Gone over to the Dark Side part 1.

Probably to the disgust to the purists out there, I’ve gone over to the dark side and invested in an IPad and a subscription to Foreflight.

I held out for a while before succumbing to the inevitable.

It was quite noticeable that EVERYONE at the flying club I joined possessed the above device. The first “flyout” I turned up to, I was the only one there fussing around with paper charts. It was kind of embarrassing actually.

To be honest I’ve always been a little skeptical about the “GPS generation” and “followers of the magenta line” but a couple of things changed my mind.

A little bit

I’m still a little skeptical in places.

I am still a little bit unconvinced that you can build up good “big picture” situational awareness solely using Foreflight. There are ways around that though.

I will admit that I could see straight away by playing with S’s Ipad and Foreflight subscription, that it was a powerful piece of software. In fact you may find many commercial operators using it as their flight planning and navigational software.

The main issue for me was that I didn’t have an Ipad to run it one. I’ve nothing against Apple and IOs. I had an Iphone for a long while, during the time when it was the best phone on the market. And then it wasn’t, so I switched to Android, as did RTH.

I’m not really a fanboy of either OS. I’ve got the tool that does the job I want it to at this moment. I can see the pros and cons of each system.

I also understand why Foreflight is only on iOs. It needs to be rated against critical failure. 100% guaranteed to work. You need it to be stable and I will admit that while my IPhone never crashed, my Android one, not so stable.

So while the subscription cost for Foreflight isn’t that outrageous (no more than an annual subscription to the blue brick that is the CFS). The Ipad is a significant outlay, moneywise.

I could justify one, not the other.

Then RTH had a brilliant idea. I had like a gazillion Aeroplan points. And, as I had discovered, they are pretty useless for booking flights, upgrades or anything else that you would think that you could use flight reward points for.

But you can trade them in for goods. I had enough for an Ipad2 Air and RTH could get enough ITunes cards to pay for Foreflight!

The only “cash” I needed to spend was on a GPS receiver. I went with the sturdy “Bad Elf” because I’d already seen that you can just turn it on, fling it in your flight bag and forget about it, with no real loss of accuracy”

So now I’m officially “tooled up” and ready to go over to the Dark Side of navigating by following the little dot.

Another post and I’ll tell you how it all works in practice.

I’ll end this post with an apology. My Mom has been complaining about the lack of blog posts and now I’ve written one that she won’t have the foggiest idea what it’s about.

Here’s the Mom version……..

…….I have a new computer thingy like the one you play Candy Crush on, only mine has maps and flying stuff on it.

Time flies and so do I!

It has been six whole months since I qualified as a pilot.

I’ve been doing some flying, not as much as I’d lie (curse you winter weather!)

But either way, if you are in the Toronto area and you look up to see a Cessna.

It could possibly be me flying it.

Be afraid people, be very afraid!

Seems an appropriate day

   

For explaining to our communications department why this is not an acceptable use of flags.

Uh huh

NO.

Happy St George’s day to all you expats out there.

Blessed are the cheesemakers

It may not come as a surprise to you that I’m highly opinionated. On most things really.

Anyways I’ve actually been using my powers for good, not evil. Well good for me at least, because they are earning me money!

Two main ways at the moment.

The first is earning me trivial amounts and probably costing me a part of my soul in the process but whatever!

I’m signed up for Google Survey, it sends me random surveys at random times and I click a few buttons and earn a few cents on my Google Play account. I have over 10 bucks now.  Deep in my heart I know I’m just a sell out and am feeding the evil Google overlord with more and more marketable data mined fodder but apparently I really am that easy to buy.

Seriously what Google already knows about me is quite frightening and probably going to be the subject of another blog post.

The other, more lucrative way, is by taking part in paid focus groups.

Somehow, I’ve ended up on the participant list of a company who provides fodder for whatever company is trying out its latest product/ad or whatever and when I fit the demographic they are trying to fill. I get a call.

I’ve done three of these now. They can be fun and they pay a reasonable amount, anywhere between $50 to $75 an hour.

The general spiel is that you are thrown with a bunch of not-quite-random strangers (the fun bit is trying to figure out what you all have in common), you sit in a room. Whatever you say / do is videoed and / or audio recorded and there is usually a suspicious looking mirror somewhere as well.

The moderator leads discussions on various ideas, you may be given printed material to look at, your opinions are sought, your reactions to various things analysed. It is generally pretty painless.

I’m hoping to get a few more phone calls now that I think I’ve built up a bit of a relationship with the recruiters, that I’ve proved myself reliable and willing to exercise some degree of flexibility in my answers to the screening questions for each survey*

I’ve given feedback on Smartpilot.ca before it went live (I still stand by my original comments, they haven’t been acted on), I’ve told a bank just how crap Aeroplan reward points are and yesterday I got to comment on cheese.

More specifically a cheese companies marketing campaign direction thingy (I honestly don’t know what you’d call it, they weren’t adverts per se…)

This was probably the most fun one I’ve done to date. Helped massively by the fact that we were quite a fun group, laughing and joking with each other before we’d even introduced ourselves. We may have been spurring each other on to pull faces at the nameless minions behind the mirror and so forth.

So now I find myself with $120 in cash and I’m wondering what to spend it on. It could pretty much pay for the half hour or so of circuit bashing I need in order to iron out my landing issues or I could buy the new kneeboard I’ve been eyeing up.

I need a new one because I have “gone over to the darkside” and invested in an Ipad and a Foreflight subscription to go with it.

Also more about that in another post.

Oh yes and they gave us cheese yesterday too, I’m betting that I’m not in the minority when I tell you that after spending two hours drooling over pictures of cheese last night, the first thing I did when I came home was to go hunting for some crackers in order to liberate the rather ripe brie I had waiting for me in the fridge.

*recruiters are usually looking for a very specifically defined demographic for each group. You can sometimes assist them by tailoring your answers to the rigidly defined questions they have to ask. They key is having a good memory because you get asked a variation on these questions about three times during the process, you need to remember what you’ve said. They will eliminate you from the group if they think you don’t meet the requirements.

Two office workers, both alike in (lack of) dignity.

K and I are having a rocking Friday afternoon. We may be separated by geography and on opposite sides of the downtown core but we are both rocking out an awesome 80s playlist on our headphones.

It’s a tough call as to which of us is going to bust out the moves from “Flashdance” first!

My apologies in advance to the guy I share an office with.

And to RTH because I realise that I've just spammed our joint Googleplay account library with cheesy 80 songs!

Ready for launch….I mean take off

I’m faced with winds at 190 degrees and two choices of runway 24 or 26. All things being equal most people would probably take 24, to minimise the crosswind, right?

Well…..maybe.

The truth is all things aren’t equal at CYTZ. 24 and 26 share a common threshold for sure but 24 is shorter (not a big problem), has a great big berm at the end (more disconcerting than problematic) and has a surface that is in pretty poor condition compared to the rest of the airport, probably because it’s only us little planes that use it.

ATC enquired as to whether I’d accept 24. I said “Affirmative” like the good little pilot that I am, because there really isn’t an operational or safety reason that I can’t take it.

I dutifully warned my passenger that the surface was about to become akin to a cattle grid. She looked at me funny because I don’t think they call them that in Canada.

If anyone cares to enlighten me as to the Canuck phraseology, I’m talking about one of these.

Muttering “hold on to your boobs” as we rattle thuddunk, thunddunk down the runway. I attempt to keep us straight.

I’m doing a pretty reasonable job, even if I do say so myself. Until, with perfect timing, the wheels hit a particularly troublesome bump at the same time the ASI hits a perfect 55 knots.

Rotation speed.

Defined by our good friends of the Wikipedia as The speed at which the aircraft's nose wheel leaves the ground.

Actually what happened is that we didn’t so much “rotate” as “launch” She hit the bump and up she went, at slightly too high an angle for either of our liking really.

I kept my mouth shut, as not to alarm my passenger. JES felt no such duty and promptly whined a way a la stall horn.

I gently eased the nose down and pretended that’s the way it always goes!

It wasn’t me

SAR has had a bit of a boo-boo.

Photos below show one wing, the damage is  roughly symmetrical on both

the other wing is damaged in the same way

wing tip in pieces

I am making no comment on how the accident occurred as I wasn’t there, the associated report is shown below

It is my belief that the antenna in question can be located here if you zoom in. (please note I don't think the tracks shown in the grass on the google image are related to this incident)

It makes me sad to see SAR in this state, she is my second favourite plane after JES, especially once she lost her nose up , rocket tendencies!