Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Notes & Observations

- Jaime Lee Curtiss was on our flight on Saturday. Apparently the ladies next to her went gaga and kept telling her what big fans they were. And these women were in their 60s, you'd think they would act less teenybopperish.

- I was awarded my first non-reserve line yesterday! It's a surprisingly good line, with labor day weekend off and some good trips. Goodbye, reserve! Well, assuming I don't get it again next month.

- My brother Jon is going back to Iraq. He's been back from his yearlong stint since April, but decided to volunteer for another year. I have mixed emotions on that one.

- The airplane I fly is very fun when empty. Our last leg today was a reposition from SEA to PDX. It took 22 minutes from takeoff to landing.

- Yesterday kinda sucked. We waited for over 3 hrs for our plane to arrive from SEA. Apparently the problem was that the 34L and 34R glidepaths were out of service for maintenance at the same time 800 RVR fog showed up. Whoops. Then when we got into Seattle, we had a plane swap...and waited 1.5 hrs for our plane to show up before we could take off for Edmonton. We got there after 2am. Egh.

- We departed YEG an hour late today, and thanks to the wonderful rampers at GEG and BOI, were on time by our 6th leg...only to get a plane swap in SEA, to a plane running 45 mins late.

- There is nothing better than a good single-malt scotch after 2 frustrating days!

3 comments:

Sam Weigel said...

Heh. I can totally see the media digging up that statement if something should ever happen to me on a repo flight, God forbid. So for posterity's sake, let me clarify:

I do not goof around on empty legs. I don't exceed aircraft or company limitations. I don't yank-n-bank. I don't do stupid things like intentionally setting off the stick shaker. If the chief pilot was hanging out in my jumpseat on a repo leg, I don't think he'd see anything that'd upset him.

The reason that I say the Q400 is a very fun plane to fly when empty is because when you put 10000 horsepower on 43000 lbs of airplane, it's a freaking monster. The acceleration and climb rate is staggering. You can climb out at barber pole and still be climbing at 2000 fpm. The plane also handles nicer, and you can land in rather short distances. So basically you do everything the same as with pax on board...the resulting performance is just a lot more eye-popping.

Lost Av8r said...

I see the Q400 in YVR every so often. Neat looking plane. I'm a huge Dash 8 fan. When I got into my career, all i wanted was to live in Kelowna and fly the Dash for Canadian Regional Airlines. I'm still hoping I get to fly it one day.

Anonymous said...

Qantas are getting Q400's soon. They look very long in the photos but that is only because I am used to the 100's =)