St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, perches on a promontory of land that protrudes into the North Atlantic, so naturally, that’s where they built the airport. The runway doesn’t extend to the coast, but it’s close enough that aircraft departing eastbound are over the ocean soon after takeoff.

If you’re headed for southern Europe or Africa, St. John’s is the logical departure point from North America. Like most of Canada, St. John’s is a friendly place, courteous and ultimately accommodating, with pretty much everything pilots need for long-distance, over-ocean travel.

The distance from St. John’s to Shannon, Ireland, is only 1,700 nm, and you’ll enjoy more benign atmospherics most of the way across.

If your destination is southern Europe, the Middle East or Africa, St. John’s is a favored jumping-off spot. One major advantage is often better winds, as much as a 30-40 knot push if you’re headed for Africa at normally aspirated altitudes.

Another is warmer weather in winter. Airframe icing is less of a problem on that route than flying the northern track over Greenland and Iceland. With no land to provide lifting forces, the ride can be smoother and more comfortable once you’re 50 miles offshore from Canada. In other words, you’ll probably have a better all-around experience.

Most of the time, Santa Maria, Azores, is blessed with decent VFR conditions, usually more reminiscent of the sky above Southern California rather than the middle of the Atlantic.

Several years back, I was hired by a prominent South African surgeon to fly his new Mooney Ovation across the Big East Pond diagonally from the Mooney plant in Kerrville, Texas, to Durban, South Africa. Dr. Johann van der Merwe was excited about the chance to ride the right seat across the ocean in his new airplane and see roughly half the planet roll beneath his wings. The owner had just completed an Ovation transition course at FlightSafety in San Antonio, and he hoped to use his Ovation around southern Africa.

One of the most common questions about flying the ocean is about airframe icing, and because our trip was in March, the ideal time to pick up ice, we did see a little rime. I’ve written about icing many times before, so I won’t belabor the point, but the good doctor did see some rime ice on the leg from Bangor into St. Johns. He asked if I ever allow icing to cancel a trip, and I told him no, but I’m not immune from icing concerns.

For better or worse, people do buy airplanes in other seasons than summer. You won’t make much money if a prospective client asks for a delivery in early December, and you tell them you only fly the ocean in July.

After cruising happily at 180 knots groundspeed for seven hours with nothing to see, Dr. van der Merwe suddenly came alive and asked, “What the heck is that?” pointing ahead and to the left. We had been flying at 9,000 feet above a solid undercast for most of the trip, and there had been nothing to see except blue sky above and a flat layer of white cloud below.

The doctor was pointing at a single round dormant volcano sticking up through the white stratus a few miles away. “That’s Mount Pico,” I said, “and it’s only 7,700 feet tall.” The mountain comes as a shock if you’re not expecting it, since virtually all the surrounding terrain isn’t terrain at all. It’s Atlantic Ocean for a thousand miles in every direction. Mount Pico is a geological beacon that you’re just over halfway across and approaching your next overnight fuel stop at Santa Maria.

I had the same surprise during the first overseas delivery of a Cessna Crusader twin from Wichita to Johannesburg many years before, and I had been just as surprised to see that volcano interrupting the horizon so far from an established land mass. 

The Azores aren’t necessarily an exciting destination in their own right, but they’re perfectly positioned if you’re headed for Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece or anywhere in the Middle East. The islands lie only 800 nm off the west coast of Portugal, and they make good stepping stones for virtually any destination in Africa.

In our case, we stopped overnight in the principal Azores isle of Santa Maria, then continued southeast to Tenerife in the Canaries, playground for Europe’s rich and famous.

So far on this trip, we had covered about 5,000 nm, but we still had nearly the same distance to go to our destination.

As the name implies, South Africa is at the far bottom of the continent, and most of the favored route is over desert or water.

After a day off in Tenerife, we topped up the Mooney for the long leg across the southwest Sahara to Abidjan, Ivory Coast. This was the first time Dr. van der Merwe had ever seen this part of Africa at a modest 9,000 feet, though he had looked down at North Africa from the flight levels on British Airways a few times. South Africa’s apartheid racial policies had just been repealed following a decades’ long uprising by the African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela, as well as from political pressure from abroad.

The next day, we landed at Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire. Because of disputes between countries in the south of the continent, the route south out of Abidjan was politically precarious. At any given time in Africa, there were as many as a half-dozen countries at war with one another, so we needed to be on top of the situation and enter our routes very cautiously. 

The next day’s stop was Libreville, Gabon, where the customs officers were very interested in the doctor, as he was the first South African citizen they had seen since the repeal of apartheid. From there, it was on to South Africa. 

Fortunately, the 800-mile leg across the Gulf of Guinea, overflying the tiny island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe, to Gabon wasn’t any problem, but after that, we had to transition through the airspace of Congo, Zaire and Angola.

Accordingly, we chose to simply not fly in their airspace at all. The only thing we knew for sure was that Angola was heavily subsidized by the Russians. There was a big airport right on the Angolan coast that we watched carefully as we passed it. As I remember, it was named Yuri Gagarin Air Base.

It was hazardous duty. When I started in the ferry business in 1977, with Globe Aero of Lakeland, Florida, we had two pilots who had to make emergency landings in Angola and were imprisoned as American spies for Namibia; the Angolans and Namibians were at war at the time. One pilot spent six months in jail in Luanda, Angola’s capital, and the other spent a year in prison. Both were eventually traded for a Russian spy held by the U.S.

Accordingly, when we left Libreville, Gabon, we headed straight out into the South Atlantic for 30 miles—well out of TOW missile range—then turned south to parallel the coast of Angola for 1,000 nm and finally turned back toward land after we passed the outflow of the Cunene River that marks the border with Namibia, which was less risky to transit. After an uneventful trip south off shore, we landed safely an hour later at Windhoek, Namibia.

From Windhoek, the final leg was an easy 800 nm across the Kalahari Desert at the bottom of the continent to Durban, South Africa.

Our trip had consumed 10 days, and we had covered almost 10,000 nm, and we were lucky. We had good weather and some strong tailwinds, and we avoided any political problems.

Cross-country flying stories from Bill Cox offer fantastic insight into what pilots face on long distance flights. Dig into our X-Country Log today.

The post The Longest Atlantic Crossing appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

You can breathe a partial sigh of relief when you depart Henderson Field on the island of Guadalcanal and point the nose southwest toward Australia that you have only one semi-short leg to go to reach the land of Oz. You’d never know it today, but Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands were the sites of some of the fiercest fighting of World War II. Most of that was in defense of the world’s largest island.

These days, the town of Honiara on Guadalcanal is just another sleepy Pacific fuel stop, the last one you’ll need if you’re destined for Cairns, Darwin, Brisbane or Sydney. In a few hours, you’ll have beaten the odds over five days and 6,000 nm on the trip from California to the world of koalas, wallabies and kangaroos.

Unlike travel to Europe or even Africa, flying to Australia in “one of those little planes” requires a certain power of will, along with a large pile of money and a tolerance for being alone in a single seat for 14-16 hours at a time.

My first trip to Australia was in 1989, flying a Cessna Skymaster from South Carolina to the giant continent-country far south of the equator. My ultimate destination was Mount Magnet in Australia’s far Western Desert, home of dozens of gold mines and thousands of wannabe millionaires.

I met my client, Blair Howe of Mount Magnet, in South Carolina, where he was closing the deal on the airplane. Howe was a bull of a man, 60 years old, probably 6’6″ tall and 300 pounds, very little of it fat. In another life, he could’ve been a WWE wrestler. When I commented that he was a big guy for such a little airplane, he laughed and said he had a normal-sized pilot back home who’d be doing all the flying, though he’d just completed his multi-engine rating (with a centerline thrust limitation) there in Charleston.

Howe had spent most of his life swinging a pick in the unforgiving, hardscrabble desert wilderness between the Great Sando Desert and the Indian Ocean.

One day, he swung the pick for the millionth time, and there it was. He sold his claim to a major mining company and decided to invest some of his millions in a mining equipment transport business, using Skymasters as his mode of delivery. My airplane was the first of what was planned to be a fleet of five Cessna 337s.

No, don’t ask me why. No cargo door, not much cargo space. More importantly, the check didn’t bounce. 

While this Skymaster might have been mildly unsuited for its mission, it did have its strong points. The unusual push/pull twin was a late-’60s development from Cessna. Old-time pilots may recall that the Skymaster’s main claim to fame was that nothing very exciting happened if an engine failed in any mode of flight. The airplane merely sags slightly from the loss of power, but there was no problem with asymmetric thrust. Other than that, it was pretty much pure airplane.

On the positive side, the thrust line of the aft engine is 8 inches higher than on the front mill, a hedge in case someone over-rotated on a dirt-runway departure.

On that initial Pacific trip, the crossing went well, with no significant weather and no squawks on the airplane. The route was standard—Santa Barbara through Honolulu, Majuro, Marshall Islands and on south to the aforementioned Guadalcanal. The weather was characteristically clear most of the way, not a typhoon in sight. I had been advised by my friend Jon Egaas that clear and 30 were fairly typical in the South Pacific, except when they weren’t. Egaas has something like 500 Atlantic and Pacific crossings (compared to my piddly 250 ocean hops), so when I need advice, I know exactly who to call.

The Skymaster and I were both eager for a few days off, and after that day’s hop to Cairns and an overnight, I would have another long leg diagonally across all of Australia to Mount Magnet, followed by a short commute down to Perth and a long ride home at 450 knots rather than 150 knots.

That day, it was a mere 1,000 additional miles over water across the Coral Sea and the Great Barrier Reef, the largest living thing visible to those talented, lucky folks cruising at 14,000 knots looking down from 300 miles up.

On this, my first full Pacific crossing, I selected a slightly lower altitude than the astronauts enjoy. Accordingly, I leveled at 1,000 feet above the Pacific for a better view of the underwater rainbow of color provided by the world’s most famous submerged tourist attraction.

I slowly merged with the Great Barrier Reef and the Aussie coast. I flew the final 300 miles at 500 feet, enjoying the spectacular views below and wishing I could’ve dropped in for some quick scuba time. I traversed the Great Barrier Reef and began to merge with the land that is northeastern Australia. The reef led me straight toward the city of Cairns.

In keeping with Cairns’ position well below the equator, the city truly is a tropical paradise, more reminiscent of Samoa than traditional equatorial vacation spots. Cairns is right on the country’s east coast, and with the mountain backdrop, you might think you’re back in Honolulu rather than 4,000 miles farther south.

As mentioned above, my final destination was Perth, perched diagonally across the world’s largest island on the far southwest corner. Regardless of whether you define Australia as an island or a continent, it’s a big one. Technically, it’s a land mass about the size of the U.S., with the population of New York City.

A day later, I decided to fly the entire final leg at low level, with overflights of Alice Springs, Ayers Rock and a brief stop at Mount Magnet before going on to Perth.

It’s about 2,000 miles by Great Circle across the island continent, but Australia is so far off the beaten path that I figured I’d best take advantage of the opportunity to see as much as possible in case I never got another chance to return. (As it turned out, I delivered another 15 airplanes—mostly new Mooneys and Caravans, plus a Shrike Commander, a 421 and a handful of Bonanzas—to points all across the country during the next 15 years.)

After I crossed the coastal mountains west of Cairns and descended back down to my 500-foot AGL cruise altitude, there wasn’t much to see, as the outback of Australia is mostly arid desert.

This is a desert unlike most that you may have seen, however. There was little sign of human habitation. There were plenty of termite mounds and scrub brush, plus a seemingly unending supply of kangaroos bobbing across the desert. 

After watching the outback track backward for two hours, I suddenly realized that I hadn’t seen a road, a car or truck, a power line, a building of any kind or anything else that might suggest I wasn’t alone in this huge, dry wasteland.

I knew Australia was famous for raising sheep and that there were huge “stations,” ranches often measured in millions of acres, where major investors raised thousands of sheep to feed the burgeoning market for wool to produce sweaters, jackets, gloves and other cold-weather outerwear sold around the world. A little irony there—cold-weather products produced in a desert for use in cold climates.

Later, I learned that the stations are so large that helicopters are the only viable method of patrolling the sheep population. Choppers are used extensively for herding sheep, and station owners aren’t so possessive of their land, so there are rarely any disputes about whose sheep are grazing on someone else’s land.

Alice Springs is roughly halfway across the country in the middle of the desert. It’s sometimes referred to as the “Gateway to Uluru,” and there’s not much reason to stop unless you need to refuel. I didn’t, so I didn’t.

It’s only 300 miles from Alice Springs down to Ayers Rock, also known by its aborigine name of Uluru. The giant Ayers is a huge sandstone hill that interrupts the desert to a height of 800 feet. All other terrain in the area is so flat that you can see Uluru from 50 miles away. That doesn’t sound too impressive, but the rock rises from such a consistently level plane that it attracts thousands of tourists as well as Aussies. The ground level at the base is about 2,000 feet, and the flat terrain and the lack of any other geologic interruption of the desert makes the sandstone mountain all the more interesting.

Uluru was practically on my flight plan, so I dialed it up on the GPS and chased the needle toward the coordinates. I had no way of knowing I’d see Uluru again many times in the next decade.

Fortunately, that first flight was in November, the beginning of Australia’s summer, so the temperature was semi-civilized. I wouldn’t dare to fly low over the Australian desert in January, when temperatures can reach 50°C, or 122°F.

I began to circle the rock at 1,000 feet AGL, but there was no traffic in sight and no comm on the radio. I got a shock coming around the backside of Uluru, however.

There was a Qantas 737 coming the opposite direction about 500 feet above me. You have no idea how large those jets look from that perspective. There was no risk of collision, and no need for an evasive maneuver, but it was still a surprise.

It seems Qantas made frequent charter trips to Uluru from Sydney and other major cities. They circle the rock in both directions, so passengers can photograph this unusual landmark standing alone in the middle of the country.

Almost before I was ready, I landed at Mount Magnet and turned the keys and logbooks over to Blair Howe’s young, enthusiastic pilot. He flew me down to Perth the next day, I commuted to Sydney and was home the following day!or was it two days later? I can never remember whether it’s a day ahead or a day behind.

When can I go back?

More Cross-Country Log Stories
A Ferry Flight To And From Copenhagen
Flying A Cessna Skylane To Argentina
A Pilot Reflect’s On The World’s Best Flight Instructor

The post Flying To Australia In A Little Plane appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

One of the frequent sources of frustration in ferry flying is that most trips are one way. It’s extremely unusual to link one international ferry flight to another in the opposite direction and eventually wind up at your starting point.

In 40 years of ferrying, I’ve made a grand total of two such round trips in ferry airplanes. The first began with a Piper Malibu from Vero Beach, Florida, to Copenhagen, Denmark. Then, it was a short commute in a Cessna Caravan across the Baltic to Hamburg, Germany, to clear up some paperwork problems, back to Copenhagen and finally launch for the USA. I had to fly back to Copenhagen to pick up a passenger who was excited to fly the Atlantic in March, not an especially friendly time to be challenging the cold waters and wet skies of that unpredictable ocean. I’ve probably been delayed for weather more times on that route than in all my trips over the rest of the world combined. It was a tough time of year to be flying westbound, in this case headed for Orlando, Florida.

The return trip wasn’t to visit Disney World. Like so many others of its type, the airplane was destined to go into package delivery service all over the Southeast.

Okay, it wasn’t a perfect round trip, since I live in Southern California. Still, it was close enough, excluding the back-and-forth between West and East Coast. Too often, the final return trip home is a wasted 12- to 17-hour airline hop back to Los Angeles, only to pack up and head back to Europe a few weeks later.

Neither of these airplanes I’d be flying would be tanked (fitted with supplemental fuel tanks in the cabin), so I’d need to rely on standard tanks, 120 gallons on the Malibu and 335 gallons on the Caravan, roughly 1,000 miles range between pit stops. Fortunately, the longest leg is only 700 nautical miles, so I should’ve enjoyed a reasonable reserve on every leg. That’s six to seven hours’ endurance on either airplane at max cruise, an hour more at economy settings.

If range wouldn’t be a problem, weather very well might be. Late winter and early spring on that route can be an especially difficult time of year because of in-flight icing. Both airplanes were certified and equipped for known ice encounters, and the Malibu offered the added advantage of pressurization to handle the flight levels.

The Caravan’s PT6A turbine engine also offered possible flight above 18,000 feet, but it’s not pressurized, and performance at flight-level altitudes is marginal. More significantly, the airplane is huge in all respects, quite a contrast to the Malibu, with long wings, a massive fuselage, struts and wheels hanging in the wind. In short, there are plenty of surfaces available to collect ice. I’ve delivered about a dozen Caravans to destinations ranging from Europe, Scandinavia and Australia to Singapore, Chile and Jordan, but the cold climate raises the most red flags.

Icing can be an especially serious problem on the Caravan. I lost a good friend back in 2006 who was flying a new Caravan from the factory in Kansas to California. He was flying in known icing conditions but was trying to stay out of the clouds to avoid icing.

The short, sad story is that Rick hit a mountain in California’s Banning Pass between two 10,000-foot peaks near Palm Springs. He was at 7,500 feet and died instantly. (In fairness, the NTSB classified the accident as a CFIT—controlled flight into terrain—rather than an icing encounter, since Rick had already announced that he was maneuvering to avoid the clouds.) At the time, the FAA was actively investigating the icing certification requirements on the Caravan as a result of 27 icing accidents in the type. The agency eventually concluded that all certification standards had been properly administered and that the existing known icing certification was proper.

Even so, Caravan pilots were justifiably cautious about inflight ice operation in the Cessna 208.

Fortunately, both airplanes were in excellent condition, all paperwork had been attended to, and the Malibu was good to go when I arrived in Vero Beach.

I departed on a typical chamber of commerce spring day in Florida and drifted up to FL230 for the run into Bangor, Maine. The tailwinds were pretty much as advertised behind the Malibu, allowing me to make the Vero Beach to Goose Bay, Canada, legs in decent IFR/VFR, including a quick stop in Bangor for U.S. Customs.

The following day, the weather in southern Greenland was on the ground and forecast to remain marginal to unflyable for a week or so. Rather than sit in the famous North Hotel in Goose Bay and watch it snow for a week, I filed IFR and headed due north to Iqaluit, Nunavut, far up at 60 degrees north near the Arctic Circle, RONd and hopped across the Labrador Sea to Sondre Stromfjord, Greenland, the former American Cold War military base that provided support to the three DEW-line radar stations out on the ice cap. Refueled and refreshed the following morning, I continued across the 10,000-foot Greenland cap to Kulusuk on the opposite coast, one of the island continent’s most picturesque airports.

Following the old fighter pilot rule that the only time you can have too much fuel is if you’re on fire, I topped off again and flew for the short, 400-nm leg across the Davis Strait to Reykjavik. I was rewarded with good weather and a forecast of minimum icing for the next day’s trip down the North Sea to Copenhagen.

I’ve written about Reykjavik many times, so I won’t bore you with vivid descriptions of what a magnificent place it is. Those of us lucky enough to fly into the downtown airport, designated BIRK, would rather be stuck in Iceland than in Hawaii or Tahiti any day. (The local joke about Iceland among pilots is that Iceland is mostly green, and Greenland is mostly ice.)

The weather went down again coming out of Copenhagen headed back north to Iceland in the Caravan. Fortunately, I was able to top most of the nasty clouds where, as I’ve been advised many times, the ice gods hold their parties.

My passenger wasn’t happy about the lack of visibility and generally poor weather, but I explained that this was the wrong time of year for a sightseeing trip, and I needed to get across the Atlantic as safely and expeditiously as possible. I wasn’t about to press my luck in icing, but I needed to fly when I deemed it reasonable and prudent. The passenger was the son-in-law of thenew owner in Florida, so I needed to tread lightly.

Even so, neither airplane posed any maintenance or avionics problems, and the two airplanes handled ice admirably.

The next morning posed a potential new problem. A volcano in Iceland named Eyjafjallajokull (I think—no, I can’t pronounce it) was throwing up clouds of volcanic ash, and there was some debate about closing some airspace between the Faroes and Iceland.

More than incidentally, I was almost directly into the wind, and it soon became apparent I couldn’t make Iceland the following day. The alternate was Vagar in the Faroe Islands. I had been in there a few times, and I knew the airport was built in a small valley with hills on all sides. I descended through the overcast and broke out with relatively good visibility.

On the ground at Vagar, my passenger found another pilot in the hotel restaurant who was heading down toward the British Isles, not that far from Copenhagen. He came back to my table, shook hands, and said he didn’t realize how tough weather would be on this trip, apologized and said he really wanted to SEE the stops along the way, not stare out the window at clouds.

I continued the next day to Iceland while the volcano grumbled and coughed more ash but eventually shut down until the major eruption of 2010.

After Iceland, the Caravan trip was an anticlimax, with stops in Narsarsuaq, Goose Bay and Bangor for customs again. The Caravan trundled along at a consistent 155 to 160 knots true, less the seasonal headwinds that slowed the airplane to more like 130 to 140 knots.

Ah yes, the second round trip was a Cessna 340 out of Dortmund, Germany, to Victor Aviation in Palo Alto, California, for a major resurrection of all systems. That roundtrip occurred in late spring and summer, when ice was not a problem.

I was grateful for that.

The post A Ferry Flight To And From Copenhagen appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

The client called from Buenos Aires and asked if I could find him a gently used, late-model Cessna Skylane, get it thoroughly inspected, annualed and have the avionics brought up to date, then ferry the airplane from my hemisphere to his.

For better or worse, I get such calls for brokering and ferry delivery every year or two, and it’s always a delight to watch an airplane transition from a 5.0 to a 9.0 or even an occasional 10.0. The process can sometimes be long and demanding, not to mention frustrating, but since I’ll be flying the end product 4,000 or even 10,000 miles on what amounts to a comprehensive flight test and delivery, the end product had better be good.       

I once upgraded a 1976 Piper Lance—basically a retractable Cherokee Six 300 with the original low tail—with new paint, a Corinthian leather interior, an overhauled engine, a panel full of updated avionics and dozens of little details meticulously attended to. When the job was finished, the total cost of the airplane had almost exactly doubled, but the client in Nairobi, Kenya, was happy.

My Argentine client’s plane was next up, and it took three months, but after a comprehensive search, I found an excellent candidate in West Texas. I had it inspected, annualed and tanked, brought all avionics up to date, and launched for Brownsville and points south.           

I deliberately added a larger ferry tank than normally installed so I could overfly virtually all of Mexico in one leg. The violence of the drug cartels, especially in conjunction with aircraft theft and pilot assassination, made safety a major consideration. I’d easily have enough fuel to fly nonstop from Brownsville to Tapachula, on the border with Guatemala.

After Tapachula, the drug kidnapping threat was greatly reduced, and the flying was easier. Second destination was San Jose, Costa Rica, a country without a standing army but a huge and highly efficient police force. Costa Rica is a beautiful country, and, perhaps more important, it’s relatively safe.

Navigation on the high road south is simple: Keep the ocean on the right. “My” temporary Skylane was nicely equipped for the trip to Buenos Aires—dual Garmin 530 navigators, an HSI and a Stormscope plus an STEC autopilot, so my job was mostly to stay awake and make an occasional position report in case anyone cared.      

ATC is fairly casual south of the U.S. border, so if you call and no one answers, it usually means the controllers are having coffee.

After Costa Rica, you can either take the western coastal route south or you can opt for the jungle route straight down the center of the continent. The latter is by far the least desirable as you’ll need to deal with customs and immigration in places such as Columbia, Guyana, Venezuela and of course, Brazil.

Long before this trip, I had been tempted to fly through Venezuela to get a look at Angel Falls, the tallest waterfall in the world. Angel Falls came to light only in 1933, when it was chanced upon by pilot Jimmie Angel (seriously). It has a total vertical drop of more than 3,200 feet. I had talked to one ferry pilot who had overflown the falls, and he commented that the only bad news was that the spray thrown up by the water splashing onto the river below very often obscured the waterfall and the mountain behind it completely. Still, Angel Falls is practically inaccessible by any other method. The waterfall is so remote that hiking in through the dense, snake-infested jungle would be very dangerous.  

The leg from San Jose to Guayaquil, Ecuador, across the Gulf of Panama, is the only overwater hop necessary on the trip south to Buenos Aires down the Pacific Coast.

If you’re willing to fly the eastern route across the full length of the Brazilian Amazon, you’re welcome to do so, but be aware that many pilots have simply disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again. I’ll take my chances over the Gulf of Panama.

We’ve written about Guayaquil, Ecuador, before, but not about the next possible stop: Lima, Peru. Lima is a picturesque city with beautiful public squares and a statue or two of its founders seemingly in every one. It’s also one of the more expensive stops in South America. The airport is located right on the coast and prone to frequent fog and bad weather. Landing and parking fees are high, and the FBO advised visiting pilots to remove ties and identifying insignias (hang tags, shoulder bars, flight crew hats and anything else that might designate them as pilots) and only ride in taxis approved by the FBO.

So, airplanes with the range often would overfly all of Peru and stop instead in Arica, Chile, 2 miles south of the Peru/Chile border. You can see the highway customs station as you approach the airport, and pilots entering the country at Arica are driven back to the road station for customs and immigration service. 

Arica is a great stop with friendly attendants, reasonable fees for landing, parking and fuel and excellent flying weather year-round.

The town is sometimes called “The City of Endless Spring” because it’s located on Chile’s northern coast at the beginning of the Atacama Desert, one of the driest places in the world. Much of the Atacama hasn’t recorded measurable rain for 400 years.

Winds off the South Pacific are light and rarely too warm since they originate over the ocean. The sky is usually brilliantly clear, and at the time of my flight, the now-famous Atacama Cosmology Telescope, one of the most powerful in the world, was under construction.

Indeed, after some unstable political problems several decades ago, Chile has now become one of the safest countries in South America.

South of Arica, the terrain turns dramatically uphill as the Andes reassert their dominance over the bottom half of the continent. In contrast, the American Sierra Nevada and Rockies and the European Alps are dramatic and beautiful, but they shrink to relative insignificance by comparison. Fly south paralleling the Andes, watching the huge mountains top 15,000 feet, then 20,000 feet and, finally, reach for true nosebleed height just under 23,000 feet.

I’ve never seen the Himalayas that rise to 29,000 feet, the tallest mountains on Earth, but the Andes are just as if not more impressive in their own right. They spring full-grown from the near-sea-level beaches of the Pacific a few miles from the 4.5-mile-tall peaks of Cerro Aconcagua and Cerro Tupungato, the two tallest mountains in the Western Hemisphere, barely 30 miles east of Santiago, Chile.

In contrast, the Himalayas rise from the Tibetan Plateau, a high, irregular table of land that starts at 16,000 feet, so the vertical rise in the Himalayas is “only” 13,000 feet to the summit of Everest.

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Santiago, Chile’s capital city, is the last stop before Buenos Aires. Just as flying south demands little more than following the coast toward Tierra del Fuego, crossing the Andes abeam Santiago demands following the Pan American Highway as it zigzags uphill toward the two monster peaks that look down on the pass. If you’re driving, the highway passes through a tunnel that transits between Chile and Argentina. If you’re flying East, as I was, you know you’re in Argentina when the mountain drops away precipitously toward the treeless pampas far below. Mendoza, Argentina, is the first city in Argentina, and your trip is nearly over.

In order to clear the Andes, you’ll need to manage about 12,000 feet to top the lowest point in the mountain ridge between countries. Incidentally, that’s an important bit of information, and it’s almost never on the chart.

East of the Andes, the terrain slowly descends as the Patagonian Steppe slopes downhill toward Buenos Aires and the Atlantic Ocean.

The view was familiar. Several years before, I had delivered a Cessna 207—essentially a stretched Cessna 206—to Schlumberger Oil Exploration at Rincón de los Sauces, Argentina. Schlumberger had been drilling for oil in the southern Patagonian Desert, and the eight-seat (okay, six-plus-two) Cessna single solved its problem of transporting men and equipment in and out of the short, dirt strips in the oil country that stretches south to Neuquén, Argentina.

A few hours after clearing the Andes, I was on the ground in Buenos Aires with a happy customer who promised to call me in a few years when he was ready to step up to a twin, probably a pressurized 414.

Check out more Cross-Country Log flying stories from ferry pilot and Senior Editor Bill Cox.

The post Flying A Cessna Skylane To Argentina appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

Like so many of our readers, I started dreaming of a career in aviation at an early age, specifically 13 years old. I fantasized about becoming a Naval aviator, a fighter pilot and a tailhooker, capable of takeoff and landing on an aircraft deck in as little as 300 feet. Unfortunately, no military option was available to me because of a partial hearing loss in one ear.

As a result, I took my early training the “wrong” way, one lesson every few weeks when money was available, and with a variety of instructors. In some cases, I was even forced to fly different airplanes, not so terrible a fate, but it was tough to make progress when radios, instruments and controls varied with each trainer.

The ideal would’ve been to fly at a school with an established curriculum, taking flight lessons two or three times a week, flying with the same instructor each time and in the same airplane.

As usual, the probable cause of my relatively flat learning curve was simply money—more accurately, the lack of it. For that reason, it took me 67 hours and 18 months to earn my private ticket, rather than the prescribed 40 hours and one year.

The next three licenses/ratings on my list were the commercial, instrument and multi-engine tickets, and I was determined not to allow those courses of study to drag out over a period of years.

For that reason, I went looking for the best instructor I could find at or near any airport within 15 miles of my home base of Long Beach, California. I began canvassing all the flight schools, looking for the best of the best.

The instructor I found was the chief pilot for a major airline, type-rated in practically every airliner you’ve ever heard of and also licensed to fly hot-air balloons, gliders, seaplanes and helicopters. Gary was an instructor in many of those types.

“When I started work on the commercial ticket, Gary imparted dozens of tips I might not have received from a less-experienced instructor.”

Despite (or perhaps because of) his considerable qualifications, Gary was more into the fun side of flying than the business of piloting the multi-turbofan airliners he flew on the job. “Even in those early days, most of the jets were so automated in operation and limited in maneuverability that they weren’t much fun to fly. Sure, they were often more comfortable, but I’ll take a Marchetti over a Boeing any day,” he used to say.

When I found Gary and enlisted him to guide me through the commercial, instrument and multi-engine training, I had already accumulated about 190 hours and was delivering single-engine Bellancas, Pipers and Cessnas to California from Minnesota, Florida and Kansas, respectively, so we didn’t have that long to go before I’d be qualified to take the commercial test.

Gary had a friend in Long Beach who owned a well-used but also well-kept Piper Apache 160, and the owner agreed to let us use it for part of the instrument and all of the multi-engine training.

As every pilot who has studied for the commercial ticket knows, the flight portion of the exam relies heavily on simply refining many of the same maneuvers and techniques learned during private training, and I practiced on my own for those exercises.

When I started work on the commercial ticket, Gary imparted dozens of tips I might not have received from a less-experienced instructor. Some were minor things that might seem insignificant, while others were potentially life-savers.

A minor one that had the potential for trouble was part of the preflight walkaround. Gary was a stickler for a comprehensive inspection on the ground, especially on trainers that were often well-used and sometimes put away with new squawks unreported.

One of the most obscure but potentially problematic was related to static ports, those tiny pinholes usually mounted on the aft fuselage sides or some other location where airflow is relatively uninterrupted. I was in the habit of running a finger across every static port to make certain it was clear during the preflight until the day I saw Gary shaking his head.

When I asked the cause of his concern, he answered that most people exude some minor amount of body oil from their skin, especially in warm weather, and that could effectively block part of the static port and cause incorrect readings on the altimeter and VSI. His correction was simple: “Look, but don’t touch.”

He also coached me that scanning for other traffic in flight is a serious business that should demand your full attention, not just something you do when all other functions are attended to.

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The military places heavy emphasis on looking for other traffic in an organized manner, and that becomes more critical as speed, altitude and closure rates increase with higher-performance aircraft utilized in commercial operation.

“First,” he told me, “remember that military pilots often fly in close proximity to one another, and that means you’ll need to be familiar with join-ups and being part of a formation.

“Civilian pilots don’t do that on a regular basis, so you need to develop the ability to find traffic at both short and long range. Scanning by segments rather than simply sweeping your eyes across the horizon. Pick a starting point—usually the greatest threat is straight ahead. Give your eyes a chance to focus,” Gary added. “Then, shift your vision to another quadrant, 30 to 45 degrees left or right.”

General Chuck Yeager used to say that his remarkable ability to shoot down enemy aircraft was mostly dependent upon his excellent vision and his scanning techniques that allowed him to spot the enemy long before they could spot him. He said, “In the civilian world, just as in aerial combat, the enemy is the unseen aircraft, and an organized scan can make the difference between a successful flight and a disaster.”

One of the most unusual tricks we tried during the combined multi/instrument instruction was a zero-zero takeoff—flown under the hood, of course. Fortunately, Long Beach has a diagonal, airline-style, 200-foot-wide runway, 30-12, so there was some margin for error.

The technique was simple but challenging: Line up on the exact centerline, set the DG to 300 degrees, bring the power in VERY slowly to avoid having torque pull you to the left, and watch the DG like a hawk. Any deviation from the primary heading needed to be corrected immediately, all the more as speed increased toward rotation.

The first few of these were predictably shaky, but I was determined to hold the proper tolerance to liftoff. Gary wouldn’t allow me to get too far off the centerline before he’d cue me with a comment such as, “A little more right rudder,” or simply have me look up. I actually came to enjoy the challenge of zero-zero takeoffs, trying to nail the Apache to the big 30 on the DG, and that was to serve me well during pure multi-engine training. (Before you ask, no, I’ve never made a zero-zero takeoff in actual conditions.)

Practically every departure in the Apache would involve a power loss and a full stop and taxi-back for another attempt. Gary used to say, “You need to concentrate on maintaining the centerline because if I see you’re off to one side, you can almost be guaranteed to lose the engine on that side.” Of course, I never knew when he was going to throw me a curve and fail the opposite engine.

Unlike some instructors, Gary was dedicated to making learning to fly as simple and enjoyable as possible. When I had become frustrated with what seemed like the impossibility of dealing with an engine failure under the hood, Gary would always reassure me with a calm comment such as, “Take it easy on, Bill. You’re trying to do too many things at once.”

“It was obvious Gary loved instructing. He took great delight when I conquered a problem, yet he never beat me over the head with my mistakes.”

Gary taught me an interesting trick to illustrate just how much time I actually had during a departure with a simulated engine failure, a circuit of the pattern and an ILS approach under the hood.

He suggested I take an old Los Angeles local chart and map out a typical IFR circuit from takeoff to landing, including speed and time marker for every function I needed to perform in the Piper Apache. For example, power up and initial climb to 1,000 feet at an average 90 mph would cover 3 miles and demand about two minutes, during which I’d need to configure the airplane for climb (retract the gear, raise the flaps and sync the props), meanwhile watching for Gary to reduce power to simulate an engine failure.

When my time/speed/distance and task chart was complete, I discovered that Gary was correct, big surprise. There was plenty of time to get everything done without feeling rushed if I organized my efforts.

It was obvious Gary loved instructing. He took great delight when I conquered a problem, yet he never beat me over the head with my mistakes.

I lost track of Gary after completing the commercial/multi- instrument tickets, but we crossed paths again at a local airport restaurant 20 years later. He had long since retired from the airline business, but he asked if I had realized any other ratings.

I admitted I had but that I had never even come close to matching his accomplishments in the sky.

Always the gentleman, Gary smiled and commented, “That’s okay, Bill. You’ll always have me on one count. I guarantee you, I’ll never fly a single-engine airplane across an ocean.”

Cross-country flying stories from Bill Cox offer fantastic insight into what pilots face on long distance flights. Dig into our X-Country Log today.

The post A Pilot Reflects On The World’s Best Flight Instructor appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

Before you read further, rest assured that this isn’t a treatise on how to ditch an airplane. In 40 years and 250 trips delivering new and used aircraft across one (or, in some case, both) of the world’s largest oceans, I’ve only lost one airplane—a six-seat Piper Lance, and that was in one of the driest places on Earth, the southern Sahara Desert of Ethiopia, Africa.

On that trip from Santa Monica to a planned destination of Nairobi, Kenya, I almost wished I had been over water. When the engine failed, the blistering desert below was anything but flat and level; no roads or even game trails, nothing that passed for an imaginary runway, just rocks, sand dunes and acacia trees, all baking at 114° Fahrenheit. At least an ocean landing would’ve been cooler.

Long story short, the airplane was totaled in the crash, but I must have done something right, as the owner and I walked away without a scratch.

Flying over water didn’t come naturally to me. In 1977, I was doing a story on how Piper moves airplanes from Vero Beach to points European. With the help of Phil Waldman, managing director of Globe Aero Ltd. in Lakeland, Florida, I flew a new Seneca from Lakeland to the Paris Air Show at Le Bourget Airport, where the Seneca joined a group of new Pipers on static display.

I was a little apprehensive about my first Atlantic crossing, 1,800 nm across one of the angriest and least-hospitable oceans on the planet. Typical water temperatures in late May rarely rise above 50 degrees F in mid summer. In winter, the water temp drops far below that level, down to 30 degrees or less. (Moving salt water can remain liquid well below normal freezing level.)

Additionally, the North Atlantic off Newfoundland, below Greenland and Iceland, is infamous for fierce storms that can swell ocean waves to 30- to 40-foot crests.

In other words, if you’re forced to ditch in the Atlantic at any time of year, no matter how complete and expensive your complement of survival gear, you have only three chances of survival: slim, fat and none. 

One ferry pilot, Harry Rhule, was flying a Twin Comanche home to the U.S. from Europe in November and had a tank fail to feed during the relatively short 650-nm leg from Wick, Scotland, to Reykjavik, Iceland. He had about 30 minutes of fuel remaining when he maydayed, but there was no land close enough to reach. He had passed the Faroe Islands, and there was nothing but water between him and Iceland.

Harry finally reached a Bondurant turboprop that was over-flying the same route at FL 200. Harry explained his problem, and the Bondurant pilot suggested he ditch while he still had some power remaining rather than attempt to dead-stick into the North Atlantic with few control options.

The Bandit pilot dropped down to Harry’s altitude and spotted the little Twin Comanche above the waves. He also saw a cruise ship a few miles ahead and directed Harry toward it.

Unfortunately, there was no way to talk to the cruise ship, as aviation and marine radio traffic use different frequencies. (I used to carry a portable marine radio for that specific reason.)

In desperation, the Bandit pilot circled the ship and buzzed it several times, trying to get it to stop. He finally succeeded—the ship’s lookout spotted the Twin Comanche and the ship captain turned his vessel toward the airplane.

Harry had managed to get into his survival dry suit before he hit the water, but the waves were running 15 feet at the crests, and the ditching was very rough. Harry lost his raft in the ditching and was left bobbing in the Atlantic Ocean with a water temperature later estimated at about 36° F.

Harry said later that he couldn’t believe how cold the water was. He said the 15 minutes the rescue boat took to reach him seemed like an hour.

A very cold Harry Rhule emerged from the experience unhurt but wiser and determined to buy a portable marine radio before his next trip.

Many years after Harry’s brush with eternity, I was flying a new Piper Arrow straight across from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to Shannon, Ireland, and I was reporting my position through a relay courtesy of TWA. When the Trans World captain finished the relay back to Gander, he asked me questions about my airplane and my sanity.

“How many engines on an Arrow?” he questioned. That’s not as elementary as you might think. Many airline captains cycle through the military directly to the airlines with little general aviation experience.

“Just one, a four-cylinder 200-hp Lycoming,” I answered.

“Do you have any radio navigation aids to help you determine position?” he asked.

“Just an ADF tuned to an LF commercial broadcast station near Shannon and a flight log with lots of numbers,” I replied. 

“I see from your position report that you’re down at 9,000 feet in the clouds.  Are you picking up any ice? Do you have de-ice equipment on board that little airplane?”

“Yeah, I have pitot heat,” I joked, “but I just flew through some light rime a while back, not too bad. It’s pretty much sublimated now.”

The TWA captain chewed on that for a while, then said, “Better you than me, buddy. I couldn’t do this job if I didn’t have four turbine engines.”

The captain’s point about number of engines over the ocean brings up an interesting question. How many are optimum? If you’re flying behind only one and that one quits, you’ll obviously have to ditch.

But don’t imagine that having two engines provides ultimate protection. Very few general aviation aircraft can manage an ocean crossing, especially on the Pacific, without supplemental fuel tanks.

On a big twin such as a 421, Duke or Chieftain, you may have as much as 250 gallons of ferry fuel installed in the cabin. That can put you as much as 25% over gross (about 1,400 pounds in a 421), and few twins will maintain any altitude at all if an engine fails at that weight. (The FAA issues Special Airworthiness Certificates to ferry aircraft that must operate at abnormal gross weights.)

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Conversely, having two engines can be a major advantage in some types of emergencies. Since we virtually always have ferry tanks installed on every oceanic flight, we make it a point to test fuel feed at near-cruise power on each tank before departing. If you fail to do that and one tank refuses to feed, you may discover too late that you don’t have sufficient fuel to complete the trip if one tank refuses to feed.

One pilot headed for Hawaii failed to test each ferry tank in a twin on the ground in Santa Barbara before departing for Honolulu and discovered the problem as he was approaching the Big Island of Hawaii. He knew he couldn’t make land at any power setting with both engines running, but he also knew the airplane had burned down to relatively light weight near the end of the trip and could probably maintain altitude on one engine. He also theorized that the airplane would actually realize slightly better fuel specifics with one mill feathered.

He shut down one engine and snuck into Hilo on the north side of the Big Island with what turned out to be 10 gallons remaining.

Another pilot, Ray Clamback of Sydney, Australia, one of the world’s most experienced ferry pilots, went in the water halfway between the Big Island and Christmas Island in the Pacific in October 2004.

Ray was on his way to Australia in a near-new 182 and began to lose oil pressure 600 miles south of Kona.

As it happened, I was flying the same leg 50 miles ahead of Clamback. I was driving a freshly reconditioned Shrike Commander to Cairns, Australia, and I was talking to Ray about his new HF radio, when he suddenly said, “Stand by. I’m losing oil pressure.”

Nothing Ray did alleviated the problem, and it soon became obvious he was going into the Pacific.

Like Harry Rhule above, Ray made a semi-successful ditching, but the fixed-gear Cessna “submarined” on touchdown (went inverted), and Ray lost his raft and all other survival gear except the vest he was wearing when the airplane nosed into the water.

“When the airplane hit the water, it flipped end-over-end, and I was lucky to get out at all,” Ray said later. The Skylane went down, leaving Ray alone halfway out on the 1,000-mile leg to Christmas.

Well, not exactly.

Clamback had another Skylane flying with him, and pilot Lyn Gray marked his spot until the U.S. Coast Guard C-130 arrived overhead and dropped survival gear. Ray was picked up later by a container ship headed for Melbourne.   

Though both Harry Rhule and Ray Clamback lost all their ferry gear in their ditchings, the big question is always how much survival gear is enough. I know of some pilots who skimp on the major investment necessary to cover all eventualities. Many of them are no longer with us.

It’s important to remember that you’ll need to get all that equipment home somehow after you deliver the airplane. An HF radio, two- or four-man life raft, die markers, flares, portable GPSs, survival rations, a fishing kit, water and a myriad of other items can increase the cost of getting into the ferry business by thousands of dollars.

It’s important to remember, however, that it all may be worth the investment if it only saves your life once.

The post Flying Over The Ocean appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

I had just dropped the keys and logbooks for the new Caravan on the South African Cessna dealer’s desk when his phone rang. He answered it and motioned me to sit.

He spoke for a few seconds, then said, “Well, he just walked into my office,” and commented, “It’s for you.”

“Bill, this is Wilfred Otto at Henschel Flugzeug Piper in Kassel, Germany. Hope you had a good trip in from Florida. What are your plans now?”

I told him I’d be catching the first flight I could find headed back to California.

“How’d you like to fly back to Florida, pick up the first Piper Mirage in Vero Beach instead and ferry it to Germany?”

Silly question. Four hours later, I was sitting on a British Airways 747, lifting off from Johannesburg for London with connections to Orlando.

Two days after that, I fired up the first customer’s Mirage in Lakeland and launched for Bangor, Maine. It was mid-January and, just as on the Caravan trip a week earlier, Maine was in the grip of a -30-degree F cold snap. Of course, Bangor was totally dark when I arrived. At least the weather was decent, though it was bitterly cold.

When I turned onto the 45 inbound to the Bangor Airport and selected gear down, the left main and nosewheel extended normally, but the right main refused to lock down.

Probably just a little stiff in the frigid, winter sky of northern Maine, I reasoned. I tried cycling the wheels several times, but the right main gear stubbornly refused to lock down. I advised the tower of my problem and asked for a low altitude fly-by. The tower reported that the right gear looked to be about three-quarters down but definitely wasn’t locked.

Hmmm. I wasn’t about to put Mr. Otto’s premier Mirage on its belly, or, worse, try to bounce it on the left main gear and hope the right would oblige and swing out and lock down of its own accord.

As I droned around a few miles from the airport, trying to think of something clever, I remembered a story I had heard at Oshkosh a few years before about a pilot in a warbird who had a similar problem and had reasoned his way out of the situation.

In that case, it was the left gear that refused to lock into position. The pilot had tried the emergency procedure without success and was faced with a similar situation to mine. Since the wheels extended outboard, he theorized that he needed to find a way to “G” the airplane in a manner that would exert a download to push the left main gear toward the wingtip. The only way he could do that was to put the airplane into a left, semi-knife edge attitude, then slam the top (right) rudder to the floor. That would cause the airplane to yaw hard right, but since attitude was already in a vertical left-knife edge, the result would be a download on the left main gear that might help push the left wheel outboard toward the low wingtip.

He tried this trick several times, and to his utter amazement, it worked. The left gear light finally blinked on, and the pilot saved the situation by landing the warbird safely.

Accordingly, I decided to try the same technique on the new Mirage. I banked hard right, established a near-90-degree bank and slammed the top (left) rudder to the floor. The nose arced hard up, but still no right gear light. I tried it six times, punching the top rudder as hard as I could, and the right green gear light finally flicked on.

Cross-country flying stories from Bill Cox offer fantastic insight into what pilots face on long distance flights. Dig into our X-Country Log today.

Convinced that I was now a full-fledged superhero, I called the tower, returned to Bangor airport and landed normally. Once on the ground, I taxied to the FBO, ordered fuel and advised the desk manager that I would be back in the morning for some maintenance.

The next day, the service manager’s first question was, “Did you come in nonstop from Florida?” When I answered “Yes,” he smiled and said he had seen the problem before.

 “We used a different kind of gear lubricant for the extreme cold temperatures we encounter in Maine, and that usually solves the problem,” he told me.

They had towed “my” Mirage into the shop two hours before I had arrived, so the airplane was up to room temperature. Next, they put it on jacks, lifted it off the floor, lubed the gear and cycled it several times. Everything worked perfectly, of course. The crucial test would come at my next stop, Goose Bay, Labrador, Canada, where I knew it would be even colder than at Bangor.

Sure enough, when I arrived at Goose Bay, the temp was closer to -40 degrees F, not an uncommon occurrence in deep winter at 61 degrees north. I held my breath and flipped the gear switch to the down position.

Again, no right green. Okay, at least this time, I had a rough idea of a trick that might work again. I advised the tower and turned back out of the pattern away from the lights of Goose Bay Airport to see if I could get some assistance from gravity.

If the folks in Bangor had been right about the nature of the problem, i.e., extreme cold temperatures, the same technique should work a second time.

Roll hard right, push hard top rudder. Nothing. Try again, still nothing. Again, no reaction. Again and again. Finally, after 10 progressively more violent, frustrated stabs at the top rudder, the right gear light finally illuminated.

I advised the tower that the problem was solved, and the controller immediately cleared me to land.

Father Nature wasn’t quite finished with me, however. The runway had recently been plowed clear of snow, but here was a sheen of ice complicating matters. Just when I thought I was back to normal operation, both main gear brakes turned out to be frozen solid. The airplane touched down normally and immediately began sliding on the ice. Fortunately, I was somewhere near the centerline, so I managed to get it stopped before I lost complete directional control.

Again, I advised the tower of the problem and they notified Woodward Aviation to send out a goat to tow me clear of the runway.  

In the shop again the next morning, it was the same diagnosis, extreme cold weather. This shop also lubed the gear, cycled it up and down several times and pronounced the airplane good to go.  

After another day of delay, I finally hit upon a plan that might solve the problem. I filled the 50-gallon ferry tank in the back of the airplane and filed for FL210 direct to Prince Christian Sound (an NDB on the southernmost tip of Greenland), direct to BIRK (Reykjavik).

That’s just under 1400 nm, but as usual in winter, the winds at 60 degrees north were wailing at 40-50 knots out of the west up high. With 170 gallons on board, I would have an easy seven hours’ endurance at probably 250 knots groundspeed and for a range of 1,750 nm.

I had been through Iceland several dozen times, often in winter, and I knew the influence of the relatively warm Gulf Stream kept Iceland unusually warm for a country near the Arctic Circle. Reykjavik rarely saw temperatures colder than 0 degrees F. I decided to fly at normal altitude for most of the trip, then ask ATC for an early descent to warmer air an hour out of Reykjavik to let the gear warm up and preclude any extension problems.

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Predictably, the flight went well for the first four hours at 21,000 feet. I called the controller and asked for the lowest altitude he could approve. He dropped me down to 7,000 feet, which put me right in the middle of clouds.

The temperature aloft was still very cold, but he advised that the floor of IFR airspace over the ocean was 5,500 feet. I agreed to cancel IFR and report position as I neared the joint U.S./Icelandic ait base at Keflavik.

I descended in solid darkness out of the clouds, but there was nothing to see. It was black on black.

I finally leveled at 1,000 feet and advised the controller that I would pull back to 2,000 to cross Keflavik and continue to Reykjavik 30 miles further inland along the coast.

The temperature was warming nicely 100 nm out of Keflavik.  I did notice a slight blue/green tinge to the airspace below. That seemed a little unusual.

It suddenly dawned on me what the slight color was. I punched off the autopilot and pulled back hard on the yoke. The Mirage climbed to 2,000 feet in about 30 seconds.

Once my heartbeat dropped back to normal levels and I fully realized what had almost happened, I called up Iceland Control and asked them for their current altimeter setting.

“November flight, Keflavik altimeter is 28.96.” I had been flying a few feet above the water without knowing it.

When I descended out of FL210 and dropped below 18,000 feet, I had either forgotten to reset the altimeter from standard to local, or the controller had forgotten to remind me. Either way, it was my error. The difference was nearly a full inch, a 1,000-foot error. I had heard about the bioluminescence in ocean waves at night, but I had never seen it before.

I’ll never know how low I was or how close I came to dumping the new Mirage into the ocean, and that’s probably just as well.

Of course, the gear swung down normally in Reykjavik and on the following day’s flight into Kassel, Germany.

I survived a very stupid and very basic mistake, and you can bet I’ll never make that transgression again. I’ll find some new ones.

The post Ice, Cold Weather Present Gear Problems For Veteran Pilot appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

Just a couple of feet below me, the world is not a friendly place. A blanket of black sky miles deep, frozen by winter and twisted by the Rocky Mountains, envelopes the landscape as this small plane flies high above it all.

For me, seated upon crushed velour and snug in my metal cocoon, the world is a safer place. I listen to the reassuring drone of my engines, turbochargers glowing soft orange through the louvers of twin cowlings.

The Rockies are geologically the youngest high terrain in the southern 48 states. They spring, knife-like, from the semi-high plateau of Arizona/Utah to the west without the benefit of foothills and drop off nearly as precipitously to the east, bordering a 1,000-mile expanse of prairie, the American Great Plains.

Yet I fear no evil, for I’m at least a mile above the tallest of the local peaks. From the darkness below—soft starlight and moon glow the only illumination—is sprinkled with occasional city lights, very occasional. Level ground is hard to find in this neighborhood.

For those flying to or from it, canyon-captured Telluride has only one way in and one way out, unless, that is, like me, you’re cruising far above the steep, granite walls that hem it in. Fortunately, I am high above Telluride and even nearly 10,000-foot Leadville, America’s highest municipal airport. Both runways recede behind me as I continue east. My strobes flashing into the dark, I see Pikes Peak barely emerging from the black of mountain night, with an occasional streak of what I know are headlights winding uphill toward the mountain’s 14,115-foot apex.

I know exactly where those cars are going, yet I wonder if any of their drivers look up at my strobes and speculate on my destination. It’s not likely, but if they did, I would wager none of them would guess it’s Helsinki. As I travel east, the mountains abruptly fall away, and the lights of Denver overpower the night to the north as I emerge above the high plains, slowly sloping downhill toward the Midwest. Though two-dozen instruments paint impressions of my tailwind-assisted, 230-knot groundspeed, and a half-dozen radios confirm that I’m now far from where I was and closer to where I want to be, I seem to be suspended in a silent embrace, detached from the reality of solid ground.

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If the weather holds and the winds continue to rip from the west, the little Seneca I fly toward Wichita tonight and Bangor tomorrow will eventually alight in Finland in three days.

This is too easy, it occurs to me. I should be paying the client for the privilege of flying his airplane to Finland, not the other way around. I decide not to mention it.

How did we come so far so fast, I wonder behind the gentle chaff of my oxygen mask? Can it really be only a little over a century since humans first flew powered aircraft? It seems somehow a monstrous joke that the most significant steps forward in human mobility took something like 700 years to achieve; yet, once realized, progress in the new discipline of flight has been nothing short of exponential.

Between the 13th and early 20th century, the cleverest form of transportation known was the back of a horse, plodding along at perhaps 7 mph; yet today, many prop-piston, general aviation aircraft achieve a 200-knot cruise speed on a regular basis, and corporate air travel is gaining on 550 knots, nearly Mach 1.0, while the airlines have already pegged out at Mach 2.0 with British/French Concorde. It seems everyone is gradually discovering the advantages of traveling fast and high. Business and professional men and women are beginning to take airplanes for granted, as the safety record of aircraft and the pilots who fly them improves on practically an annual basis.

Of course, I recognize that the readers of this magazine are more than a little prejudiced. I’ve been addicted to airplanes since the age of 13, when I first looked over the fence at Merrill Field in Anchorage, Alaska, and dreamed of someday flying Cubs, Porterfields, Luscombes and perhaps even the one Navion in the local CAP squadron.

Since then, I’ve owned a half-dozen different models over 50 years and have logged 15,000 hours. That’s not nearly enough. I still haven’t got it right. Given the option, I’d fly general aviation practically every time to pretty much everywhere.

Despite what you see in the media, private aircraft are safer and easier to fly than ever. Many of “those little airplanes” are routinely sold with shoulder harness that feature built-in air bags and seats constructed to absorb 26 G vertical impacts. These days, some airplanes are even being fitted with whole-aircraft parachutes (including one small, private jet) designed to lower the aircraft and its passengers to the ground with minimal or no injuries.

Along the way, GPS has relegated navigation to pilot’s play, and flat-panel displays have simplified situational awareness to the point where even newbies have to work hard to get lost. Flying airplanes is no longer the mind-boggling task it used to be.

All of the above might be construed as preaching to the converted, the ravings of a CAP Cadet who never grew up and dreamed of becoming an astronaut, the absolute, unchallenged peak of the aviation pyramid.

Speaking of which, as every aviation buff must know by now, last July marked the 50th anniversary of the most momentous event in aviation history, some say in the history of humankind.

Against all odds, astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins flew a quarter of a million miles to the moon in a spacecraft consisting of some 2 million parts, virtually all of which had to work if the crew was to return home safely. Armstrong and Aldrin descended to the moon’s surface in the lunar lander, appropriately named Eagle, collected some 47 pounds of rocks and surface material, while some 600 million people, the largest TV audience in history, watched the video broadcast, live and in glorious black-and-white. The astronauts then rejoined Mike Collins, who had been orbiting overhead, and returned to Earth a few days later as if they did this sort of thing all the time.

If the weather holds and the winds continue to rip from the west, the little Seneca I fly toward Wichita tonight and Bangor tomorrow will eventually alight in Finland in three days.

During the next few years, six more missions went to the moon, and another 10 astronauts descended to the lunar surface and carried out extensive scientific research. It may be a while before such an adventure becomes available to the pilot/non-pilot public, but who knows. NASA recently announced it will soon be possible for anyone who can pony up $60 million and pass the physical to travel to the International Space Station, spending a few days floating in zero G and witnessing the Earth rotating below at one revolution every 90 minutes. Could SpaceX founder Elon Musk lower that cost on one of his company’s crafts?

Regardless, for those of us limited to flight inside the Earth’s atmosphere, lesser aero mobility is becoming a key concept in the business world and means more and more to the recreational traveler than ever before.

General aviation has proven its worth as an alternative to automotive, rail and airline travel. Now, perhaps more than at any age in history, time most emphatically is money.

As I drift along at an easy 4 miles a minute above winter Kansas, a negligee of snow reflecting my night’s companion, the moon, I can only wonder why everyone with the means and the need to move people and things from A to a distant B (okay, I admit, Santa Monica to Helsinki in January may be a little extreme), it’s hard to imagine a better and more fun way to travel than the fast lane in the sky.

Cross-country flying stories from Bill Cox offer fantastic insight into what pilots face on long-distance flights. Dig into our Cross-Country Log today.

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CAVU conditions are rare in Greenland. Today, that’s exactly what I have in northeast Canada and the giant ice cap continent. Three hours ago, when I departed Goose Bay, Labrador, with the forecaster’s promise of clear skies and tailwinds spelled out in the weather package, I was more than a little dubious that Mother Time and Father Nature would relinquish their grip on Southern Greenland just for me.

Fortunately, the tailwinds were there, and the usual weather wasn’t. Now, the GPS suggests I’m 90 miles out from my destination of Narsarsuaq, and, sure enough, I’m well ahead of my how-goes-it, flight-planned time en route. From 17,000 feet, I can see all the way down to the southern tip of Greenland and well north toward the capital city of Nuuk. If the Earth were flat, I could probably see the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

Slowly, the ice-capped mountains of Southern Greenland begin to materialize in the distance. Icebergs dot the water below, becoming more numerous and distinct as I slowly gain on the mountains of compacted snow. My God, this place is magnificent, and I’m far south of the highest part of the ice cap.

Many years ago, on my first trip to Europe, I was looking down from 35,000 feet, and the view of Greenland was nothing but white on white. I was eastbound in a 747 on my way from Los Angeles to Paris to cover the Paris Air Show. The pilot had just announced that we were crossing the Labrador Sea and should be over the western coast of Greenland in a few minutes.

Trouble was, the clouds below were confused layers of cirrus that merged perfectly with the ice cap. Even in early summer, the weather that far above the Arctic Circle was marginal, obscuring practically everything below 20,000 feet. 

At that time, I couldn’t possibly have guessed that I would be visiting Greenland perhaps 50 times in the next 30 years. Contrary to popular belief, Greenland isn’t outside the range of many general aviation aircraft, and its weather isn’t as bad as it is in Northeastern Canada. There are a number of blue-sky-and-sunshine days in both summer and winter.

If you’re considering an Atlantic crossing to Europe by the milk-run route through Labrador, Greenland, Iceland and Scotland, you may need only about 700 nm range plus reserve. It’s true the survival equipment requirements for such a trip are strict and significant, but you can rent cold-water survival- suit rafts and most of the other items in Bangor, Maine, the last stop inside the U.S.

From the tourist’s perspective, Greenland features some things you won’t see anywhere else, unless you can afford a trip to Antarctica. If you stick to the bottom half of the “green” continent, you’ll miss any possible encounters with the polar bears of the northern cap, but you’ll need to surmount a massive accumulation of ice, over 10,000 feet tall, that grows out of the North Atlantic. 

A friendly controversy up north is that Greenland is mostly ice, and Iceland is mostly green. In fact, Greenland is actually a ring of mountains that have gradually filled with ice over the millennia. 

Narsarsuaq, Greenland, resides near the bottom of the island continent—okay, it’s not officially a continent, but why it’s not is more historical than geographical—and it’s one of the most popular stops on the high road to Europe. The airport was built by the U.S. Army in the early years of WWII as a refueling stop for aircraft headed for the European Theatre and was designated as Bluie West One. That’s the reason its official airport code remains BGBW (B for North Atlantic, G for Greenland and BW for its original name).

From a pilot’s point of view, there are four primary airports in Greenland, Narsarsuaq, on the southwest coast, near the southern tip. The three others are: Gothab, the capital of this territory of Denmark, recently renamed Nuuk, 200 miles north, also on the west coast; Sondrestrom Fjord (also known as Kangerlussuaq), 200 miles north of that; and Kulusuk, on the east coast, straight across from Sondrestrom Fjord.

Today’s airport, BGBW, was constructed at the end of a 42-mile-long fjord near the southwest coast of Greenland. The runway, 7-25, begins practically at water’s edge and slopes steeply uphill toward the ice cap. Mountains surround the airport on three sides, close enough that the IFR minimum MDA is 1,800 feet and 6,000 meters visibility. Eighteen hundred and 3.5 miles is hardly a typical IFR approach minimum. Keep in mind, that’s the lowest minimum, applicable to a 100-knot aircraft. At 135 knots, the MDA rises to 2,400 feet. Narsarsuaq is no place for amateurs.

Standard procedure at BGBW is to approach and land uphill toward the east and depart to the west to avoid the ice cap.

For that very reason, a common practice during marginal weather used to be to descend VFR (sort of) below the clouds while still well out over the Labrador Sea, track inbound to the Tunulliarfik Fjord, designated by an NDB and follow the fjord on the south side of the beacon as it winds inland to the airport. There used to be a half-submerged ship several miles into the fjord to reassure pilots that they were in the correct fjord.

Trouble was, there was another fjord on the north side of the NDB that would lead you just as far inland but would terminate in a solid mountain wall. If the weather were low, you’d need to retrace your steps back to the beacon and fly up the proper fjord to find the airport, adding 84 miles to your trip. 

The pilot of a Bellanca Viking 300 made exactly this mistake many years ago. He flew up the wrong fjord, turned around and tracked back to the beacon, found the correct fjord and started back toward Narsarsuaq. The Viking ran out of fuel only about 2 miles from the airport. The pilot ditched his Bellanca near a boat in the fjord, walked out on the right wing and stepped into the boat practically without getting wet. Relieved of carrying fuel, the two wing tanks were now full of air and served as giant pontoons that kept the airplane afloat. Since the wings were constructed of Sitka spruce, the airplane floated just fine in the smooth, semi-fresh water of the fjord. 

When it became obvious the airplane wasn’t going to sink, the boat owner threw a line around the prop and towed the Viking to shore directly abeam the threshold of the airport’s runway 7. The pilot climbed back into the cockpit, extended the gear, and a four-wheel-drive truck hauled the Viking out of the water onto the beach.

The story goes that there was very little damage to the Bellanca, and the avionics never got wet. Water damage was minimal, as the inner fjord was fed by water runoff from the ice cap rather than the salty North Atlantic.

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However you arrive in Narsarsuaq, the people are great, the service is excellent, and there’s even a comfortable Scandinavian-style hotel on the airport if you decide to stay over. Once, a few years back, I stayed there for five days waiting for weather to clear so I could make the next leg to Reykjavik. I was flying a new Maule M6-260 on amphibious floats that accumulate ice like you wouldn’t believe, and IFR was out of the question.

Oh, yes, one other thing about Narsarsuaq and most other Greenland airports: Fuel costs $17/gallon.

Another feature of the Greenland ice cap is the Distant Early Warning radar network, better known in the ’60s and ’70s as the DEW line. It was established during the Cold War. There were three radar stations built out on the cap, code-named Sea Bass, Sob Story and Big Gun. These dome-shaped, top-secret radar facilities were built near or above the 10,000-foot level of the cap and looked predominately north toward Russia across the North Pole. They were resupplied by ski-equipped Lockheed C-130s and helicopters staged primarily out of another U.S. base at Sondrestrom Fjord, 400 miles north of Narsarsuaq, also on Greenland’s west coast. All three radars have long been decommissioned.

It’s hard to imagine what manner of behavior could earn a G.I. an extended stay at any of those facilities, but being stationed on top of the Greenland ice cap must have been regarded as the most boring, if not necessarily the toughest, duty in the military.

Another interesting sidebar to the Greenland story is the saga of a P-38 Lightning being ferried across the Atlantic to Europe in the early days of WWII. The airplane was part of a flight consisting of six P-38s and two Boeing B-17s. The group departed Sondrestrom, destination Reykjavik, and encountered severe fog and poor weather conditions over the Davis Strait. All eight aircraft turned back toward Greenland, only to discover the weather had closed done behind them. With little other choice, all eight airplanes were forced to land on the ice cap.

No one was hurt in the forced landings on the flat surface of the ice, and all pilots and crew were rescued a few days later. When the war ended, there was no incentive to salvage the airplanes, so they were abandoned out on the cap. All eight warbirds were gradually entombed by the years of storms and shifting ice. 

Inevitably, someone decided to bring up one of the P-38s, and the recovery finally succeeded, as I wrote for this magazine in 2007: “Warbird expert Bob Cardin led a team of adventurers onto the ice to recover one of the airplanes. The 10th expedition to make the effort, Cardin’s group battled blizzard conditions and minus-20 degrees F temperatures and finally succeeded in retrieving a partially crushed P-38 from 266 feet below the surface of the ice. The team transported the disassembled airplane by ski-equipped DC-3 to the Greenland port of Kulusuk and shipped (the P-38) to Savannah, GA.”

The full story of the recovery, transport and eventual restoration of that P-38 could fill the rest of this magazine, but San Antonio oilman Rod Lewis eventually purchased the airplane, named Glacier Girl, and decided to complete the trip to Duxford, England, for the Flying Legends Airshow. Duxford was the original destination planned in 1942. 

I joined Rod Lewis’ trans-Atlantic team as a result of my association with Steve Hinton, a well-known test pilot, unlimited race pilot and owner of the Planes of Fame Air Museum in Chino, California. At the time, Hinton was the only pilot insured to fly Glacier Girl, and he felt the team needed someone along who knew a little about flying the ocean. Since I knew as little as anyone, I was hired as a consultant.

Unfortunately, we didn’t make it to Duxford on that trip. Bad weather in England intervened, and I wound up flying home from Reykjavik. Today, it goes much better, and we arrive safely in the surprisingly friendly conditions.

Nevertheless, for all you wannabe warbird owners out there who have a few million dollars to spend, be advised that there are still two B-17s and five P-38s just waiting to be retrieved from 250-300 feet of glaciated snow and ice on top of the Greenland ice cap.

The post It’s Not Easy Flying In Greenland appeared first on Plane & Pilot Magazine.

Back in the day when we were flying through Egyptian airspace, we always kept our head on a swivel. That didn’t, unfortunately, mean we always saw the bogeys. On that day I was lucky to have some sharp eyes to assist. 

“Hey, Bill. Are you up on company?” came a voice in my headset.

“Yeah, Lisa, I’m right behind you at your five o’clock, about 200 yards back,” I answered.

“Look down at our 11:00 position, and tell me what you see.” ’

I checked the airspace directly below and saw only an Egyptian air base 2 miles down with delta-wing Mirage fighters parked wingtip-to-wingtip on the ramp. Then, I noticed two of them at the runway threshold.

“Yeah, I see ’em. Wonder if we’re about to have company,” I wondered aloud.

The two French jets lined up on the runway in formation, then started down the asphalt, lifted off and disappeared behind us.  

Sure enough, they came drifting by off our right side a few minutes later with gear down, flying as slow as possible, probably about 150 knots. Lisa and I were cruising along in a pair of new Piper Archers at perhaps 110 knots at 11,000 feet MSL, droning toward Cairo and the Suez Canal.

Somewhere behind us, a caravan of eight more Archers were strung out back to Alexandria, Egypt, all 10 airplanes headed for Amman, Jordan.

We had departed Lakeland, Florida, seven days before, flown north to Bangor, Maine, then to St. John’s, Newfoundland, where we were delayed by weather for a day. Finally, we got back in the air and flew down to Santa Maria, Azores, in the mid-Atlantic. The following day, we tracked across Portugal and Spain to the island of Palma de Mallorca for a day off. Then, we transitioned across most of the Mediterranean to Iraklion on the Greek island of Crete. We were hoping this would be the last day of our ferry flight.

Contrary to what some pilots might assume, our Archers were fairly typical of ferry aircraft, not surprising considering that Globe Aero in Lakeland is only about 100 nm from Piper’s manufacturing plant in Vero Beach, Florida. In those days, Globe did the lion’s share of delivery work for Piper. The Archer was/is one of Piper’s most popular flight training models, and we flew them all over the world. With assistance from ferry tanks, we delivered them all over the world, though some of the 2,000-mile Pacific legs were a challenge.

Cabin room was tight, however, and it seemed there was never enough space to cram in all the equipment for a long leg. We would have preferred a little more interior room, an onboard potty and a hot meal once in a while.

In this case, the right seat had been replaced by a 30-gallon fuel tank. An HF radio was loosely mounted on top of the copilot seat tank, and buried underneath all that were miscellaneous charts; survival gear that included a cold-water exposure suit, life raft, two vests; a portable, two-way VHF radio/GPS; a big box of Cheez-Its; drinking water; and some other stuff.

On some Pacific deliveries, space was at such a premium that we sometimes had to make what we called, for obvious reasons, an “unpacked” trip. There was so little space remaining in the airplane after loading all the mandatory equipment that there was no room for even a small suitcase. The only option remaining was to tuck jeans, underwear, shirts, socks and other essentials in anywhere they fit. We also carried a package of folded plastic bags for overnight stops. When we reached our destination, we bought a cheap suitcase for the airline trip home.    

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The Archer’s backseat had been replaced by a 55-gallon ferry tank, bringing the airplane’s total fuel to 133 gallons. At 9.5 gph, that meant I had an easy 14.5 hours’ endurance, worth perhaps 1,550 nm range in no-wind conditions, it said there.

It’s a small world, after all, but it’s not so bad once you become accustomed to the claustrophobic accommodations. To avoid deep vein thrombosis (pooling of blood in the legs and possible blood clot), I practice an isometric exercise program borrowed from the Canadian military. It consists of pitting one muscle against another for a limited time. I try to do a 10-minute session once every hour. After 40 years of ferry flying, I don’t seem to suffer any ill effects other than premature hysteria and the belief that this job doesn’t pay nearly enough.

On the planned last day of our trip, we departed Iraklion and flew south to the Egyptian coast of the Mediterranean, a roundabout method of reaching Jordan, to be sure. In more peaceful times (of which there have been virtually none since the creation of Israel in 1948), we would simply have flown straight east from Crete, across the eastern shore of the Med and directly into Amman. That route would have been politically unwise in today’s volatile Middle Eastern climate.

For that reason, we all expected to be vectored far south to Luxor, Egypt, then turned left out over the Red Sea and finally allowed to fly northeast above the Gulf of Aqaba to Amman.                                                                                                            

This time, we were given a surprising left turn after crossing the coast to fly above the pyramids and the city of Cairo itself. None of us had ever flown this route before, so we were delighted with the chance to see some of Egypt’s most famous, historic landmarks and, perhaps, the Suez Canal.

I had tuned com 2 to guard just in case the fighters wanted to talk before opening fire, and the Mirage leader came up on 121.5, instructed me to dial a different frequency, and basically asked what the hell we thought we were doing overflying an Egyptian air force base.

Obviously, not everyone had gotten the memo. We all had overflight clearances with specific time and date limits but no specific routes. I told Mirage leader we were on a vector from Cairo control and there were eight more Piper Archers behind us. I added that all 10 airplanes were unarmed. He didn’t laugh. He also didn’t believe me.

I read him our collective assigned clearance number and informed him that our point of original departure had been Lakeland, Florida. He said, “Stand by,” and left the frequency to check with higher authority.

The Mirage fighters loitered in our general area while someone on the ground checked for our clearances. Before they left, the Egyptian Air Force had a good look at us, just to make sure we were what we said we were. Finally satisfied that we posed no threat, the jets pulled away and returned to base.

It was no big surprise when ATC called and directed us to turn right and skirt the city of Cairo well to the east. We would not see Cairo or the Suez Canal on that day.

Accordingly, we flew south to a point parallel to the bottom of the Sinai Peninsula before ATC allowed us to turn back east, cross the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba, then fly north to Amman. That was closer to the normal route, but it still added over 500 miles to the trip into Jordan.

By sheer chance, Lisa and I had picked the two fastest Archers on the ramp at Globe Aero’s shop in Lakeland, and though the difference in speed was only a few knots, it still provided a welcome advantage when the legs were a thousand miles or longer.      

As a part-time ferry pilot for the last 40 years, I’m sometimes asked about the glamour of flying new turboprops and piston twins internationally to often-exotic locations such as Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires, Singapore and Sydney. Fact is, most ferry pilots rarely see those places, primarily because we’re slaves to a budget, and those destinations are very expensive. Ferrying airplanes is anything but a vacation.

We do deliver mostly new aircraft, but there are few turbines among them and almost no jets. Most jet buyers employ their own crews, and even if they didn’t, jets demand type ratings, and few ferry pilots just happen to have the appropriate type ticket. I’ve flown co-pilot in only a half-dozen jets in the last 40 years.

Caravans, Cheyennes, Conquests, Meridians, Jetprops and King Airs are more common, but even they are relatively scarce. 

Read more cross-country flying stories from Bill Cox. 

Piper Archers and other single-engine piston aircraft are more the rule than the exception. Back in the 1990s, I had an agreement with the Mooney dealer for Australia and flew a dozen new Mooney Bravos and Ovations from the plant in Kerrville, Texas, to various destinations Down Under.

Meanwhile, back in the Middle East, Lisa and I landed at Marka Airport in Amman without being intercepted by Jordanian F-15s. A few minutes later, the third Archer pulled up on the ramp, and within a half-hour, all 10 airplanes were parked around the maintenance shop.

We couldn’t help but notice a group of pilots in military uniforms watching us as we detanked the airplanes, unloaded our equipment and prepared to head for the hotel. The military pilots split up and headed for our airplanes. The one leaning on my Archer’s left wing asked, congenially, “How was your trip from America?”

“No problems,” I replied. “It’s a good airplane. Will you be flying it?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “As soon as all the paperwork is complete, we’ll all be leaving for our final destination.”

Ah, yes, that explained our 10-airplane trek from Florida to Jordan. It’s highly unlikely the Archers were trainers for the local flight school in Amman, and it’s equally implausible they were ab initio teaching machines reporting for duty with the Jordanian Air Force, since we knew they were leaving for somewhere else.

Back at the hotel, none of the other pilots had heard any mention of the “final destination” for the Archers. We all had our own ideas as to where the Archers were headed.

Let’s see, what nearby country might be training new pilots for a possible transition to military aircraft?

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