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Headin’ West – Day Four

Woke up and had a look at the weather only to find something rather annoying. There was a band of Bad weather (mostly low clouds) between my destination and me. It was forecasted to be clear at the photo site but I’d still need to get there. Figuring that I should at least attempt to get close so that I would be nearer to the site, I prepared the plane and was airborne shortly after. As I continued in the flight I found that the weather was exceptionally clear and…read more

Headin’ West – Day Three

Author Note: Sadly I lost all of the pictures I took during this mission so the following posts will sadly not be accompanied with many pictures if any. Additionally these post were originally written several months back. I am only getting to post them now. Woke up this morning ready to head to north east Iowa (sort of) and found nothing but storms … storms everywhere. Seeing that I wouldn’t be able to do anything over there I realized I would be stuck until tomorrow. By this point after two…read more

Headin’ West – Day Two

Author Note: Sadly I lost all of the pictures I took during this mission so the following posts will sadly not be accompanied with many pictures if any. Additionally these post were originally written several months back. I am only getting to post them now. Woke up bright and early and prepared to do another long day of flying. To be honest I’m not much of a coffee person (never really could stand the taste … love the smell though) but this morning was definitely a coffee morning. My host…read more

Headin’ West – Day One

Author Note: Sadly I lost all of the pictures I took during this mission so the following posts will sadly not be accompanied with many pictures if any. This post was also written a while ago and I’m only just getting to post it now. For some time now our boss had spoken about the prospect of having some clients out in the Nebraska area. We were pretty excited, as neither Shane nor myself have flown out in that area before. However as with many things, life got fairly busy…read more

Hey I can see Canada from here … No wait … That’s Michigan

For some reason one of our more anticipated routes had been eluding us for weeks. It was one of the longer ones and would take us all the way up into central Wisconsin. However it seemed as though the weather was conspiring against us in every way possible. It would either be really bad here and we couldn’t leave (our aircraft are only legal to operate under Visual Flight Rules or VFR so we can’t go into clouds or low visibility conditions. That aside taking pictures from inside of a…read more

Fly ALL the routes …

(Note: Due to various things coming up and this post being delayed, this post refers to events occurring on May 24,2013) It’s become a routine now where we sit on the ground for a few days due to terrible weather, and then fly the living daylights out of the one or two days that we have great weather. Today was no different. We’d been kept on the ground by several days of thunderstorms and low ceilings and were now finally given one great day. I think “great” might even be…read more

Of Nuts and Bolts …

Video Note: Video of me doing the takeoff on runway 19 towards the wires. The turn is to avoid the wires until you clear them. Video courtesy of Shane Cassell. By now we’d gotten pretty used to the drill. Arrive at the airport, pick up the equipment, preflight the plane and the equipment, sign off with the boss, and then take off. The only difference today was that the boss noticed a fuel stain inside the cowling (He keeps this thing immaculately clean … so you notice if there is…read more

Storm Runners …

Early Wednesday morning, filled with excitement, we prepared to head off on our first non-training survey route. After our usual commute to the airfield, we got started on our pre-flight of the plane and the equipment. At random we would get these showers of rain that were very light and would last anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds. Seeing that storms weren’t expected to start building till late afternoon we thought nothing of it and continued our preparations. As we were finishing up I suddenly heard the faint rumble of…read more

Master Map Maker …

Another part of our job is to put together the routes that we’ll be flying. To get an idea of what that’s like just image someone threw about 20 Jigsaw puzzle pieces randomly on a map and told you to find the best route to connect all of them. The fields are spread across Indiana and Illinois and we generally pick a path that would allow us to fly over each of them in a specific direction (Either East/West or North/South) in the shortest, most efficient way. A lot of the fields…read more

Week One: Weird Weather and Lot’s of Sleep

Posted by juerujin in ACRE, Stuff and Things

*Title image by Cyclonediesel at www.motortopia.com* And thus ends my first week out of Berrien Springs and the great state of Michigan. First off, the weather here in West Indiana/East Illinois is not quite what I’m used to. I’ve been here a week and it hasn’t warmed up quite past 75. In fact today it stayed a cool 45 degrees … it’s as if I stepped back a month or two into March. Not complaining though, it’s not snowing (yet) and it isn’t 90 degrees (yet). On the work side things have been…read more