This has been a good
week. I started Monday and Tuesday on
AM reserve as scheduled. AM reserve
really isn’t so bad. I get to the airport
at 0430, preflight an airplane, and go to sleep in the La-Z-Boy (or, fly the
La-Z-Boy) for three or four hours. Then
they come in, wake me up and say, “Go home!”
Then I’m technically on call until 1500, but there really is virtually
no chance of getting called and all I have to do is keep my cell phone with
me. It’s kind of neat getting home at
0830 and having worked and been paid for a full day.
Then I flew the rest of the
week, and will be flying a short day (home by noon) on Saturday as well. I did the Lakeview run on Wednesday for 4.6
flight hours, and a new route on Thursday and Friday to Grants Pass via
Medford. It is a UPS run, so I get to
work extra early, taxi over to UPS, and they load me up with boxes. The amount of weight certainly varies. I took off yesterday with 800 pounds and
returned home with 1300. Today I
carried all of 50 pounds to Medford, which can’t be cost effective. Who knows what I’ll come back with? I like this route since I get over 3 hours
and still get home at a reasonable hour at night, as is true with most UPS
runs.
I’m still hoping to bid one
of the “time building” runs for the next bid period which begins in late
March. I will probably pick up AMF 413
to Ontario, which is good for 5.5 hours and 8 takeoffs and landings per day. Whew!
Taking off out of PDX today
I was granted with the most beautiful flight I’ve had since I started
here. There were uniform cloud tops at
6000 feet, and I got to watch the sunrise from above the cloud layer. The sun backlit the clouds for a while and
it was unlike anything most people have ever seen. It reminds me why I switched to this career – it’s all for the
great view.
Most of my flying is IFR
between 7000 and 11000 feet, but yesterday I got to enjoy the fun of flying VFR
with an empty cargo bay from Medford to Grants Pass. Since there is no IFR approach into Grants Pass, I was reminded
of my many hours of search and rescue flying weaving between hills at low
altitude underneath the clouds. It was
a refreshing and enjoyable break from the IFR system. Looking forward to doing it again today!
Next week I have a UPS run
to Tillamook via Astoria all five days.
Some consistency will be nice, but I would rather have a run that yields
more than 2.3 hours a day. Hopefully
Tillamook won’t become a habit. The
positive side is I’ll get home in time to have dinner with my wife every night,
which is kind of a rare thing these days!