Tracking our flights

We are home from our flying holiday–– I'll add some pictures to the story I began to tell in my previous two blogposts and there'll be more posts to follow. In the meantime here is proof of the fact that nowadays all the IFR flights logged by Chris flying C-FPTN (Canadian Foxtrot Papa Tango November) are officially tracked. This is an image cut from the FlightAware website:

The blue dashed line shows the last leg of our flight home from Trois Rivières to Gatineau yesterday afternoon, as filed. The slightly wobbly white line, that more or less follows the blue dashes, is the route we actually took. We didn't reach Gatineau airport itself, because for the last 15 minutes we could see the heavy rain cloud ahead (the smaller radar blob on the left). We cancelled our IFR approach and diverted to our home airport, Rockcliffe, instead, where we landed after the shower had gone by. (We were in and out of some developing cloud during the turns, but these don't show up on the picture.) If you click on the picture and then look carefully you can even see the little circuit we did before landing at Rockcliffe.

The much bigger cell of bad weather to the southwest of our track was a thunderstorm of some magnitude whose flashes were showing up on our StrikeFinder.

In case you wondered, the other white lines are the divisions between Ottawa and Montreal airspace and between neighbouring areas of the sky controlled by flight services in the USA. The rather vague start to the line of route from CYRQ (Trois Rivières airport) was due to the fact that, after taking off towards the east (because of the wind direction and the need to avoid a high tower), we had to climb to a certain altitude before being detected by the flight tracking radar; it therefore looks as if we began our flight east of that airport.