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.
PIC: 25.8 hrs.
Flights: 87
X-Country: 10.4 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.
