Monday, October 30, 2006

Contrails

Company King Air, 1000 Feet above Us

We're 124 Miles north of YXE at FL250, there's a company King Air trailing us by a bout 17 miles. They just called us on the company frequency to let us know that we are leaving contrails in the cold sky. I look at the OAT gauge it's showing -45 degrees Celsius, that's indicated. To get the true outside air temp I minus about 6 degrees to correct for ram air warming. As we fly through the air at 260 knots, the friction created on the temp prob by the passing air actually warms the prob up. The True OAT is -52, cold.

About 5 hours later, we're homeward bound on the last leg of our day. We're the ones trailing company now. They're about 22 miles ahead of us at FL220. We can't see them, but they're leaving behind bright white streaks in the blue sky. Cool, the plane I fly is big enough to leave contrails, it's a neat sight. Soon we hear another company KingAir coming towards us at FL240, we spot them and there are nice contrails behing them also. I'm able to get a good picture of this one. It's been a good day in the office.

It's Cold at 25'000 feet!

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

FL250

Over BC

From FL250 the sun is bright and it's all blue sky above us, the earth is covered by a solid pure white layer of cloud. It's funny to think that far below under all that cloud it is dark, gray and dismal. Hmm, I guess in about 45 minutes we'll be entering it for the 5th and final time today. We've already used up over twelve hours out of our fourteen hour duty day, I'm pretty sure dispatch won't have anything for those last two hours. Hopefully not anyways. I was only suppose to have two short hops of 45 minutes today, but 9 hours of flight and 3 provinces later here I am. Floating back home, wondering if this time I'm actually finished. O-well, the joys of charter work.

Level at FL250
actual OAT (Outside Air Temp) is -36
IAS is 180 kts
TAS is 259 kts
GS is 240 kts
181 miles W of CYXE
108 miles E of CYYC
1082 miles N of KLAX
1661 miles W of KJFK

Okay I'm done playing with the GPS...

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Medivac

The sun is setting on the western horizon as we settle at 16'000 feet for the hour and 20 minute flight to Cowtown. We're staying low today as we're conducting a medivac, we can keep our cabin altitude at about 2800 feet at this height which provides a comfortable ride for our not so well passenger. The patient we're giving a ride to today looks in fairly rough shape with IV tubes and other metal contraptions sticking out of her. It made for interesting loading as you had to be very careful to not bump any of them.

It's actually my first medivac, as well as my captains first. So that makes this trip cool. It's neat to put the word "medivac" on the end of our call sign which gives us priority over most other flights in the sky. ATC works hard to get us to our destination quickly.

We took off RWY 27 in Toon Town and are given the clearance for RWY28 into Cowtown which provided a very direct and straight flight without more than a 20 degree turn the whole way. On short final to 28 ATC asks us if we'd prefer RWY25 which would put us on a tight 3 mile final but would also put us on the ground nearer to the apron we so desire tonight. We accept the offer and make a solid left turn to intercept final for RWY25, Tower asks us to keep our speed up so an A320 that's on final for 34 can land. Well with only 3 miles to go there's not a lot of room left to keep the speed up, but we do our best and it makes for a smooth and slightly long landing on 25 which gets us quickly across 34 and out of the 320's way. We exit on A and call up Ground control for the short for the short taxi to our apron. After unloading and grabbing a bit of fuel, we are ready to go East, back home at FL230.