Fort McMurray Flight - 2007

This week, for business (and convienently, for pleasure), my partner Chris and I rented an airplane and flew up to Fort McMurray. Ft Mac is about a 4-5 hour drive, but takes us about 1.5 hours in a 4 seater. We chose to fly. :-)

We rented our new favorite airplane, the Diamond DA-40. This is the plane we recently trained up on, and has the new Garmin G1000 glass cockpit. It's a pleasure to fly...a bit on the complex side, but nevertheless, really great to fly. It has an airspeed of roughly 125 knots which is about 230 km/hr, so it will get you places quick. Having two pilots in the cockpit is also refreshing. There is an obvious advantage in that you can bounce things off of each other and keep each other sharp.

Ft Mac was a great adventure. I piloted the DA on the way up to Ft Mac, and it was very much non-eventful. Pretty smooth ride all the way in, with clouds at about 5500 ASL, which left us plenty of margin. Landing into Ft Mac was also a non-event.

This morning, we attended our meeting at the Albian Oil Sands to discuss our training platform (T2 Platform). There was definitely some interest in our software for certain areas, and we will explore these opportunities. For us, this is a foot in the door in oil country, an industry we haven't yet ventured into.

We decided to take an extra hour on the way out, and fly around the oil sands. This is the first time up to Ft Mac for both of us, and we wanted to take in the sites from the air. I was nothing short of impressed on the activity up there, and level of chaos with all that is going on. You really don't realize how fortunate we are to live in Alberta when you see the magnitude of what our natural resources up north bring to our economy here.

The last part of the video (and the last site) shows the CNRL site, which my cousin David Rouleau works at. He is the Manager of Mining Operations and has a large responsibility as this site builds out. He was telling me that this is a 7.5 Billion dollar project, and is about a year away from starting production. Once operational, their site will pump out a stunning 110,000 barrels of synthetic crude oil per day. Future phases of construction will increase that to upwards around 500,000 barrels per day.

Chris flew on the way back and got to land the rainy windy landing you'll see at the end of the video :-) I had the opportunity to take some video of the sites on the way back (as well as some video on the way up as well - thanks to autopilot ;-)

Warning: The video you are about to watch has been severly impacted by light turbulance. If you are at any level affected by motion sickness, please take 2 gravol before you watch this video, and have your air sickness baggie handy.