Originally Posted by uofWaPilot

Its 4:45AM in the morning and your alarm is going off. Its -10F and snowing outside. You make yourself a coffee and get dressed, out the door by 5. The car is half frozen, need 15 min to warm it up... Get to the airport, your CE 402 or P212 are tucked inside a hangar that may or may not have internal heating. After a thorough preflight you grab the Kubota to tug it from the hangar to the terminal- a simple task but some struggle with towing somehow. The sun isn't up yet. You go inside the ops room to find youre booked full- 9 pax. You diligently plan your required fuel and how much TKS to bring. As the passengers begin to check-in, you realize you might be overweight and forced to either bump a bag or your FO, sometimes even a revenue passenger. Its 5:45, you have thirty minutes until departure. By some miracle you've found a way to make the weights work and you've completed the weight and balance, no time to relax though because there's some crap weather out there to worry about..


615am you pull away from the terminal with your full boat and you depart from your 4500 ft long runway climbing out at about 400 fpm and 120KIAS. Three minutes after takeoff you see ice accumulating on your flight surfaces.. You trust in your boots/TKS to keep you going. An hour and half later you pop out of the clouds and behold ORD in all its glory in front of you. ATC gave you some weird vectors to get onto final but hey you made it. After a good 15 minute taxi you arrive at the gate and have an hour to go grab some breakfast. 9AM, time to get back to weight and balance and looking at the weather. Not a full boat this time so that simplifies things a bit. By 9:30AM you're back on your way out of ORD headed to Manistee, MI or Quincy, IL. You'll do this process most likely again later in the afternoon. Some times the weather will improve, some times it will get worse. Some days your airplane will fly perfectly, other days you'll be writing up something silly and stuck somewhere that isn't where your bed is. SOC does their best to help, but they cant make airworthy planes appear out of nowhere.


It's 6 or 7PM, and you've completed the last leg of the day. Time to button up the plane and tow it back to the hangar. You probably didn't see the sun today, and likely dealt with more ice in one day than what most piston drivers fly through in a year. You get home at 7:30PM, whip yourself up something to eat and are in bed by whatever time you need to be to get enough sleep to repeat this entire process at 4:45AM again the next day.


Obviously this isn't how things work year round, but some might consider a day like this 'incredibly hard'.