Last Sunday started out innocuously enough at 4:15am for a 6:00am departure from Casper, Wyoming for a leg back to Denver. It was my leg, and the weather over the rockies in the summer is best for flying in the early morning. It was a perfectly calm morning, though the clouds that would form the afternoon thunderstorms were already in evidence. Even the approach into Denver was perfectly smooth, which helped me make one of my best Dash 8 landings yet. The whole approach went perfectly. Right before the wheels touched I was sure it was going to be a…
KDEN 242023Z 01012KT 8SM FC TS SCT060CB BKN090 BKN200 18/13 A2992 RMK FUNNEL CLOUD B21 7 W AO2 FRQ LTGICCG VC W AND N TS VC W AND N MOV NE SHRA VC N AND DSNT W
There’s a short video of my captain flying an approach to runway 33 in Aspen, CO. Note that I just clicked started the camera recording and held it up to the window, but I wasn’t paying attention to the camera for obvious reasons. At one point you can hear, “Caution, Terrain, Terrain!” from the airplane, which is a pretty normal thing going into Aspen on the circle to 33. Click on the photo below to see it. It’s 20MB, and my server is a little slow, so be patient. If you can’t get it to work in the gallery, I…
I just spent the night in the same hotel room for the third time. Most hotels have a few rooms they use just for crew members, so this isn’t terribly surprising. Since we check in and out at odd times (we’ll be leaving at 4pm today), it works better for them that way. And the rooms often have a refrigerator and microwave. This has been a good 4-day trip. I flew us into Casper last night and the runway lights went out right at about 200 feet. My landing lights were shining on the pavement surface by this time, so…
One of the downsides (though maybe some will consider at an upside, so maybe I’ll just refer to it as a side) of flying the Dash is that we’ve only got a few destinations. I haven’t even really managed to visit half of them, but I’ve spent a lot of time in Casper, Wyoming lately. As I showered this morning, I thought that the scars in the bathtub seemed awfully familiar, but I was reasonably sure I hadn’t been in this hotel room before. This was based on the fact that this room has a balcony, and I was sure…