Some photo's from work…

I guess that these photo’s would border on the Commercial Forum’ territory, but GA seems to be more in tune with the kind of aircraft I get to fly.
It has been an interesting few weeks for me. First I went down to Orlando to train for my type rating in the Citation II (my first Jet :)), then, when I came back I was lucky enough to ride along on a demo flight of the new Cessna Mustang VLJ. I also squeezed in a Citation trip to Ft Lauderdale (as SIC)…

First, the Citation sim. This was my first experience in a full motion simulator. It was pretty convincing but the visuals were very dated. Good enough to do the job though. One thing is for sure, if that was a real plane I would never fly in it. Almost every flight something goes wrong with it 😉 (Engine fires, generator failures, engine failures, hydraulic failures, Thrust reversers that pop out just a few knots above V1..
😮 Still, I survived without crashing which was reassuring :).

With a shiney type rating in my hand I headed home and a couple of days later had the opportunity to ride in the Cessna Mustang. It was bigger than I thought it would be. The Garmin avionics suite was really impressive..

A few days later I flew as SIC in the Citation II down to Ft Lauderdale. The trip was interesting to say the least due to weather. Florida itself was VFR but just off the East coast was a large line of bad weather. Of course ATC put us on an arrival procedure that put us through the worst of it. After some ‘negotiation’ we managed to get an alternative arrival that took us to the Western coast, but they kept switching back to the East (I guess they were saturated with traffic). Eventually we had to go East as ATC was not being flexible at all. Fortunately by this time we had moved South enough to miss a lot of the weather… Here is the route of flight we took (image from http://www.flightaware.com):