LGA over New York Harbor the aircraft was crabbed pretty much due north to hold the track to the north east.

It worked out that as we slipped sideways we were directly perpendicular to Manhattan. All the north-south Avenues were straight in front of us and even though we weren’t heading directly to the city (we were going just east) we were pointed directly at it and moving to the right (east) at the same time. You could see the Avenues running from down town all the way up north to the upper east and west side. You could see which way the traffic was moving as alternating streets were red tail lights or white head lights.

It was one of those things that would have looked really good in a picture but unfortunately my camera just doesn’t do night stuff.

Good is flying eastbound with a 130 knot tailwind and doing 660 mph across the ground.

Bad is flying westbound in to the same 130 knot wind and managing only 310 mph. 2 hours from Philly to Cincy? Sure.

I’m just finishing up 2 days off. They were pretty good days. My couch finally came. I cleaned my apartment. I went out to go bowling and have ice cream, and that was just day one. Unfortunately I have to start work again tomorrow morning. It’s not so much I have to work (on a holiday no less) but the fact I have to start so damn early at 5am. Oh well.

The captain I flew with last trip took a few pictures he sent to me. Plus I took a few that actually came out ok. They are all up under November in 2007. Here are a few though.

If you didn’t know better it sort of looks like I am sitting in a car. We actually were in flight coming into Charlotte from somewhere.

If you look really closely there is an airplane in the middle of the picture.

We made it. It actually wasn’t that bad. They swapped out the captain so the guy flying it wasn’t on high mins (and hasn’t been for about 12 years!) However, he hadn’t flown the 700 in over 2 years so I flew the leg up to Wilkes Barre. It was a pretty smooth flight up here until we descended through 12,000 feet into the clouds. We joined the instrument approach and popped out the bottom and into the clear at about 800 feet. Visibility was up around 2 miles and the runway was pretty clear. I even managed a rather nice landing. Taxied into the gate through 3 inches of slush and had a good snowball fight with the airplane (ok, just me throwing snow at the tires) on the walk around.

[i]In best movie announcer voice…[/i]

The captain was on high mins. The weather was bad. Would they get in? Or would they be doomed to fly for ever, just like Charley on the MTA? Find out when ever Ethan gets a chance to post again!

Ok, no really, the captain I am flying with has less then 100 hours in the left seat so he is considered to be on “high minimums”. Basically we need to add 1/2 miles to the visibility and 100 feet to the ceiling to every set of minimums for an approach we shoot. So if the approach calls for 1/2 miles and 200 feet we would need 1 mile and 300 feet. It doesn’t sound like much of a difference, but in the end it can make all the difference when the snow or rain is coming down or it is foggy.

We are going up to Wilkes Barre, PA this evening. They currently are reporting 3/4 of a mile with light snow and low overcast. Oh yeah, it’s also 30 degrees out. That’s all sort of hard to picture for me as right now I am sitting in Tallahassee where it is 70 degrees and sunny. Oh well. At least I got to walk around here today a bit and enjoy the weather.

Stupid furniture place. They were supposed to deliver my couch and chair some time today between 11:30 and 2:30. Of course they didn’t show up until 3:30 and then they discovered that the couch was broken. So they dropped off the chair and now I have to wait until Tuesday to get the couch. And the worst part is that I called the store to request a morning delivery as I’ve got stuff to do that afternoon and they told me they don’t know where I’ll be until the night before. Wonderful.

Two quick pictures from the past week.

Climbing out of Chattanooga heading towards DC (actually what I am going to be doing today in a few hours). The leaves are mostly changing down here but like every where else due to the dry summer it has been less then spectacular.
[img]http://www.thegearmonkey.com/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=1927&g2_serialNumber=1[/img]

This was between Jacksonville, NC and Charlotte. With darkness coming early now, the sun is down just after 6pm. I’m not sure what town is down there but we were just on the NC/SC border heading west bound back to Charlotte.
[img]http://www.thegearmonkey.com/gallery/main.php?g2_view=core.DownloadItem&g2_itemId=1929&g2_serialNumber=1[/img]

Yesterday we spent most of our day ferrying around college Football Fans. Seminoles and Hokies on the Charlotte to Roanoke, VA flight and Gators and Game Cocks heading to Columbia, SC.

In between those two flights we did a trip out to Jacksonville, NC. We got out there early so we had a good 45 minutes to sit and watch the sun set over the Carolina piedmont. Very nice. ASA now flies in there from Atlanta and they were right behind us on the arrival. They loaded up and left right in front of us. OAJ is an uncontrolled airport so to depart you need to call up Wilmington and request a release. They can only have one airplane depart at a time so we sat and waited while ASA took off and left the area. In the mean time another on of our flights had come off the ground at Wilmington, and Charlotte being Charlotte needed about 30 miles between us and them.

So we sat on the ground in Jacksonville for 20 minutes waiting to be let go. The runway lighting (it was now VERY dark out) is turned on by clicking your mic 5 times on the local frequency. After 15 minutes of no clicks it will turn off again. While we were sitting and waiting 15 minutes went by from when ASA had turned on the lights to taxi out and all the airport lights turned off. The captain quickly clicked his mic 5 times and everything came back on. Of course we really didn’t need the lights as we were just sitting there waiting for a release time still. He made some comment about all the electricity he was wasting by turning on the lights and I joked about Al Gore getting an ulcer. He laughed and then said “yep, somewhere a cute little baby polar bear is drowning.”

It was one of those things that is really terrible but incredibly funny at the same time. Maybe it’s just that it had been a long day but I couldn’t stop laughing. For the rest of the leg over to Charlotte I saw every light we flew over in terms of swimming polar bears.

I had one of those “the world is small” experiences yesterday.

We were finishing up the last day of a 3 day trip with just two legs on the last day. We blasted off out of Chattanooga after waiting for about 4 airplanes to land and just beating out a flight of 5 Air Guard helicopters into a rather turbulent sky. Climbing though 10,000 over the Blue Ridge Mountains the ride smoothed out and remained so until we descended back into a darking world just south of DC. 20 miles to the south we descended through 10,000 again and joined the 185 radial off the DCA VOR and headed up the Potomac River.

I was flying and through about 6000 feet the surface winds of almost 25 knots started making themselves known. The airport came into sight through the murk and they cleared us for the visual approach to Runway One. About 5 miles out Potomac Approach handed us off to tower who at first ignored us (he was busy trying to pump out departures up the River) and then finally cleared us to circle to 33 where we were cleared to land. Circling to Runway 33 is one of the few really fun approaches that we have on the East Coast. Depending on how tight you keep it, it can involved up to 45 degrees of bank all the way down to almost 200 feet above the river before kicking it straight and touching down on a rather short 5000 foot runway that ends against a blast fence and a major road.

I managed to keep it together pretty well despite the winds and touched down just over the 1000 foot markers. Some quick brake application and reverse thrust had us stopped well before the end. From there the captain took it and taxied us to our parking spot. A bus was actually waiting for our passengers and after a few minutes it was just the three of us (CA, FO and FA) and the airplane. Another DAY based FO wandered up and put his bags on board as his crew was taking our plane down to Greenville, SC for the night and we were taking their plane back to Dayton.

We had almost 2 hours (as did the other crew) so we dragged out bags (our new plane was parked all the way at the opposite end of the ramp so we just took our bags with us) across a wind swept ramp, around a Colgan SAAB and inside to get some dinner. I stashed my bag in the crew room downstairs and then with my captain and the other FO headed upstairs to get some dead cow.

Walking to 5 Guys Burgers I heard my name being called and turned around to see an FO in a Colgan uniform reaching out to shake my hand and asking how I was. Now, I do ok with faces, but I really had no idea. He must of saw my puzzled face and said his name was Joe and he knew me from ATP in Jacksonville, FL. I still had no idea but I just played along and smiled and nodded and asked how he was doing and how Colgan was. Thankfully he wandered away before I could make too much of a fool of my self.

We got in line at 5 Guys and there was a Colgan Captain standing in front of me. Seeing as there was just one Colgan plane on the ramp I asked him what his FOs name was and sure enough it was my guy. The last name triggered enough the I recalled (I think) the flight I flew with Joe.

From what I remember we were returning in a Cessna from Montgomery, AL after one of the three big hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004. It was already late September then and I had been working in the main ATP office in Jacksonville for almost a month. I was working on a Saturday afternoon when one of the Dispatchers asked if I wanted to evac a plane that afternoon. I jumped on the chance to actually fly for a bit (as I was mostly just answering the phone in the main office) and was packed and out at Craig Field several hours later where I met the student I would be flying with. It wasn’t this guy. I think his name was Chris. We were one of the last planes to depart CRG as the first line of weather was just 50 miles to the south when we left. From what I recall Chris (who was from Canada) had just soloed two days before. I didn’t have high expectations for him, but he did a great job of taking off into a solid overcast and navigating on instruments until we were almost halfway to MGM.

I don’t remember too much of MGM for 3 days. We stayed at some rundown hotel, with a bunch of other instructor/student pairs who had flown planes out of Florida. Some of my friends from Stuart were there so that was cool. On the second day I took a student over to Atlanta to burn some Cessna time. Then on the 3rd day the weather was good enough we could head back to Florida. This is where I *think* I flew with Joe. We we left about 20 minutes before another Cessna that was returning to CRG flown by a student and an instructor who I really didn’t know too well but a year later would be my house mate in Dayton. The plan was to head towards Pensacola for a fuel stop and to check and see how much the weather had moved out before heading straight east for CRG. However once air born and heading South we had almost 100 knots of tail wind (from the backside of the hurricane rotation) so we decided to head directly for CRG. The winds were gusting to 30 or so but mostly down the runway and Joe managed a pretty good landing, although he forgot to keep the wind correction in once we were on the ground and we almost blew off the side of the runway. My first Oh Crap moment as an instructor.

So anyhow, I think that this Colgan FO who some how recognized me from more then 3 years ago was the guy I flew with back into CRG. The interesting thing is meeting him and thinking back to that flight got me thinking about that whole trip and my time spend in Jacksonville that Fall. I can’t say I miss it too much, but it wasn’t too bad of a time. Good people. That’s for sure. Every once in a while I hear a voice from my past on the radio using a Regional Airline call sign and I think, eh, maybe that is them. And then I wonder, if I actually saw them in person, would I even recognize them? This guy recognized me so I guess maybe so.

I woke up this morning at 5am after getting in to the hotel at midnight. In my still sleeping mind I was trying to figure out why it was so bright in my room. Was the sun coming up already? I had to think through daylight savings and should it be getting light later or earlier. And even though I was still mostly asleep I realized it should in fact NOT be getting light earlier.

Turns out somebody parked right outside me window had turned on their headlights and was just sitting there, probably letting their car warm up in the cold.

Anyhow, I’m posting this from my Treo while sitting in an IHOP waiting for my breakfast. Ah, technology.