Holding Back the Dam

One of the best things about being a pilot is some of the scenery I get to see. Today we were flying a ring route, which is basically just picking up cargo and/or passengers and dropping them off in another location, all day long. We went to our first stop to drop off a General and his entourage, then we had another stop near by. We were flying behind a Chinook and had to fly over a ridgeline. As you can see from the photos, there was a lot of cloud cover on the other side. We were able to eventually break through further away from the mountains, but it was a sight to see.

I flew for almost 8 hours, and it was fun! I am finally starting to feel like a real pilot, rather than just someone who plays dress up to play pilot. I am supposed to fly tomorrow and maybe the day after as well. We will have to see how the weather holds out. On our way home today we were barely able to beat the bad weather into Kandahar. We ran into a rain storm about two miles away from the airfield and we were entering the traffic pattern to land when one of our door gunners saw lightning about two miles off our right side. We got down as fast as we could, and put the aircraft away before all of the worst of the rain came in. It was a full day.