Long haul...ish

CYOW-CYWG- CYYC, this is the first leg westbound at FL200. We are down low as the winds are going to be picking up in a few hundred miles so I am getting the best true airspeed to make headway before mother nature kicks us in the face with wind. Here we are flying over Sudbury, Ontario. At first glance it looks like the moon but it is just a rocky outcrop of the Canadian shield. The open pit mines are for Nickel as Inco has a huuge operation here and I believe Falconbridge does also, but I am sure they are all part of the same thing at one level.

The big stack's are puking out smoke to the south. Apparently they had to make the stack's higher because having them too low cause the trees in the Sudbury area to die from acid rain. Apparently dilution is the solution to the pollution :) Its the same concept as NIMBY for airports, dumps and other unwanted sources of pollution. We all want jobs but can you pump that sulfur dioxide elsewhere to kill everyone's trees and not just ours :) Necessary evil if you want luxuries like car's, computers, and millions of other things made from nickel.

Almost there ! At our current pace another 2 hours to go ! We are grounding 175 knots and its a good thing we have full fuel and a close alternate. Because we went to low our fuel burn is up but then our time is down by about 30 minutes if we had chosen FL260. It almost works out fuel wise but if you factor in the cost of burning a few more pounds of gas or taking .5 hours off the airframe time then extra 150 bucks in gas is cheaper.

90 knots off the schnoz. It's nice to have an air data computer page such as this to look at while you are wondering why you are going so slow. I can't wait to see what the new avionics package has in store for the 2008 PC12's coming out. 5 screens of geek squad excitement. The 15 percent extra horsepower will be nice to. In the next post I will talk about climbing up to FL270 fulling loaded and mushing for the first hour to gain the last 10 kts of true airspeed. It seems as if my days of semi-retirement are over lately. Off to Boston, followed by Key Largo tommorow. Going to go back to ISO 80 on my camera as the Auto ISO makes the images to "noisy". I can't wait to get a DSLR camera and I can see the Nikon D80 on the horizon. Too bad Visa,Amex, student loans and my line of credit keep blocking my view of it :) Happy trails.