I’ve got a solid line. Apparently I figured out how to work PBS (our new, preferential bidding system, because it did a pretty decent job. The most important thing was that I get the 14-17th off to go to Sydney’s graduation, and I got that. In addition, I got a couple other saturdays off. I only have 4-day trips, which was what I wanted. If I had 1 or 2-day trips, I’d have to drive to the airport way too often. A rough sketch of the overnights is on my google calendar (DEN means I’m working, but I’m done when…
I finished up IOE with 21 hours (the FAA minimum required for a turbo-prop is 20 hours) on Friday. I wasn’t sure what my schedule would be like, but I knew that weekends off in the future were somewhat unlikely. Neal was free Friday evening, so I cooked elk bolognese with the remainder of the elk that Nathan gave us and we had a fine dinner. I managed to stay up pretty late considering that I’d gotten up at 4am that morning and flown in from Casper, WY. Crew tracking called that night to tell me that I would be…
I’m getting a little better at flying the Dash. Fortunately, I’m nowhere near as bad as I was when I first started flying the jet. Durango is shaping up to be another excellent overnight. It looks like we stay right downtown in walking distance of all kinds of things, including a brewery. Unfortunately, we got in too late tonight for me to go exploring, and we leave pretty early in the morning. But I’m sure I’ll be back with a decent overnight eventually. The flight in tonight was interesting in that the weather was being reported as high enough that…
I just now discovered a nifty little Google Maps tool that lets you make maps. It’s probably been around forever, but I just now noticed it. So I made a map of all the destinations that we currently go to in the Dash 8 out of Denver. The blue ones are overnights, the green ones are cities we go to, but don’t overnight at.
I was supposed to start IOE on Monday, but that didn’t happen. I did manage to start on Tuesday. My IOE instructor was exactly the sort of guy you want teaching IOE—he’s the most senior guy on the airplane, been with the company for years, very knowledgeable, by-the-book, and patient. He had me fly the very first leg. Takeoff wasn’t terribly smooth, but I got the hang of it pretty quickly. The plane feels a lot like flying a very heavy Cessna 182. It’s twitchy in pitch, but very slow to respond in roll. I’d brought my leather jacket with…