What an awesome day! I flew a lot in the SAAB today, and got to try my hand at integrating sim training to line ops.. There were as many operational problems as legs that we flew. Just to summarize my day:

We had a show time of 6:39am. I got the dispatch release and weather then I started to fill out what I could from our W&B sheet. Next thing you know, there is a maintenance issue with another plane so we did a plane swop. We had to do that because the steering wheel tiller was busted on the plane we were gonna take. After going over there to start over at the top. On my walk around I discovered where the PGB (prop gear box)had a leak. That caused us to push the scheduled departure time back 2 hours until another plane came in that we could use. We finally got under way about 2.2 hours later. We made our out-and-back with so much efficiency that we blocked in 10 minutes ahead of our planned ETA from our original flight. As we prepared for another flight, our flight attendant decided to call in fatigued. So we waited another 90 minutes for a reserve flight attendant. After she arrived, we booked it out to the flightline and were ready to go in about 10 minutes. The problem was that the gate agent didn't listen to the Captain when he told him we could only take 31 pax. We had just finished boarding 34 passengers and then the fun began. No irrate passengers, but no volunteers to give up their seat. Cutting right to the chase, we had to cancel the flight due to several things which caused us to time out.

The plane is so fun to fly. It is very sensitive on ptich control inputs, and very slow on roll. I had a great first landing in the SAAB, but my second one was not as good. ATC slam dunked us, and as a result I was about 15 knots fast over the threshold. We didn't go to the UK, bu we made it within our company's policy for speed limits on final and within the company's policy for max distance from the threshold that we may land. All of the flying was very fun, and I can't wait till tomorrow to do it all again, but with a few more destinations thrown in there. I will add more details about the flight later, but for now I need to get some sleep.