Who the hell is flying the plane ?

Here is a shot of a Sun Dog (parhelion)
We were just about to go under this layer of cloud when we could see it so here is the best I could do. I tried to zoom in a bit as to not get the windshield heater elements but in order to get the whole thing in one shot I had to. Flying in the Arctic you would see this quite a bit and also on the ground because of ice crystals in the air. In the Arctic ice crystals can be so thick to actually obscure visibility and I have seen it down to 1/4 mile in ice crystals. The sky can be clear and blue but visibility reduced.


Now here is the shot I titled the post after. You can see the other half of the Sun Dog and well I couldn't be the only one trying to get a picture of it so here auto flies the airplane as we busily snap shots before we get under the cloud layer ahead.


A welcome sight after just riding through some bumps in cloud on our short flight to Toronto. Clear skies ahead....little did I know I would in about 25 minutes on landing skid a tire and have to get it replaced. These shots help to make up for how crappy I felt having to call maintenance to drive to the airport and change a tire.


Now if you can see the streamers on the water you can guess that it was a suppper windy day. The wind was coming from 280 degrees at 30 gusting to 40 kts (about 70kms/hr). Right after this shot (co-pilot credit) the bumps became pretty bad. Porter was following us in but we had to slow down for the bumps and were grounding around 140 kts. At least there was no smog :)