Quick trip update for friends and family… The trip to Edmonton was uneventful except for some strong headwinds in flight (almost 40 knots) and gusty surface winds (20 knots gusting 25 was typical for most of the landings from Winnipeg and onward). Jeff Foster, the Cirrus authorized service guy here in Edmonton, turned out to be quite the craftsman like a lot of aviation mechanics. The plane seems to be holding up very nicely after 60 hours on the clock.
The weather forecast for the next couple of days is pretty good so Alex and I should be able to make it to Yellowknife and Inuvik as planned. I booked the last dog-friendly room in Yellowknife a few hours ago and if we can’t find one in Inuvik we’ll just pitch the tent next to the airplane and eat granola bars (if living out of one’s car is a badge of honorable poverty among singer/songwriters what can one say about living out of an airplane?).
Nearly everyone in Canada has asked about Alex. Aside from the dog-curiosity the main difference between a Canadian city and a U.S. city seems to be that the Canadians have groups of working-age men hanging around downtown. Unlike the U.S. the Canadians have a welfare system for men of working age and furthermore that welfare system has no time limits. So a lot of guys choose to let others pick up the slack while they hang with their buddies and drink beer.
Aviation here is fairly similar to the U.S. but slightly less formal and much less busy. One can listen to an MP3 track all the way through on a Center frequency before being interrupted by a radio call from an airliner checking in. At the aviation museum here in Edmonton one of the guides talked about how crazy busy the Edmonton airport was during WWII when they were doing training here and also ferrying 8000 planes over to the Russians. “We had 850 operations [takeoffs and landings] one day during the peak!” he noted. For comparison Logan airport in Boston has 2000 operations per day and Teterboro, NJ, a NYC-area airport for private planes, has nearly 600 per day.
I will be spending the rest of the night spraying permethrin into my clothing to repel the mosquitoes and other nasty bugs up there in the NWT.
Looking forward to see your trip pictures.
On your way to NWT make sure you do some low level flying on Slave lake, lesser slave lake and Alexsandra falls. Alexsandra falls not too far from Alberta/NWT border.
Hi Philip and Alex! It looks like your going into some friendly territory. Just don’t let anyone tie Alex up to one of the dog sleds! He might enjoy it too much and decide not to get on the plane with you when you’re ready to come home!
The website I included above is a link to an interesting article about what your trip might have been like if you’d decided to drive! I’ll also the link here in case it doesn’t work the way I had expected in the web site entry for this comment.
Hope you’re having a great trip!
http://www.openthinkinc.com/tatra/3oceans3.html