A flight odyssey

As you may have gathered, I’m currently on vacation until January 5 and looking forward to it to be honest.

RTH starts his vacation a day later and so asked me “what are your plans for Friday then?”

My careless “whatever the hell I feel like!” was replaced by a different plan upon receiving an email from D. Basically he was taking his plane up for a flight and wanted to know if I wished to tag along.

I thought about it for all of three nanoseconds before replying in the affirmative!

D is working towards his instrument rating at the moment; he’s passed the written and is chugging away at the flight test standards. Something which leaves me slightly in awe, I’m still fumbling my way around the sky VFR. D talks of circling approaches, IFR holds and procedure turns and I nod sagely and pretend I understand every word.

D had a few things he wanted to get done this flight, including some monitoring of his EGT’s. Some tasks that would involve a bit of “head in the cockpit” time. I was more than happy to act as a spare pair of eyeballs while he did what he needed.

We did the “engineering” stuff, concluded that the autopilot was behaving as it should and headed up to Muskoka to practice some instrument approaches, again something the subtleties of which escape me at the moment.

Either way I had a spare few moments to take stock of my surroundings. It’s a lot snowier up there and the lakes are slowly starting to freeze over, smaller ones totally frozen and larger ones starting to go at the edges.

It’s pretty.

Oh so very pretty up there.

Unbelievably beautiful in fact.

I can’t believe I get to do this for fun!

Even after all my flight hours, all my training, all the “flinging it around” airwork, I still need a reality check sometimes.

It is such a privilege to be able to do this.

Oh yeah you might be wondering about the “odyssey” part of the title. As D filled in the paperwork for the flight, he noted that we’d just ticked over to 2001 hours exactly on the plane.