A Wild Week

Wow, what a week it was!

This past week, I was sent to Prince George for a week of flying into the norther BC community of Fort Ware and the Kemess Creek mine and it was a week of wild adventures. It all started Monday morning with an early morning flight into the mountains to the Kemess Creek mine followed by a diversion due to low ceilings into Fort Ware and a return to Prince George. Tuesday, I finally knocked off my IATRA exam, my last hurdle before I can take an airline job. Wednesday was a quick trip back up to Fort Ware in beautiful blue skies.

Thursday we woke to a blizzard but the weather north looked somewhat better so we loaded up for Kemess and while on the approach, we learned the visibility was dropping quickly so we aborted the approach and flew a hold for 30 mins while we re-assessed the situation. Deciding that we didn’t have much fuel, we diverted back to Prince George. However, enroute we learned that there was now freezing rain in Prince George so we probably couldn’t return. We quickly sought the assistance of ATC and received weather reports for airports that were within our range and unfortunately, nothing was much better. On a hunch, the captain dialed up Prince George town and received an updated report that the freezing rain wasn’t amounting to much and that we could probably continue. By this time we were very far behind our decent profile and had to chop and drop several thousand feet quickly to arrive at the initial approach fix at the target altitude. Back on profile, we flew the ILS down to the runway and broke out 200 ft above the ground, thankfully seeing the lead-in-lights at the very last second – phew!

Thankfully, Friday morning was crystal clear so we headed back up to Fort Ware and planned a VFR mountain run over to Kemess.

Video