Fly With Blake | Fly With Blake |
|
Days since beginning: 1067
You can be notified of when this site is updated!
Taxiing on Bravo to 33Date: 18/05/2006
At: Dec 05 2008 00:00Z
|
Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - 08:48:46 ET
The awesome ATC guys and gals at Buttonville moved into their new tower this morning. Hope you like your new digs! The new tower brings frequency coupling to Ground and Tower. With the old tower, you would only hear one side of the conversation (the controllers) when one controller was working ground and tower. This meant that you might be trying to call them up on ground when they were talking on tower. Usually this results in a "aircraft calling ground, say again". Now you will be able to hear the pilot side of the tower conversation on the ground frequency and vise versa. I wonder what other new tools they have in the new tower. I'm also curious to know why they picked a Tuesday to move in. Maybe it's the airports' slowest day? I highly doubt that I will be able to do my supervisory ride tomorrow. There is a cold front that is slowly making its way east that will bring thunderstorms. The temperature today is supposed to reach a high of 33°C with ~65% relative humidity. If that's not a recipe for severe t-storms, then I don't know what is (Forecasters are saying 80% chance of thunderstorms tomorrow afternoon). So I got my log book all sorted out and here are the numbers to date: Total Time: 109.2 hrs. I totally thought that my PIC time was a lot higher. I have a mid-term on Instruments and Avionics tonight, so I've been studying the inner workings of the "six pack", VORs, NDBs, and the ILS. We have to describe in detail how these instruments work and how they work with their respective navaid. I always love learning about how things work ;) Last flight I took the "long way" to the practice area. By long way, I mean via Downtown. I took some quick snaps as I headed around the CN Tower across the shore, up over the Zoo, and into the Claremont training area. I will be posting my GPS track later. The flight was bumpy. The winds at Buttonville were around 320°, while the winds at City Centre were 180°. Thats ~180° wind direction change in less than 10 miles. Not to mention the fact that a lot of the downtown buildings were adding to the mechanical turbulence. Coming back to the airport, winds were 6 knots gusting 16. With a 10 knot gust factor, changing my approach speed to 70 knots and 20° of flaps was in order. The clouds also rolled in, but (and and correct me if I'm wrong) they looked pretty lenticular to me. Probably due to all the turbulence. The photo doesn't do it justice. Comments (0) | Permalink | Category: Pre Training
Thursday, June 21, 2007 - 14:21:30 ET
My PPL Exam is set for July 2nd. I was supposed to do a supervisory ride today, except that was canceled due to weather (blasted TCUs and winds gusting to 25). I'm ready as I will ever be, and I'm hoping I can get my super done before July 2nd. I have a mid-term exam today for Personnel Management. Turns out I originally wrote it down on the calendar for next week. I only found out on Tuesday that it's this week. Whoops! I took a look at my log book, the last entry is December 16th, 2006. I really need to get that updated. I'm going to head to the airport later today to copy my entries from my PTR (which legally has to stay at the flight school) into my fancy dancy excel spreadsheet. I suspect I have around 110 hours. The weather is supposed to be great the next five days. Let's hope it stays that way until my PPL exam. Today is the first day of Summer which means that starting tomorrow, the days get shorter. Great if you are trying to get your Night rating (no more flights at 10pm), but bad if you're working on your PPL. Comments (1) | Permalink | Category: Training
Monday, June 18, 2007 - 11:32:38 ET
Canada's No-Fly List went live today. I know nothing about it as i'm still getting up to speed about it. However, CBC (the company I work for during my day job) has some interesting information about it: Critics raise alarms over Canada's no-fly list The Current, a CBC Radio One program, has a 20 min or so debate about the no-fly list. It is only available in Real Media format. For more information, visit the Passenger Protect website. Comments (0) | Permalink | Category: Interesting Things
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 - 00:01:47 ET
My latest solo flight was a diversion to Holland Landing Airpark. The plan was to divert from Claremont to CLA4. I had previously been to CLA4 with my FI, but this was the first time solo.  Me, looking all piloty I love this little airport. I haven't actually physically landed there, but have done at least a "low and over". There was nothing exciting about the flight. The weather was great as was the visibility. I did take some snaps which you can see in the gallery. I also did bring along my GPS unit to record the flight. You can download the Google Earth KMZ if you would like to see the details. I did a simulated precautionary landing at the airport, hence the many circuits before actually doing the low-and-over.  Preston Lake, a VFR reporting point for YKZ The Google Earth imagery in the GTA has been updated recently as well (incidentally by a company that operates right next to Buttonville). So where's the PPL you ask? I'm still waiting for a supervisory ride. All of the class 2+ instructors are busy or cant jive with my schedule. Comments (0) | Permalink | Category: Training
Friday, June 1, 2007 - 10:29:31 ET
Sorry for the lack of posts lately, things have been pretty busy. I've had three flights since my last post. All of them have been just fine tuning some of my weaker exercises as well as squishing any bad habits that crept in. My FI decided to pull the engine to idle at 4000' to do a forced approach. I am proud to say that I made the field. My previous FIs have always done so at 2000' or so. We spent some time in the circuit practicing some performance landings. I keep on putting full flaps in way too early, causing me to add power during the descent. I have a solo booking this weekend where I plan on getting that fine tuned. After adding up my PTR, it turns out I was short 0.3 hours of x-country time. I took care of that as well, and logged 0.5 hours of x-country. Review, review, review. Gotta get my mind back into the flight test mode. It's June and still no PPL. Flying has taken a higher priority in life now that everything else has settled down for me. I've been seeing some people inside the new tower at Buttonville. Word on the street is that they will transition to it in July or August. Comments (0) | Permalink | Category: Training
|
|
New Tower, Thunderstorms, Supervisory 
