Coffee.... ERR My First Day

Ft. Smith Airport

Well, My first day was full of many new adventures and being exposed to many new things.
The day started out with a Monday Morning Coffee break, as soon as everyone 'punched in'. I've never seen so many people with a case of the 'mondays'. It was funny because I actually love mondays. Who doesn't love the start of something new?... like ... a new week!?

Lance giving me the tour around Northwestern's 3 hangers, showing me all of the scheduled service maintenance hanger, the charters hanger, as well as the Admin Building. The Scheduled service hanger was filled with Jetstreams and AME's (aircraft mechanics) working on them.

Jetstream 31 sitting outside the hanger on a brisk September morning

The Charter hanger had many of the 'bush planes' both inside and out. Many different machines like the Beech 99, the Otter and the Beaver (which were both on floats). These airplanes go down into the bush dropping off passengers or cargo in remote places, which is only accessibly by float plane in the summer or ski plane in the winter.

Beech 99

Otter (On floats in the summer, skis in the winter)

Along the tour, Lance was instructed to introduce me to all the other employees. I think I must have met about 90% of the staff within the first hour! The fun part is trying to remember their names the next time you see them! By the time the tour was finished, it was about 10 o'clock, which meant coffee time! I have never seen so many people swarm around a coffee pot the way they do constantly around here! It's similar to a pack of ravens attacking a carcass on the ground! Funny enough, this was the first morning in about 6 months where I hadn't actually had at least a single cup of coffee, and the way it was being consumed made me a little repulsed by the whole idea. I will see how long I can go without having any desire to drink a cup of coffee.

Proceeding our second break of the morning, they send me off to various people to complete different parts of the training for the airline operations. It varied from many different things, which included Cargo Screening, WHMIS (Workplace Harazadous Materials Information System [...I believe?]) training, and tests on the Jetstreams and Beech 99 - allowing me to do elementary maintenance on the aircraft (I didn't think I would be doing any of that ever, but its pretty cool!). The list of different types of training I had to do goes on, but will be completed over the following week or so.

One thing which really stuck out throughout the course of the day was during my WHMIS training, where the 'Quality Assurance Manager' named Marcel gave me a longwinded lesson on all the dangerous chemicals we ship, use and store. Showing me how to find information on the products and what to do if someone accidentally ingested it, or became covered in it. Marcel is a funny little man, and likes attention and absolutely loves talking. Throughout the day, he was assuring quality everywhere by taking his cup of coffee and talking to anybody and everybody that would listen to him speak! I am going to try and get a picture with Marcel sometime soon, so I can post up for you all to see. Anyways, at the end of our training, he talks to me, letting me know that he could be my 'home-away-from home' dad and that if I needed someone to talk to or a ride home from the bar or want advice on a girl - he was my go to guy. I didn't even know there was a bar for several hundred miles!

By the end of the day, the majority of the office staff had 5 coffee breaks (not including the lunch!)

I was able to make it to the gym, where at a 'peak hour' there were 3 people, one of them being
myself. I think I will be pretty lucky, if I continually get a gym with nobody in it!

Localized fog over the runway in the early AM