Irregular Operations

Well, the latter part of last week has been a bit of a different one.. (just like every other week, really). We had some very low level clouds and freezing fog which rolled through Fort Smith and hung around until mid-day on Friday.



All of the Jetstreams here at Northwestern are flown IFR (instrument flight rules), which allow the pilots to fly and navigate with their instruments only, without any visual reference to the ground. To transition from cruise to landing, they use instrument approaches, which uses various types of ground stations (depending on the type of approach) and sends signals to instruments to line the aircraft up with the runway and guide it with an appropriate rate of descent. Some Instrument Landing Systems are precise enough for some aircraft which have several auto-pilots to have the aircraft land itself on the runway. The approaches here, allow the pilots to be guided down to 350 feet off the ground, and at that point, if they do not have the runway insight, they have to execute a 'missed approach' - and go to their alternate airport until the weather clears.

All our flights left as planned on Thursday morning; however, when many of them tried to get back in that afternoon, many of them did not get visual contact with the runway and had to use their alternate, which was Yellowknife. Only one flight got lucky and most likely with a slight break in the clouds were able to get visual contact with the runway and proceed to land. This left us on the ground having to find other things to do, as the aircrafts weren't back to be cleaned or fueled.

The Friday morning our flight schedule was switched up completely, to fulfill all our daily scheduled flights using the 2 aircraft on the ground instead of the 5 we normally have flying. Aircrafts departing only need 1/2 mile of runway visibility to proceed with a takeoff, so the morning flights were able to leave, but the crews and aircrafts which overnighted in Yellowknife still had to rely on some luck that there would be a hole to breakthrough underneath the clouds to be able to actually make it in to land. After a few tries, fortunately all were able to make it in!

Two Scheduled flights, doing the abnormal routes to fulfill all our regular scheduled flights

This is the aircraft disappearing through the clouds less than 100ft above the runway

I spent most of Thursday afternoon, polishing engine spinners, to make them as shiny as a mirror

Below is a picture of one of the engineers replacing one of the landing lights in the wing of the Jetstream. Although it looks like an easy installation, every screw holding it in place must be measured exactly to a 10th of a millimeter, to ensure that it has the exact angle for the pilots to see in front of them at night.

Smokey the Hanger Cat causing trouble in the parts department