Curse you!

It’s hard to say no to man who’s currently making you blueberry pancakes, as I discovered this morning.  Yep, you can add awesome cook to the long list of RTHs many talents! He’s cooking away while I’m doing some bloggy stuff, then he asks oh-so-innocently “can you do me a favour please?”

Of course I answer “yes,” right away. Normally in these situations it involves fetching the flour or something. No, this time he had a different request in mind, “can you phone flight services and get us a weather briefing?”

A bit of background, we were meant to be flying on a nice little sightseeing trip up to the base of Lake Simcoe. The weather looked dubious. Also I hate talking on the phone. RTH knows this. So that’s why he made me do it. Curse him!!

I did it though, got a fairly friendly person on the other end as well, if a little fast in the way he was rattling stuff off. I got the general idea though; we both came to the conclusion that it was “a sucky day to fly.”

Ah well, even if we didn’t fly, I learned something. Conversations with flight services go a lot smoother if you lay out at the start exactly what you want. I took a deep breath, rehearsed it in my mind and started off the conversation “ good morning , could I get a weather briefing for the Toronto city centre area towards the base of Lake Simcoe taking off at 12:00 today?”

After that it all went surprisingly well, if a little quick. Next time if I really need to concentrate on the details and it’s a little less clear than “it’s not going to stay VFR for long,” I think I’ll just say “I’m sorry, I’m a student pilot, I haven’t done many of these briefings, could you slow it down a little?” Hopefully it’ll work.