A blast from the past

This is a picture of a picture taken in the Saint John, NB airport of a Flying Boxcar. No, not the Shorts 360 I used to fly...ha ha. This was a military airplane used back in the day. Romy used to be a crew member on the flying boxcars when he was in the Airforce. I do know that it is not him standing there because this picture was taken a few years earlier than his boxcar days.

Mont Tremblant from 25,000 feet. Where are the mountains??

A day of thunderstorms and I have to figure out a way to dodge them. Looking at the radar picture below this one, it paints a colourful view of what we are surrounded with. Red = Dead. Green = Go. Black = Clear Blue Sky. How hard is that?

My friendly radar.

I can also super-impose the radar image onto a navigation screen to plot my escape route. See the little airplane drawing at the bottom? That's me!! The trick is to get to the other side with all the parts still attached to the plane.



Without getting too technical, an aircrafts vortices have carved a path through the top of these clouds.



This is the windshield wiper hinge. The post sticking up is called the ice post. Hence, the ice attached to it. We use this post as a gauge to determine how much ice has accumulated on the wings. It even has a special light that we use at night, to illuminate it, so we can see it in all conditions. I have seen a golf ball sized ice accumulation on here before.



Apparently, it can also be used as a place to hang out if you are a grasshopper.



Once we have determined how fast the ice is accumulating and/or how much ice is already on the aircraft then we can turn on our de-ice system consisting of inflatable rubber boots, on the forward edge of the wings, tail and engine air intake, which inflate to shed the ice. In this picture an inflation cycle has been done and as you see not all of the ice is gone but most of it. The best de-ice system is to get out of the icing conditions...period!



Those 2 little specks in the distance are a KC-135 refueling a C-5 Galaxy. How about one big military plane, mid-air refueling an even bigger military airplane. The KC-135's call sign is "Esso."


Irving is a huge oil company in the Maritimes. It's home base is in Saint John, NB. They are constructing new above ground oil storage tanks on the outskirts of Saint John. You know the ones...they paint white...you see them on the way from WL into Kamloops on the right hand side?




Here they are a few months later. One is finished, the second is just about done and they have started on a third. They have made quite a bit of progress, haven't they.



Watch in these next three pictures how the clouds change in the span of about 10 minutes. I thought they looked neat in the first one but they kept on changing shape and getting better.

Saint John, NB airport.

A bit more Winter

For those of you that are now enjoying the end of summer, I would like to take you back to last winter.

We had the opportunity to hit the slopes of Mount Tremblant this year. Known as the Whistler of the East, it is a posh ski resort about 1:30 mins north of Montreal. Unlike Whistlers' windy sea to sky highway, the road to Tremblant is a 4 lane divided freeway, so you can imagine the amount of people that come up here to ski. Even though you pass by 10 ski hills on the way up, Tremblant is still packed. The high speed gondola moves 8 people at a time up the hill so line-ups aren't too bad. I stopped just before the last downward slope to the gondola, to show the remarkable resemblance Tremblant has to a European village nestled in the Alps. The only thing lacking are huge mountains in the background, of course.



Enough of that being on the ground stuff.........Jennilyn described this next photo as a picture from space, looking down on the earth below. Close, but the Dash can't go that high and I hope she doesn't think I am an astronaut. We are in a steep banking turn going towards Les Iles de Madeline and that is sea ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The ocean never freezes solid here but it definitely has a lot of ice in the winter.

The wind blows the ice around so it is constantly changing formations.

Montreal

Montreal gets its fair share of snow I am told. The snow removal crews cannot simply pile it up on the sides of the streets, so they load it all into trucks and move it out of town. In the middle of the city there are two huge holes. I believe they are from some type of mining, back in the day. They have installed dumping zones all around these holes so the snow trucks can back up and dump all of the city's snow into them. It took until late June for all the snow piled in this hole to melt. I have seen another snow dumping site on our approach path into the airport, but this one is above ground and when trucks dump the snow CAT machines push it up into a giant pile. This site seems to be fairly modern having been built on gravel and surrounded by a water collection system. We probably drink the water from there. They use enough salt here I am sure the water has been thoroughly sterilized.


If only I still had my GT snowracer. Maybe my kids need one soon and they will let me borrow it. I'm doin' it. Don't even try and stop me!



A view of Montreal looking West. You can see the Olympic Stadium/Park on the left side of this picture and the desolate looking Botanical Gardens to the right of it.

Lames d'acier

Can anyone guess what is made in this factory in Gaspe? The finished product is all laid out on the right. Hundreds of them! They are not something that is often seen in BC, they are used in a type of "farm" and they help the environment....sort of.

Any Guesses?

A fellow crew member pointed this huge crater out to me the other day. It is over 5 miles wide. That is pretty big in my books. This crater is on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River near Sept Iles. I have seen another crater more than twice this size in diameter and it has been cut in half by the St. Lawrence River. I have tried taking pictures of it but it is quite eroded and doesn't really show up in a photo, but it can definitely be seen from the air.


This is a shot of Quebec City. The old town is located at the bottom of the picture where the red and white Coast Guard vessels are moored. For those of you that have not been to Quebec City, it is a great place to come and visit.


This is a little bit of the coastline of Eastern Quebec approaching Bonaventure Island and Perce Rock. Yesterday, I learned of the significance of Bonaventure Island and the Gannets that inhabit the cliffs. Rocher Perce when translated to English means Pierced Rock and if you look at the links I've provided in this paragraph, you'll see a picture of the natural sea arch that gives the Rock it's name.


Many of you have seen pictures of Perce Rock before on this blog, but we had the opportunity to fly quite low on this trip from Les Iles de Madeline to Gaspe. From 1500 feet above sea level it is a great shot.


This is a view of the rock in the winter. Look chilly, doesn't it?






PS - There is a hint in the title to the answer of the riddle!

Room with a view

Look out below!!!

This is an AC Jazz RJ passing 1000 feet above us as we all line up to land into Toronto. Sometimes the Air Traffic Controllers will tell us that there is an aircraft descending to 1000 feet above and will be passing overhead. At least we know it's coming then. Sometimes it comes as a bit of a surprise for us. The planes do appear quite close but what is even more disturbing is that they are the same distance away when we are all in cloud and can't see each other.

To keep things new and interesting I often request some flying out of Toronto. Every other month I try to get out of Montreal and head to the rat race of Toronto's Pearson Airport.
This pairing took me to Sault St. Marie, home of the Algoma Steel company. Did you know that there is a Sault St. Marie in Canada and a Sault St. Marie in the USA? They are actually beside each other only separated by a river. A nice day in the "SOO" as they call it provided this nice picture of the airport as we maneuvered to land.

We saw a large tanker in the shipping channel and thought we should go in for a closer look before landing. We often take the chance for a bit of sightseeing when the situation permits.



Final approach for Runway 12. This is where we have to work the hardest. Oooops did I use the word work and hard in the same sentence describing my job? Sorry. One pilot is concentrating ever so hard on getting the plane on the runway in on piece and the other guy................is still sightseeing, after putting the gear down, flaps down and flicking a few switches of course. I'd take another sip of my Double Double but it's all gone so water it is. Bing.......Bong.........could I get a glass of ice please? Oh Ya landing.........

One of our Canadain Snowbirds stopped in Sault St. Marie for some fuel.



After Sault St. Marie we headed back to Toronto. I am not sure why I always take pictures of the downtown but it I like the view from above I guess.

I have been wanting to get the opportunity to take this photo for some time. It seems we seldom get to land on this runway. This happens to be the site of the Air France crash a few years ago. For those of you that aren't familiar, about 2 years ago an Air France Airbus A340 landed in a thunderstorm and for many reasons landed over halfway down the runway and was unable to stop before going off the end and into a gully, bursting into flames.
This approach will overfly the gully where the A340 came to rest. Anyways, the reason for the picture is to capture the size of the 401 freeway and the volume of traffic at 7:30 in the morning. I tried to count the lanes and got somewhere between 18 and 20 lanes of traffic. Click to enlarge this picture for a better view.



While all the passengers sit uncomfortably in their seats waiting for their plane to take off we sit looking up the back end of the plane in front of us. Right in front of us is a Westjet 737. This is our definition of sitting in traffic during the morning rush. I guess I should take another sip of my Double Double. Toronto's Tim Horton's makes the worst DD's around! This is the last one of the day I promise.

This aircraft or should I say airline is relatively new to Toronto. Etihad Airway's is based out of Abu Dhabi. They use an Airbus A340-500 for the 12+ hour jaunt across the Atlantic.