Life Begins - On The Road

Howdy. So just before Christmas, I got a call from my new boss, Nick.

“I just had another pilot give notice… Can you be in Rochester on Monday or Tuesday?”

This was on Thursday. Christmas was on Saturday. When I had talked to him the day before, he’d told me to expect a mid-January departure. So much for having a couple weeks to pack and get everything in order! Oh well. I got my last desk shift covered and reserved a ticket on Continental to leave early Tuesday. I feel like this is the first breath I’ve taken since that phone call.

I was training in Rochester, NY from Tuesday till Saturday of last week. I had to learn all about the photo system, not to mention the seemingly endless policies and procedures. I finally left Rochester on New Year’s Day headed for Fort Worth, TX in my modified 1976 Cessna 172. I took off and flew down the coast of Lake Erie to my first stop at Sandusky, Ohio. Along the way, I found that my Nav 2 radio was useless due to some sort of crazy electrical interference. Nav 1 was a bit shaky too, come to think of it. I sort of had to take an average of its indications. Since this flying carpet didn’t come with GPS, the nav radios are all that tell me where I am.

After a bacon cheeseburger and confirmation from the previous pilot of my plane that the nav 1 held true to a localizer course (used to find airports through clouds and low visibility), I blasted off again. The nav 2 radio miraculously revived itself for the second leg of my journey and has been fine ever since. Strange.

Since then, I’ve flown about seven hours in the clouds. I’ve shot 2 approaches to minimums (see the runway 200 feet above and ½ mile away from the threshold). I had to execute a missed approach procedure yesterday at Cape Girardo, Missouri because a rooky ATC controller vectored me inside the final approach fix. I could tell she was training. I could hear the trainer prompting her on what to say. Aargh.

I’m in Harrison, Arkansas right now. I got here last night. There were embedded thunderstorms around Dallas/Ft. Worth today, so here I sit. The down time is much appreciated, but so are the experiences.