A Good Day at the Office

It was a pretty easy day of flying yesterday. I arrived at work around 0430 to depart at 0530. The great weather along the route meant that we didn't have to do much in the way of IFR approaches. We went through Williams Lake and Prince George in the dark, however, with little around either airports in the way of terrain, VFR approaches were pretty straight forward. On arrival into Kemess the freshly broken daylight revealed just a thin scattered layer of cloud. Rather then join our GPS approach, we simply descended through a hole in the cloud layer closer to the strip. From Kemess onto Smithers was sky clear, or severe VMC.

We broke out through 6500' coming into Terrace, just after we joined the ILS around Kitimat. On the Terrace to Vancouver leg, the longest leg of the day at over an hour and a half in the air, the captain and I had a pretty good discussion on economics. The time flew by (no pun intended) so quickly that I hadn't even finished up the paperwork before we started down for Vancouver (usually the paper work is done 10 minutes after we level off). The only ice we ran into was on the Keinn four arrival into Vancouver. As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to run into ice, the descent into Vancouver is the place to do it. The aircraft is going fast, so the ice comes off the boots easier. With gravity on your side in the descent, any performance lost with ice accumulating and the engine anti-ice (ice vanes, inertial seperators, whatever you want to call em) on is hardly noticable. Finally, if any ice does manage to stick around, you're going to lose it as you descend into the warm air the surrounds the airport anyways. Following some vectors from the approach guys, YVR came into site just as we caught the glideslope onto the ILS for 08L. The kind people in the Vancouver tower then gave us the sidestep onto 08R, saving us from having to taxi around the main terminal to the south side of the airport. Duty day finished at 2100.

'Thunderbird 928, C-GCMT, infront of the NT Air hanger in Prince George

A Westjet 737-700 just starting up to depart Prince George

Enroute from Kemess to Smithers, 17000'

The good old KLN90. The GPS is a great tool, it's amazing what it has done for aviation, and things are still progressing

Arrived into Smithers at 0930 local. Our 1900C with Hudson Bay Mountain in the background. Time for breakfast