Just sent an email to the boss, letting him know this morning's elk flight was canceled.

Did not tell him why. If I did, he'd be pissed.

Turns out the pilot got a request for a commuter flight for this morning. That means at least twice the money he'd get flying me. So I got bumped (actually, he called yesterday to see if it would be all right if he bumped me back a day).

Now the rules of charter aircraft etiquette are pretty much 'first come, first served'. You reserve a plane, and it's supposed to be ready to go, with pilot, at that time. This pilot has bumped flights with our outfit before, in order to take a more profitable charter. And the bosses in charge of scheduling observers and paying the bills get really pissed.

Me, I don't mind.

I cannot count the number of times he has turned away business because I had a morning flight scheduled, only to have me cancel out on him because there were too many clouds. He has taken me up on his daughter's birthday more than once, simply because that was the only day we got good light.

We've flown on more than one holiday, again just because the light was right or we had fresh snow cover. As with my work, Saturday and Sunday are just two more days of the week to him. Before we got the internet, it was pretty common to get a late night phone call, this pilot advising me we should have snow by morning and did I want to fly?

A couple winters back, we never got good snow conditions for our Ferris-Seminoe elk counts. Flew twice anyway, but knew we didn't find even half the elk. But we got a late, heavy snow in April, and this pilot and his Dad took the time out on a return trip from Central City to find and count the elk for us.

He could have just landed, picked me up and gotten paid to do that work. But instead he did it for free.

So, I'm bumped. Forecast does not call for wind today, so most of the new snow should still be there tomorrow. Ought to have plenty of tracks to help find the elk.