Saskatoon, Calgary and Vancouver

This picture turned out much better then I could have hoped. I was driving up Sarcee Trail doing 80 km/h when I took the shot. It was also going around the bend in the road and I got one without a light pole in the shot. This is in Southwest Calgary facing East towards downtown. Not as nice looking this way as the Rockies are to the West. -30 this morning and warmed up to -15 by the afternoon, a really lovely day for flying.

Poor quality but its the best I could do. Coming into Calgary via the Toron 3 arrival. The Rocky Mountains about 65 miles to the west. You can see all the little creek and river beds which have dug themselves through the earth.

In the vicinity of Harrison Hot Springs on the Booth arrival into Vancouver. Only a glimpse of the mountains before we entered into the overcast sky.

Toron 3 arrival again just leaving 13,000 for 10,000. Smooth as silk today and what a great day to do training. No 172's in the circuit and just us at the airport for 2 hours of mayhem :)

One of Jade's company King Air's in Saskatoon getting fuel. We started up shortly after and had to wait for this guy to move. They had plowed all the snow into a big windrow and we couldn't get around them. They graciously scooted out of the way to let us go, thanks guys.

Looking down the pipe of a Lear 40 engine. Its amazing that all that connects the engine producing all that thrust to the airplane is the little engine mount. This bird is fresh from the factory as of one year ago but as in the life of a corporate plane it doesn't look a day old.

River branches just east of Calgary as we fly the Alomo arrival. This is the best scenery the prairies has to offer. Nothing close to mountains but at least neat to look at.

Hard to believe but this is taxiing in Vancouver. They had shutdown 8R to clear it off and also were using it as a taxiway till they got this one cleaned off. Its amazing to see how things grind to halt when something is out of the ordinary.

Now I usually speak well of the dead (airplanes that is:) but this airplane is not so dear to my heart. If you could have 6 letters in a registration this one would be C-FCRAP. It was noisy plane, had fiberglass lined baggage compartments which were only big enough to get in and lay down to stack the bags. There is about 20 or so sitting here and all of them belonged to Canadian Regional. They were all parked shortly after Air Canada took over. I guess even Pepsi doesn't want them to turn them into pop cans :) Also in the cockpit it had old old steam gauges and after sitting jump seat a few times not very much room.


FL270 just south of Banff en-route to Saskatoon. Not much of a wind today (grounding 263 knots) but we are up in the clear so a nice flight. Saskatoon is reporting 1 mile visibility and winds out of the east at 30 kts. They had gotten snow all day and now on the backside of the front the strong winds were blowing it all around. The purple rings just ahead are of Calgary terminal airspace. The aircraft ahead 2100 feet above us just got in trouble for climbing up when he was suppose to be descending. His apparent reasoning was Mountain Wave. Not saying that wasn't the case but he was just above us and we were in the smooth stable air. Plus there was only 10 kts of wind :)