Greetings, DC Drivers!
The days are getting shorter and the October nights are getting colder as the sun continues its trek southward. September was a fairly slow and quiet month for the Washington D.C. hub but many of our newer guys stepped up and kept the passengers moving.
We’d like to remind our pilots that you can find many useful links to charts, training material, and other resources on our Washington D.C. Hub home page, along with news and announcements on new pilots, promotions, and upcoming events.
We’d like to see more of our pilots flying online with the VATSIM network. One of the best ways we have to advertise our VA and show hub pride is to put those AFA callsigns in the virtual skies of the internet. (Be sure to add
www.flyafa.com in the comments section of your flight plan.) Flying online with live people providing virtual air traffic control (ATC) service is one sure way to kick your flight-sim experience up a couple of notches. For training, information, and to get started, check out the links in the Pilot Resources section of our Washington D.C. Hub home page.
We’d like to welcome the following ten pilots who joined AFA’s DC Hub during the month of September: Brandon Campbell, Samual Law, Gabriel Abreu, Michael Noyes, Christian Roeder, Adam Brown, Jeff Hoedt, Justin Cilimberg, Martin McGinnis, and Michael Cohen. We’re glad to have you all aboard.
We have three promotions to recognize for September. Most notable is ATP Senior Commander Jamie Baker, who crossed the 1000-hour mark on September 28 (and in true style, at an online fly-in event). We’d also like to congratulate Captains Tony Mallory and Brandon Campbell. It’s good to see these new guys jump right in there and get ‘er done.
Our PILOT OF THE MONTH award goes to a pilot who actually joined AFA in February. He started out in DC, spent some time with the Atlanta hub, and then transferred back to us in September. He’s been burning up the skies with short hops, logging forty flights last month. Congratulations to AFA6634, ATP Captain Gabriel Abreu!
What’s better than flying online? Attending APG online events would be the correct answer. If there’s anything better than seeing the skies sprinkled with AFA and PAY callsigns, it has to be seeing those callsigns converging on one airport. It doesn’t get much better than that, unless you get to fly a simultaneous parallel approach with company traffic. I’ve had this privilege at least half a dozen times, three or four of them in the last year alone. Last week’s VATSIM Sunday event was into Salt Lake City, and Salt Lake Approach had us landing on both of the 34’s. Just as I was vectored onto the localizer for 34R, I heard them slotting PAY6132 (Norm Tipton) onto the localizer for 34L, just ahead of me and a little north of my ten o’clock. While you never get “used” to that kind of flying, it was almost routine to us as this was probably the third time in the past year or so that Norm and I have been in this circumstance together. We both made the turn onto the localizers manually just to make sure we didn’t overshoot into each other’s way. He was able to get a good screenshot, but I was a little busy trying to stabilize my ’57 into landing configuration. But great fun like that starts with venturing online and then getting to the events. And while I’m happy to fly with Norm anytime, I’d also like to shoot one of those simultaneous approaches with another “AFA6___” callsign, right? I hope to see you there next time.
Speaking of APG events, our VATSIM Sundays kick off the month of October with a flight into Reno on the 5th. We’ll continue north on subsequent Sundays with stops at Paine Field in Washington and Whitehorse in Canada before wrapping up in Anchorage, Alaska on the 26th. The hubTUEhub on October 7 also looks promising with a hop from Reno to Lakeview, Oregon. Upcoming Friday Night Ops will feature the ARTCC’s of Kansas City, Boston, Seattle, and Memphis.
Don’t forget about the NML (National Madden League) charters that can be flown on or offline. AFA is handling the transportation needs of the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys, flying them to their away games.
You can find details on these special charter flights and other APG happenings in the American Pacific Group Forums. If you’re not already registered with our forums, please take the time to join up today. There you’ll find a helpful community of company pilots and a wide array of information and discussions ranging from football chat to technical assistance.
Within those forums, you’ll find an office for each hub, including Washington D.C. That office is where we administer our charter flights. Chief Pilot John Britt does an amazing job designing and maintaining those special flights that take you off the beaten paths of regularly scheduled flights and into the realm of not-so-familiar airports and challenges. Curious yet? Check them out and sign up for one today. And speaking of John, it’s good to have him back home after a few weeks overseas.
For any who would like to participate in APG at a staff level, several opportunities remain open. You can learn more about those opportunities by (you guessed it) checking out the APG forums.
Ok, thanks guys, it’s time for me to fire up some engines and go fast. I’ll see you in the lounge later.
