Last Friday the Police caught someone shining a laser pointer at a police helicopter: On Friday, August 1, 2014, shortly after midnight, Air2 was in the area of Yonge Street and High Tech Road assisting uniform officers on the ground, who were conducting a traffic stop on an impaired driver. While assisting with the traffic…
Oh, I don’t use paper maps anymore. – Coworker. One of the advantages of flying the USA I guess! A co-worker recommended that I fly out of San Carlos airport (KSQL), so I decided to take a look at the surrounding airspace to get familiar with flying in San Francisco. It’s pretty complicated. So much…
I’ve started blogging again! This time from the west coast of San Francisco, California. I’m in the process of converting my TCCA licence to an FAA license (*nudge* see, American spelling now!). I’ll be blogging about that process when I’m done studying all the new material. In the mean time, the website has a brand…
9:44pm, June 22, 1924. Three minutes before dusk and still no sign of Pilot Russell Maughan. 50,000 people waited at Crissy Field outside of San Francisco for the first ever dawn to dusk transcontinental crossing of the United States. What nobody had known was that thunderstorms and heavy rain had caused poor take off conditions…
Stats Canada released their aircraft movement report last week. Some highlights: There were 5.2 Million take-offs and landings at the top 93 airports. The peak month was in July, 2012. Toronto Pearson (CYYZ) was number one at 435,592 movements. Buttonville (CYKZ) pushed up two spots last year from 11th to 9th with 138,946 movements. Of…
It was Sunday afternoon when I decided to see if there was a plane available at 6pm. I called up the airport, and indeed there was! So far, the new booking policy at TAL has paid off. For me specifically, I’ve been able to fly exactly when I wanted to without having to book months…
Yesterday involved a 1.5 hour checkout with a flight instructor at Toronto Airways. It had been 8 months (damn, time flies) since I was last up in the air. Toronto Airways has changed their checkout policy for the better. Checkouts now involve 0.5 hours of ground briefing plus 1 hour in the air. The good…
NavCanada has decided that the Pilot Information Kiosks in various airports across Canada will be decommissioned by the end of August of this year. The main reason? Lack of use. PIK were introduced in the early 2000s when the availability of the Internet, cell phone, and other mobile technologies were limited. Due to the emergence of this…
I just did an update of the GTA Rental rates spreadsheet for aicraft rentals in the Toronto Area. I’ve updated all the prices, as well added the Brantford Flying Club. If you have any recommendations, suggestions, or corrections… please let me know. The minimum annual cost to fly is still out of Brantford (no change…
My annual renewal form came in the mail for my CFS subscription. In it was a letter on a blue piece of paper that read: NEW! NAV CANADA now offers the Canada Air Pilot (CAP), Reistricted Canada Air Pilot (RCAP) and Canada Water Aerodrome Supplement (CWAS) in electronic PDF download format… Wow! This is great…