This week, I got a helicopter ride out to a glacier, got two flying job offers, and logged some Cessna 207 time!
Long story made slightly less long...
I volunteered to help out a photo shoot out at a Matanuska Glacier, by driving an SUV from Girdwood up to the glacier airstrip. They just needed an extra warm body to do some driving around. But due to a organizational snafu in the morning, the photo crew left for the glacier without lunch, and my job became to deliver food to the site itself. By helicopter! OMG!!! That thing is like a magic carpet. After being in that helicopter, flying an airplane seems like driving a car that happens to go "up"...
We landed in a little exposed piece of rock in the middle of the glacier. I served coffee to the photo shoot crew and wandered around. When it was time to leave, we took off backwards, and then our pilot did a hard right banking turn, swooping through the icy valleys of the glacier... Holy COW. I think my heart stopped. Me gotta do dat.
Still drunk on helicopters, I then had to drive an hour back to Anchorage, the SUV now empty of its lunchy cargo. While waiting around at an FBO at Merrill Field for the rest of the crew to return from the shoot, I perused airplane rental rates at this FBO and started asking the woman at the front desk about initial CFI training, which is what I want to do this upcoming winter season. The chief pilot overhears the conversation and calls me into his office. "If you get your CFI with us, afterwards we'll hire you as a CFI," he says. I try to explain that that sounds like a wonderful deal, but I already have a "day job" that's not going anywhere, and that my availablility would be quite limited anytime other than the summer. "That's okay, we can hire part-time CFI's" he says, "Say, by the way, there's something else you might be interested in. I've got my own banner-tow business and I need a banner-tow pilot. Interested?" By this point, my jaw is more or less on the floor.
The following day I get another phone call from Mr. Chief Pilot guy at work. "I'm heading out to a mining camp in the Alaska Range in the 207 this morning. Wanna come along? How soon can you get here?" The papers on my desk fluttered slightly as I was out the door...
I got the feeling that, watching me learn to fly the 207 was more or less my "interview" for the possible future CFI/banner-tow gigs. The weather was kinda lousy, and lightly raining, navigation entirely by pilotage through wide mountain canyons, through a place called "Hell's Gate" (yipes!) to a little nameless gravel strip at a drilling camp in the middle of nowhere. A few tents, equipment, boxes of drill cores... it reminded me of a drill camp near South Pole that I once visited. The guys in the mess tent brighted noticably when a woman (me!) entered the room. Our mission was to drop off a helicopter part and pick up the mechanic, a grizzly smoky dirty Alaska guy named "Two Dogs".
If someone had told me a year ago that all this would happen, I'd have laughed milk out my nose... What's great is that I'm starting to actually get to know people in the local "pilot community." This is something that's just hard to do as a student, and never happened at all back in Boston. Except for Dave, of course, hi Dave!
I guess it helps that the "pilot community" up here is just huge. Some weirdos, though.
Pictures are below:
1: Kath with the helicopter
2: Landing site
3: View, cruising over the Matanuska River
4: The 207 at the drill camp
5: Hero shot with the 207
--Kath
Long story made slightly less long...
I volunteered to help out a photo shoot out at a Matanuska Glacier, by driving an SUV from Girdwood up to the glacier airstrip. They just needed an extra warm body to do some driving around. But due to a organizational snafu in the morning, the photo crew left for the glacier without lunch, and my job became to deliver food to the site itself. By helicopter! OMG!!! That thing is like a magic carpet. After being in that helicopter, flying an airplane seems like driving a car that happens to go "up"...
We landed in a little exposed piece of rock in the middle of the glacier. I served coffee to the photo shoot crew and wandered around. When it was time to leave, we took off backwards, and then our pilot did a hard right banking turn, swooping through the icy valleys of the glacier... Holy COW. I think my heart stopped. Me gotta do dat.
Still drunk on helicopters, I then had to drive an hour back to Anchorage, the SUV now empty of its lunchy cargo. While waiting around at an FBO at Merrill Field for the rest of the crew to return from the shoot, I perused airplane rental rates at this FBO and started asking the woman at the front desk about initial CFI training, which is what I want to do this upcoming winter season. The chief pilot overhears the conversation and calls me into his office. "If you get your CFI with us, afterwards we'll hire you as a CFI," he says. I try to explain that that sounds like a wonderful deal, but I already have a "day job" that's not going anywhere, and that my availablility would be quite limited anytime other than the summer. "That's okay, we can hire part-time CFI's" he says, "Say, by the way, there's something else you might be interested in. I've got my own banner-tow business and I need a banner-tow pilot. Interested?" By this point, my jaw is more or less on the floor.
The following day I get another phone call from Mr. Chief Pilot guy at work. "I'm heading out to a mining camp in the Alaska Range in the 207 this morning. Wanna come along? How soon can you get here?" The papers on my desk fluttered slightly as I was out the door...
I got the feeling that, watching me learn to fly the 207 was more or less my "interview" for the possible future CFI/banner-tow gigs. The weather was kinda lousy, and lightly raining, navigation entirely by pilotage through wide mountain canyons, through a place called "Hell's Gate" (yipes!) to a little nameless gravel strip at a drilling camp in the middle of nowhere. A few tents, equipment, boxes of drill cores... it reminded me of a drill camp near South Pole that I once visited. The guys in the mess tent brighted noticably when a woman (me!) entered the room. Our mission was to drop off a helicopter part and pick up the mechanic, a grizzly smoky dirty Alaska guy named "Two Dogs".
If someone had told me a year ago that all this would happen, I'd have laughed milk out my nose... What's great is that I'm starting to actually get to know people in the local "pilot community." This is something that's just hard to do as a student, and never happened at all back in Boston. Except for Dave, of course, hi Dave!
I guess it helps that the "pilot community" up here is just huge. Some weirdos, though. Pictures are below:
1: Kath with the helicopter
2: Landing site
3: View, cruising over the Matanuska River
4: The 207 at the drill camp
5: Hero shot with the 207
--Kath
