Trip to Alaska June 29th

Well the weather gods has decided to shine on us again today. When we arrived at the airport in Fairbanks at around 8:00AM the weather was looking a whole lot better than it had the previous day. Our flight leader had determined that we would be able to make it into Anchorage with a little deviation from our original flight plan.

It's interesting up here how they get some of their weather reports. Ron, David & I went over to the Flight Service Staion on the field with the flight leader, Dale, to get the weather. The flight briefers went over our options with us but the interesting part of it was that they have positioned cameras up through the mountains near passes and they can call up the images from these cameras live so you can actually see what the weather looks like in these strategic locations. Very helpful little tool to use in mountain flying. It sure helped us make a decision to go.

I would have to say that the flight from Fairbanks to Anchorage, for me and I think Ron, was probably the best thus far on our trip. One, Ron & I were able to move up to the the front of the group, which made it a much easier day of flying because some in the group enjoy wondering around sight seeing while we're flying, going down low then back up or left to right and you really have to pay attention when they do that obviosuly so you don't have a bad hair day. I flew second behind the leader and Ron flew third. We didn't deviate around at all, so I was able to enjoy the views much more and not have to be slowing down and speeding up for the planes in front of us.


But mostly the sceanery on the route that we took was fantastic, the best that we've seen thus far. We were flying through mountain areas and it seemed at times as thought the white capped mountains stretched in front of us from left to right forever. Amazing sight. Also we were able to see a few glaciers as we flew along our route as you will see in our photos. You'll have to view our photos to see what I'm talking about.

Our flight from Fairbanks into Anchorage was about 2 1/2 hours. We had an arrival window we had to meet in Anchorage because of a scheduled air show that was going to close down the air space so we had to be in before 3PM. We landed at about 1:30.

We are scheduled to go on a train trip tomorrow down to meet up with a boat, which will take us out on a boat sight seeing tour where we will see some wildlife and glaciers. They will be serving us a meal on the boat.

I'm back into good WIFI hookup now so I'll hopefully be able to keep up with loading the photos. If you're interested you should look at the album at the bottom of the blog for our trip down to Anchorage from Fairbanks.

Wayne