In the past month, I’ve done 34 flights, 8 as a passenger and 26 as pilot flying. Flown business class for the first time, added a new country to my list, that makes it now 43 countries, but still, I’ve only seen 19 percent of the world, so much left to explore. I’ve been on tv twice, (City line link, and CTV Your Morning link) found a new love for dirt biking, visited Bucket List Niagara Falls and Hawaii for the first time, met new and old friends, slept an average of 5 hours a night and loved every second of it, September 2018 you’ve been the best one so far.
You see me going to all these amazing places and think that’s what it’s going to be like to be a pilot, unfortunately, it’s not always as glamours, being a pilot is hard work and I’m fortunate that I somehow managed ‘to make it’ in the social media world and I get to travel to places like Hawaii, Dubai, Barcelona, LA through different brand collaborations that I do, that has nothing to do with being a pilot, the airline that I fly for we don’t do layovers, we get 25 minutes at our destinations where we set up for our return flight, our schedule is perfect for someone who has a family and doesn’t want to be away from home, but you don’t get to see the world. To be honest, I don’t even think that long-haul pilots nowadays get much more than 24 hours at the destination, but I’m no long haul pilot so feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
Writing this I’m actually en-route to Gran Canaria, a four hours flight from London Stansted, our onboard computers tell us that we’re landing 20 minutes early, which gives us 45 minutes in total on the beautiful sunny island. I am pilot flying down which means that I will be pilot monitoring on the way up, which in turn means that I will get to do the walk around in Gran Canaria, the Captain asked me what sector I preferred to do and knowing that the weather would be just beautiful down there I choose to fly to Gran Canary with in mind that I would do the walk around there. It’s my day five and after finishing today I get to go home. I’ve not been home in almost a month and I have two big suitcases of laundry with me. As much as I love to travel, and would book a ticket to somewhere exciting straight away, I’m actually looking forward to just getting home for a couple of days to get back on track with everything, my skin needs a deep cleanse, my back is in knots and my highlights has grown far too long. It will only be for a few days, in 6 days I’m boarding a flight from Gothenburg to Barcelona to meet up with my GoPro family for amazing adventures. I am so excited for this trip, it will be the first GoPro trip that both Malin, Maria and I will be all three at. As you might remember I was with GoPro on Yacht Week earlier this summer together with Malin, but it has never been all three of us before and I am really looking forward to it.
Day 1 this week started easier than I thought. I had just got back from Hawaii and Toronto where I’ve been for the past two weeks, it was a 6 hours time difference from Toronto timezone but I didn’t suffer at all, I went to bed around 8 pm and slept until the alarm woke me up at 04.00 am. I flew with a nice Captain a long two sector day to Fuerteventura and back, my favorite kind of day, two long sectors rather than four short.
On Day 2 it was time to get back into the four sector feeling and I flew to Aalborg in Denmark and Bremen in Germany. Landing in Denmark I got a text message from a friend asking if I was parked on stand 4? I looked around and saw a Norwegian airplane parked next to us on stand five and a friend that I did my line training with back in 2014 was waving at me, made my day! The aviation industry might seem big, all airplanes everywhere but it’s almost like a big happy family, it´s not rare that I recognize voices on the radio or occasionally hear someone say ´Hello Maria´ on the frequency, makes me just as happy every time.
Day 3 Was an easy day and the shortest for me this week, London Stansted to Tallin in Estonia, approximately two and a half hours one way and we landed back in London around 1 pm already.
Day 4 Back to four sector day. This week has actually been the perfect mix of long two sector days and four sector days. Today we flew to Poland twice and back, first to Bydgoszcz (hugs to anyone that can pronounce that) and later to Lodz that I learned does not pronounce Lodz but actually Vodz…I was corrected after I already said Lodz about ten times and I think the passengers started to wonder where they were actually going, oops.
Day 5 Was the longest of them all but felt the shortest. I had such a nice day flying with Dave @davegibson474 who I flew with two years ago when we took this picture (see below), so flying together again we had to recreate it. Gran Canaria was beautiful and I ended this week excited about my upcoming adventures.
Next week of ´A Pilots Diary´will be a short one, I only work one day and then I´m off all October, we get one month of annual leave each year and this year October was given as mine. Let me know what you want me to focus on for next weeks blog post, any thoughts? We have already talked about; fear of flying, flight training costs, and motivation during pilot training in previous posts.
Thank you for reading, and as always let me know if you have any questions, here or on my Instagram @pilotmaria
xx Maria
