I’m sitting in a hotel on Long Island, waiting for the press folks from work to finish with a meeting so we can fly them back to Atlanta. We were in Boston yesterday, and are going home tonight. Being a corporate pilot is something I could get used to. I like hotels. I like to travel. I like flying. I even like several hours of boredom in an airport or hotel somewhere. I can kill time driving around a new city, or writing, or drawing, or whatever. Cool job to have.

The weather here really sucks, and is getting worse, so I hope we aren’t delayed in getting out. Just checked the weather, and there are reports of icing very close to where we are,at just about the altitude we will be flying. The bad thing about ice is that it makes the plane stop flying, and then you die. That is paraphrased from the hours I spent learning about different kinds of ice and its effects, but the part where you die is all you really need to know. The other part is where I say “I’m not flying into that shit”.

Okay, so checking the weather with obsessive regularity is not so much fun compared to the rest of it. Last night’s flight from Bedford, Mass, to Islip, NY was fun. Super cloudy and bumpy in places, none of the boring “turn on the autopilot and watch systems until we have to do something again” crap. As ATC vectored us onto the ILS, he even complimented my superior turn on course, considering the 35 knot crosswind. It helps to not have a flight now and then where I am not getting yelled at by the controllers for not hearing something. Actually doing something right once in a while keeps me from getting discouraged. Here is the best part- flying for an hour without any reference to the ground, lining up some needles, descending into what you hope is an airport environment, hearing your captain call altitudes “500…400…300…going miss in 100 feet…” Then those brilliant delicious runway lights pop out right in front of you, looking right down the center of the runway (hopefully the runway you were planning on), and you land, feeling like you really did something. I have done that a couple hundred times (which may sound like a lot, but really just means I have been lucky so far), and I get goosebumps every time.

The most glaring difference between flying in the northeast and the southeast (aside from the fact that you’ll get shot if you fly over certain areas), is the way the controllers don’t have time for you if you don’t know what’s going on. You don’t call them with a request and wait for them to ask you what it is. You call and tell them what you need in four seconds or less, unless you want to spend the next fifteen minutes in a hold while they deal with the guys who know what they are doing. I made that mistake on the way up, and found myself at 17,000 feet and 18 minutes away from the runway. Apologies to those in the back who had to deal with my 1,500 foot per minute divebomb arrival procedure and the earaches it may have caused.

Doug lets me screw up now and then to teach me a lesson. Then he sits in the left seat and shakes his head slowly and infuriatingly as if thinking, “when is this retard going to learn to fly?” Strangely, I have never made the same mistake twice. Even more bafflingly, I have managed to invent new ones. In my defense, the plane I usually fly is a windup toy compared to his plane. His requires about half the workload actually flying the plane, and you spend more time programming computers and monitoring various systems. It’s much easier to fly if you know the plane, but I’m still learning.

It looks like tonight’s flight will be an interesting one. The weather is varying from crappy to total suck, and we have five hours to spend in it. IF we decide to go, that is.

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