I flew with a new pilot this afternoon, generally not something I'm fond of, but this young guy was extremely good. I walked in and he asked if we could sit down and do a pre-flight brief, I liked that, especially because a bunch of these parcels were smallish and peppered all around downtown Dallas, right in Love's departure lanes. We compared notes on our iPad Mini4's (the one I bought to dedicate to my Phantom 4 Pro) and our "pins" coordinated perfectly. There's few things I dislike more than circling and circling, looking for a site because something didn't match up. Every 60 seconds you spend doing that costs about 10 bucks in an R44, $30.00 in a Bell JetRanger, and $70.00 in a 429. I do my homework before the flight and these sites were so tricky I scouted each one on the ground and "pinned" them on my iPad, which was worth it's weight in gold on a mission like this one. I've found that ATC is normally very happy to work your flight if they feel that you have your act together, conversely, they will deny you access in a blink if you appear to be behind the power curve in any way. We even got access to a couple of sites in DFW's airspace that we didn't have prior approval for, very unusual. My pilot hailed from the U.K. which made him alright in my book from the get go and he just continued to prove my instincts correct.
Great mission, successfully executed, albeit with a touch of nausea toward the close. Circling that many sites on a 97 degree day with winds 11G18 will work on all but the most astronauts middle ears, and I do not have one of those
We had "good light", thanks Nick!
Aug 15, 2017 at 08:03 PM
Previous versions of JWilsonphoto's message #14145697 « Mustang Air to Air: The Sequel »
