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All day long
Posted by just-a-surveyor on September 19, 2019 at 10:22 pmAll day long marking for new paint stripes on the runway. Very nice day for a change with a nice cool breeze. At the southerly end there was a great view of Kennesaw Mountain. No airplanes and I had a pleasant day and the only distractions were the hydro blaster removing old paint and the folks I am working for.
I did not have to cut anything. ????
paden-cash replied 4 years, 7 months ago 5 Members · 5 Replies- 5 Replies
Good gig.
The last time I was working at an airport were setting locations for VASI stations.
We were not set in the centerline of the runway like we were 50ft from the edge of the pavement and were almost run over by two very small planes having to make an emergency landing that were blown off the runway by a strong crosswind.
Had to grab the tripod and TS and run like lle4 thru mud at right angles to the airstrip and pray.
Did not get hit but the mud splatter coated me very well.
Kind of like when the client sends his landscape crew out to cut line for you. That was nice. The only problem was keeping them from cutting line clear across the adjoining property.
Freedom is just another word for nothing left to loseGuys I decided to sleep in late and just woke up and I gotta tell ya, I’m very sore. I can only guess that walking around on concrete for 12 hours is the cause and being sore is the effect.
That work is awesome at smaller airports, especially uncontrolled and/or remote. The bigger ones can be a pain when you have to constantly clear a runway.
And yes, that is a lot of walking. I did a number of FAA AGIS surveys, and they only required 50 foot stations on centerline for the gravel surfaces. But for the hard surfaces, it was ten feet stations, with a ten foot offset observation on both sides of each station. So, for the 5K-6K foot long runways, it was a mind-numbing 1500-plus shots just to get the centerline, never mind the rest of the features at airport.
I miss the times when I could work both field and office, it sure helped keep me in shape…
Although it’s not all fun and games…once I had to tie in patched cracks in the Barrow airport in November, in a snowstorm, with 40 knot gusts. I got so sick of hearing the controller repeat “No Target!” as I struggled to keep the prism steady enough for the instrument to get a good shot. I don’t think the data even got used.
“…people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.” -Neil Postman20 years ago I had an engineering firm client that did strictly AP work. The larger controlled airports were a pain in the butt to work on. About every third or fourth job we would wind up at a sleepy uncontrolled AP and get our work done relatively freely and quickly. Rarely did we work on closed strips at the smaller APs, but we always had NOTAMs filed for “personnel and equipment near the RW”. We always had a scanner tuned to unicom freq. for any traffic.
We were at Waynoka, OK one crisp December day. It was getting late and we hadn’t seen any traffic all day. Someone clicked on unicom (it turns on the RW lights) so we knew a plane would probably land. Sure enough a few minutes later a pilot was announcing herself in the pattern.
A beautiful Cessna 210 dropped its gear turning final and chirped the tires as it touched down right in front of us. For a second I thought there was no pilot. Then I realized that someone very short was piloting the plane. Someone with white hair and frail wrinkled hands. We watched an 80 year old lady taxi that Cessna over to one of the only hangars there at the time.
She climbed out of the plane and was definitely waving us over to her. We all trotted over there to find she needed help opening the hangar door. We helped and her big fat Lincoln was parked inside. She pulled the Lincoln out and we helped he drag the Cessna in. Then she asked us to help he unload the plane…
She had that Cessna packed full of shopping bags and boxed from every mall in the central US. She explained she did her Christmas shopping all in one day because “that’s the way she liked it”. We packed her Lincoln full and away she went waving goodbye to us. I’m guessing she probably owned a large ranch somewhere near. She did tell us she hated driving to town.
Things you find at those sleepy little airstrips.
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