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North Atlantic Flight Log

Jack Paul Showers

            At some point in 2004, I got an email from my life-long friend, Bill Hammack.  Bill, at the time, was a partner in a King Air, and chomping at the bit to get back into flying real-live general aviation airplanes....  You know, stuff with pistons and propellers and damned few seats.

            The email read, “I’m planning an around the world flight in 2006.  Want to go?  See www.earthrounders.com”  That was it.  Nothing else.  I’m not sure of my thinking, but I agreed to go.  Well, actually, I’m quite sure of my thinking…. It was irrational. 

At the time, Bill was talking about flying a twin with extra tankage, which is good, so my main fear was the political situation.  This was post 9/11, and after we’d gone to war with the entire Islamic world, it seemed.  Anyway, I agreed.

            Well, Bill bought a new airplane.  A Lancair Columbia 400.  I’m pasting a picture here of Duncan Jones, Lancair salesman, Bill, and my shadow with Bill’s 400. You’ll notice the lack of a second engine.

            Now, a Lancair Columbia 400 is an extremely fast, (get that:  extremely fast) single engine airplane that will do a maximum cruise speed of 236 knots at 25,000 feet.  Yep, that’s 271 miles per hour  when it is five miles above the Earth.  Of course, it’s drinking fuel like crazy at that speed, so it is usually flown at more sane speeds of 200-210 knots.  Still, as single-engine airplanes go, this one is fast as a bat out of hell…. Move over Meat Loaf.  And, it has fixed gear….  Most fast single engine airplanes get the wheels up out of the breeze so they can go fast.  Lancair doesn’t bother.  It is so slick that the wheels don’t matter much.  (Take a look at http://www.flycolumbia.com/).

            I’m no stranger to flying, myself, in fact, I introduced Bill to flying in 1982.  I sold him an interest in my Piper Arrow before he had ever even taken a flying lesson.  But, as you’ll see, Bill moves fast. 

            Over the years, we went through a couple of airplanes as partners, then both of us went through a few airplanes separately, then we both had minor medical certification problems that we got fixed, then Bill ended up burning kerosene in a King Air while I got an introduction to the Mooney line. 

            I have ended up with an over-equipped 1974 Mooney Executive M20F.  It gets me around great, and is plenty fast for what I do (typical speeds are 145-148 knots, or 166mph to 170mph).  After flying it a while, I completely re-equipped the panel with modern, almost state-of-the art, avionics.  She’s a good airplane.  And I wound up a “Mooniac”.

            Bill and I continued talking periodically about the trip around the world, and, though I had preferred a twin, I continued thinking about it.  On the Mooney List online, there was discussion of the trip made around the world by Carol Ann Garrett, a serious Mooney pilot if there ever was one.  She flew a Mooney 201, which is very similar to my Executive.  In fact, the 201 is simply a refined, faster, more streamlined Executive.  The basic fuselage, wing, gear and so on are the the same.  So, I was doubly interested in her account.  See http://www.kerrlake.com/mgarratt/index.htm.  She did write a book, and it is available, too.

            I didn’t really think of a shorter, less ambitious, trip until I read about another fellow Mooniac who had flown, against all odds, across the Atlantic and back.

            Yury Avarutin, Crazy Man and Transatlantic Flyer

             We Mooney owners are a bit fanatical, and there are probably good reasons for that. 

One of the reasons is an excellent Internet-based email list that has over a thousand members; all, or mostly all, are Mooney owners and pilots.  I’m one.  So was Yury Avarutin, during his brief life.  Yury was a young Mooney owner who had more guts than sense, and a good way with words.  He flew the Atlantic along the North Route , which he called the Viking Route .  It’s true, Eric the Red was familiar with the region.  Eric was a Viking, I think.  Not sure.

            Yury was a Russian-American, and adventurer, and a writer.  His account of flying the “ Viking Route ” is filled with excitement, cleverness, foolhardiness and utter stupidity.  And it is reading of the sort that is frequently referred to as “riveting”….  I literally (literally) sat up all night long reading the entire account on my laptop.  At about 5:00am, I finished it, and turned off the light.  No way I was going to get to sleep.

            Later that morning, I called Bill.  “How about a warm-up for the trip around the World?  How about a flight across the Atlantic this summer?”  Well, I called the wrong guy.  Bill was all over that idea like white on rice, as we say down here in Cajun country.  He, we, started planning at that moment.

            Now, to be sure, we didn’t want to do it Yury’s way…. He had no life raft, no immersion suits, horribly faulty radios, uncertified GPS’s, no charts whatsoever, no nothing.  Just an old, poorly maintained Mooney and Yury in an old army field jacket with a couple of handheld GPS’s. We, on the other hand, would put together a lot of stuff that seems advisable.

            Well, we were going.  And, besides equipment, we needed information.  I searched the web.

            I pretty quickly found a website for a man named Big Pete Powell.  The “Big” part is mandatory. We were to have a checkered relationship with Pete (I have changed the name and identifying info to avoid a future hassle, but the story is spot-on).

             “Big Pete Powell”

            Big Pete lives in the northeast, and is an Atlantic Crossing expert with a couple of hundred crossings under his belt.  He sells a “book” and does in-person instruction on crossing the pond.

            (Let me say here that I’m using a pseudonym for Pete’s real name.  He is the only person in this log whose name I have changed).

            Bill and I met up east to train with Pete.  Bill was on a business trip and flew commercial from the Midwest, and I flew my Mooney from Lafayette , LA ;  we met up at the car rental place in the terminal.  We drove to Pete’s house.  After a good round of hale-fellow-well-met stuff, Pete took us to a very economical motel in his little town.  We pushed him to take us further up the road to a bit nicer place with a bar.  There, we had a few snorts and told war stories.

            Pete’s “ Ground School ” started the next morning and it’s an interesting time.  Pete, like it or not, is a kidder and a cut-up.  Sometimes it’s hard to get him to act serious. He spends most of the time giving out information on how to get, and interpret, weather information.  His mantra is, “Don’t fly in bad weather, don’t run out of gas and carry plenty of Margaritas.”  The ground school costs something like $395, and he doesn’t give quantity discounts…. We tried.  His “book” is a mish-mash of stuff he throws together sort of haphazardly in a 3-ring binder, and one would have hoped for better organization, but that said, it’s still a bargain.  I’ve read it through several times, now.  Lots of good information.  Well, some of it is clearly copyrighted stuff that he has copied from magazines and such, but he doesn’t seem all that worried about copyright.

            One thing I never really saw, however, was any guideline on what weather was flyable and what wasn’t, in real-world terms. Pete only says, “Don’t fly in bad weather.”  One would hope for more than that.  

            It was only after I got back and swapped emails with him several times and had a subsequent phone call that I came up with Pete’s Rules.  Essentially, they are to fly only when you have a ceiling of 10,000, high pressure in the area, generally, and you are flying toward a higher barometric pressure than the one you are leaving. Lower scattered stuff is OK, Pete says, but you need to make sure it is really lower scattered stuff, and not fool’s gold.  In other words, it’s flyable if you can see lots of blue between the scattered clouds. Getting this information out of him was like pulling teeth.

            But, for a couple of boys from the Deep South , we needed the info. The problem is ice, and neither of us have much experience with it.  And, we know it.

            Later, Bill and I were to learn that you almost never have the conditions Pete said we should have.

The next day, after the session, Bill and I drove to a major city nearby where we got two suites in the best hotel in town, then headed out for dinner at the best restaurant in town, had steaks, drank a $200 bottle of Far Niente something-or-another, left there and went to a swell bar and had a couple of shots of high end whistle-wetter.  Hell, we were flying to Paris .  Who’s counting? 

(Oh, yeah, there’s one other thing…. Did I mention that Bill is the owner of, among other things, one of the best restaurants in New Orleans ?  HerbSaint.  Try it, you’ll like it. But, needless to say, he travels, and dines, well.)

We were on our way.

            Getting the Equipment Together

            Both of us started researching stuff…. Bill ended up buying a $4200 life raft to go on the back seat.  That’ll come in handy for the RTW (Round The World) trip, too. 

And, when we tried on immersion suits with Big Pete Powell, Bill realized the feet were too small, so he started checking out those as well, and ended up buying a couple of them that don’t have truly formed feet in them, rather, they have closed legs with no true “footie” in them.  That’s fine with me, because I thought the formed feet were a bit snug, too.  Not horrible, but snug on my size 11.5 foot.  Bill says he has a size 13, and the suits were miserable for him.  So, he found some that didn’t have that problem.

            I bought a Garmin GPSMAP 296.  This was a tough, and somewhat unhappy decision.  What we needed was simply a backup GPS to get us down if we had a systems failure in the airplane.  What I really wanted was a Garmin 396, which I would keep for my Mooney to backup the Garmin 530 in the panel.  But the Garmin 396 is back-ordered and not available.  So, it would have to be another model.  I thought we could save money and order the 196, which is monochrome, but the full color 296 looked better.  Bill wanted the 296, and I was game for that, so I ordered it.  BUT, what we really needed was the Atlantic International database.  Now, this gets confusing. 

            Garmin’s website makes it very, very clear that the database is built into the unit and cannot be changed.  So, if you get an Americas Database, that’s what you’re stuck with.  Or, the same for the Atlantic database which includes Europe .  The illustration on the website makes it look as if the Atlantic International database covers all of Greenland , but in reality it only covers the Eastern Coast of Greenland. 

            And, it really turns out that all of that didn’t matter, anyway, because the unit overlays the geography with the Jeppesen database of airports and navigational aids, and that is worldwide. So, not matter which database you get, that’s only the terrain.  The stuff we really needed is the Jeppesen aviation stuff, and it is in either unit no matter which you order.  The airports and VOR’s display on a solid blue background, and that’s just fine.  The continents are white, the sea is blue.  The drawings are very crude in these non-database areas, but is fine for just getting to a point on the globe.  After I got it, I wished I’d gotten the Americas , but that’s tough.  I’m not much of a guy to return stuff and hate to do it, and it will be just fine. 

            After the 296 was delivered, I sat with the materials Bill had sent and entered waypoints for the entire trip, leaving out a few, but putting in enough to lay the trip out well enough. (If you wonder what airport is represented by the initials BIRK on the screen, just enter “BIRK airport” in Google, and it’ll tell you more about that airport than you’ll ever care to know.  Unless you are a pilot). By the way, if you get to looking too close, you’ll see that we didn’t really fly this route.  We flew, instead a more southern route.  But, this gives you the idea, anyway.

            Actually, the in-panel Garmin 430’s (two of them in Bill’s airplane) have the Americas database on them, and the Avidyne display does, too, so those things will give us the surface geography while in the Americas territory and the handheld Garmin 296 will give it to us in the Atlantic/Europe territories.  That’ll end up working well.

            Knowing we will want to document this trip well, I bought a super-thin Sony something-T7 camera, with a ton of memory in it.  I’m a sucker for cameras, anyway.  This is a complicated little fellow, and I actually had to read the instructions a bit to figure out some of the symbols, despite decades of screwing around with camera equipment and darkrooms.

            Then came the topic of emergency location beacons….  They operate under the name ELT, for Emergency Locator Transmitter in airplanes, and all airplanes have to have them.  We had that in Bill’s airplane, of course, but we were also wanting something else….  A personal version that we could carry in our immersion suits.  There are many available, and they go by the name Personal Locator Beacon (PLB) these days.  The ocean voyager version is called an EPIRB.  I found an excellent website, www.equipped.com for information.  I won’t go into it all, but I ultimately decided on a thing called the ACR Aerofix 406 I/O.  It is pretty cool.  Has a built-in GPS.  If you actuate the thing, it checks out all of the satellites it can find, figures out the latitude and longitude and broadcasts that to another satellite that relays the information to some search and rescue folks, then, while it’s doing all of that stuff, it also broadcasts a signal on the emergency aviation frequency, 121.5, so that the rescue folks can home in on you when the get into the general area.  At least, that’s what is supposed to happen. 

            I ordered two.  Each costs, with discount, about $650.  And, baby, I’m hoping that’s a total waste.  I hope it gets dusty, sitting there with the raft, the immersion suit, all that stuff.  Yury would have been…., well, I’m not sure what he would have been.  And, I guess it doesn’t matter.  We were going to be equipped. Period.

Don Ray

            There was another thing that needed attention.  Me.

            I’ve got time in over 30 types of airplanes.  I know most of the systems in most of the stuff we normal pilots fly on a day-to-day basis all over the US .  But, I didn’t know the Columbia 400.  I needed what they call “type training”.

            Bill had piled up more than an hundred hours in it, but I’d only had one.  It was different for me primarily because of the “glass cockpit”. I was used to flying traditional airplanes that most of us fly looking at all those round dials that folks these days love to refer to a “steam gauges”…. You know, the new battle of analog (old) versus digital (new).

Most of my flying in recent years had been in normally aspirated airplanes and I needed a refresher course on turbocharged engines.  And, probably most of all, the COL4 is fast.  I needed to get used to things happening at a quicker pace.  Especially a let-down, which must start almost twice as far out as I am used to, and the landing, which happens about 20 knots faster than the Mooney.  Then there were the speed brakes.  I’d never, ever used speed brakes. And one final thing…. The Lancairs don’t have control yokes, no, they are fitted with side sticks.  So that is a bit different, too, but somewhat intuitive.

            The solution to that came in the form of an airline pilot named Don Ray.  Don’s “day job”, some of which is worked at night, is flying for USAir, and he is, to boot, an instructor.  But, more to the point, he is one of the very few people who is certified to instruct in the Lancair Columbia 400.  “Instruct” is a funny name for what he does.  Don Ray worked my ass off. 

            Bill had him flown down to New Orleans .  Then, for the next two days and one night, In that Saturday, Saturday night and Sunday, I got in 25 landings, a dozen approaches, all sorts of flinging the thing around the sky in weird attitudes and configurations, mostly in low, hot, humid air, and generally, I was made miserable flying the airplane until I got good at it. 

The big hurdle, really, was finding stuff on the panel.  The airplanes I’ve always flown have pretty standard flight instruments in pretty standard places, and the engine instruments are usually in roughly the same place from airplane to airplane, too.  Not this thing with it’s glass cockpit.  Everything was in a new place, and doing jobs as simple as checking the manifold pressure, or fuel level or engine speed or altitude took relearning.  Once I figured out where all the stuff was things got simpler, but not easy.  It’ll take a while to get used to instinctively looking at the wrong spot for an instrument that’s always been over somewhere else.

By the time I was through, I had 6 hours of ground school and 11.5 hours of flight time in the 400.  And, I had gotten an insurance sign-off.  I was so tired Sunday night I could hardly move.  Bill asked if I wanted to take the Lancair home rather than fly my Mooney.  I told Bill, “I didn’t ever want to see that thing again.” 

I stayed out at the airport for a while cooling my jets and watching a storm pass over, not getting in any hurry to get back into an airplane.  Once I got in the Mooney, it was a quick 45 minute ride home.  Tired, and used to the fixed gear Lancair, I forgot to raise the landing gear on the Mooney when I left, and flew with it down for a few minutes while I puzzled over the slow forward speed.  Eventually, the light dawned; I raised the gear and headed home at a decent airspeed.  You know, it’s better to forget and leave the wheels down than to forget and leave them up.

Last Minute Engine Work

            Bill would be the best guy to tell you this, but I should mention that the airplane went back to the shop about 3 weeks before we were to leave for engine roughness and a flukey fuel flow meter.  “The shop”, in this case was the Continental factory in Mobile , Alabama , since it was right there, near New Orleans .  They apparently did some work on the mags, the injectors, the fuel flow meter and something else.  It will be there for a week. 

            Planned departure moved up to August 24.  I’m trying to get Bill to get ready to leave August 23.  That’s a Monday.  The sooner we leave, the more leeway we have for waiting on weather.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005, 3:11am

            Couldn’t sleep, so I’ve been searching the internet finding accounts of folks who have flown the Atlantic (many of them doing it during an around-the-world flight; see www.earthrounders.com).    The one thing that came through loud and clear is how much time folks spent waiting on favorable weather.  Sitting for days at a time seems normal.  One fellow in an ultralight waited four weeks in one spot, eventually gave up and started again the next year. Also read a harrowing account of a guy who ditched in the Pacific and was there for about a day and a half before they picked him up.  Of particular note is that his airplane, a Bonanza, sank within a minute of the ditching.

            We’ve scheduled Don Ray to come back in Friday to give me an additional workout, and I’m planning to bring the airplane back to Lafayette , so I can get a couple more hours in it before we leave.

            The Personal Locator Beacons (ELT’s that are PLB’s…. got that?) I ordered should be here later this morning, along with a few other odds and ends….  Tie down ropes, chocks, knee board, etc.  The beacons are ACR Aerofix 406 I/O’s, which seemed to perform well in the tests reported at www.equipped.com.  I got one each for Bill and me.

            I’ll need to call Continental in Mobile about the airplane later this morning.  First, I’m going back to bed.

            Mary Ellen, who loves clothes, just had to try on my new immersion suit.

Thursday, August 18, 2005   

            Got everything in including an ICOM handheld radio I added to the list and a couple of seat belt cutters.  I had read th story written by the guy who had ditched in the Pacific, and his only contact with rescuers was a handheld radio…. An airplane flew over him without seeing him, and he flagged it down with that radio.  So, I ordered one.  The seat belt cutters I got because I keep reading about seat belts getting jammed.

            Mike Lindsay at Continental tells me they still haven’t gotten the engine right and are still working on it.  I don’t have a phone number on Don Ray, so can’t stop him from flying down here.

            Later in the day:  Got a call from Mike Lindsay saying it will be ready at 10:00am.  Hope so.  I’m going to go on down.  Still haven’t heard from Don, he may get there to find that the airplane isn’t ready.

Tuesday, August 23, 2005,   New Orleans to Quebec City .

            We are in Quebec City , after a night IFR trip from Columbus , OH .  It’s early yet, but is overcast.  Still at hotel as I write this.  I was a bit amused to see an Esso sign on the FBO building.  Right out of the 50’s for us in the lower 48.

            For long stretches we were out of radar coverage, meaning that the controllers couldn’t see us on a radar screen.  We are pampered in the US , since most of the country, even out in the boondocks, has good radar coverage, the controllers can see us, they can see everyone else, and they can see much of the bad weather, too.  Not so up in Canada and points east. Even in the UK , we found poor radar coverage by our standards.

Bill sent the following email….

Good morning...

Jack and I made it to Quebec City about 11 p.m. (local time) last night after a good day of flying.  Unfortunately, we didn't get to leave New Orleans until almost 1 p.m., which put our entire day behind schedule.  

We flipped a coin and I won so I got to fly the first leg, which was from KNEW to Columbus , Ohio , a slight deviation from our original plan so we could re-charge our oxygen system.  Jack flew from Columbus to Quebec City, which turned out to require a night ILS due to a 1,600 foot overcast.  He did a great job.  

Both legs took about 3:45 minutes of flying time with favorable winds from New Orleans to Columbus and a bit of a head wind to Quebec .  The airplane did a great job.  I'll send a separate email with more performance detail but we saw plus 200 knot groundspeeds most of the way.  

Quebec is interesting...the folks here don't speak English.  I really was surprised at how much this part of Canada is mono-linguistic. (Just like the entire U.S. !)   Bottom line, I think, is they only want to talk French!   I wish Cassidy were here to help me  communicate.  

We're at the Times Hotel and about to begin planning our day.  I would like to make Greenland today but all the airports there close at 4:30 p.m. and we lose a couple of hours going in that direction.  I should have more time this evening to get out a more detailed email.

More soon...

Bill and (Jack)

Wednesday, August 24, 2005,  Quebec City to Goose Bay .  

    Boy, a couple of days of serious flying. 

    Bill and I are now in Goose Bay , Labrador .  We did it in 3:40 minutes with headwinds most of the way.  Used about 16.5gph (lean of peak, for you technical sorts) and had speeds in the 170 knot range  (195mph), mostly due to rain and some light ice, both of which slow the airplane down.  Like most airports these days, the Goose Bay airport has a website…. http://www.goosebayairport.com/index1.htm.

            Below is a picture of the Goose Bay airport over the nose outside the window, and the approach plate depicted on the right-hand Avidyne unit in front of the copilot. Cool, huh? The heavy dark lines are runways, and the heavy magenta line is our flight path.  Out the windshield, we are looking straight down runway 08, which is 11,046 feet long…. Over two miles.

    The ice, mostly encountered in the area of Sept Isle, not far North of the Canadian border, was prettily easily handled by shedding a couple of thousand feet, and it was never more than 1/64th of an inch, anyway.  But ice gets your attention.  Ice, Ice.  Airplanes can't fly well with much ice on the wings and propeller.  Way up here there are few if any ice reports from other pilots, so you fly by staying out of clouds and rain or stay beneath the level where temperatures are below freezing.... the "freezing level".

    The freezing level was about 11,000 feet and we were flying at 9 and 11 and 9 again looking for the best conditions.  I flew.  Well, as you would expect, the autopilot flew, mostly.  It was a twixt and tween deal, because I wanted to stay above the cloud tops to see storms in the distance, and I wanted to stay below 11,000 to fly in warm air.  We were able to have our cake and eat it, too, on this issue today.  Knock on wood.

    There is an outstanding weather overlay on the screen on the panel of this airplane, but it does not work outside the US, so we are doing the weather info the old-fashioned way. None.

    While in Quebec City I was surprised by a few things, mostly the amount of French spoken, and the inablility of folks to speak English.  When you tell folks you are from Louisiana, they light up.  One lady told me she lived in Pineville (Louisiana) for a while.  Hmmmm.  Just like in Cajun Country, the people are very nice looking.  Frenchmen, so that's natural, I guess.

    There is a type of pilot who loves it so much, and loves the involvement with other pilots and the machines so much, that they spend inordinate amounts of time at airports.  They are called "hangar bums" or "airport bums".... like ski bums and tennis bums, sort of.  Today I met a nice gent named Brun who had a British airplane that was a derivative of the Beagle (I think) called the Bulldog.  He stood right beside our airplane the entire time we were preparing to leave and stood there while we were taxiing out.  Nice, nice man.  A French Canadian Hangar Bum.  I took a picture of him and his airplane as we were leaving.  That's Brun in the green jacket with his red and white Bulldog way in the background, right over his head.

    In the Quebec area one hears a lot of French spoken on the air traffic control frequencies, which is pretty cool, and not an issue except for one thing....  the controllers sometimes have heavy accents themselves, and the terminology is different.  It can be hard to understand them.

    And, leaving Quebec, flying north, we got into an area that had no radar coverage, like I’ve mentioned before....  when I first started flying there were many areas like that in the US, especially in the West, but no more.  We left the area where controllers saw us near Charlevoix, but several hundred miles later were back on radar screens further north.  When you are not on radar, you have to tell the controllers where you are every now and then.... a "position report".  I did my first one in 20 years today.  Most of these are done by actually telling the controllers when you cross a specific latitude and/or longitude.  Some of those points are so well known they have names (Adam One) or nicknames (the Boundary), and some don’t.  We had to teach ourselves to enter waypoints into the GPS units using only latitude and longitude.  Now, that sounds basic, huh?  Well, it’s not.  Most such points in the US have standardized names that you can call up by dialing in the letters.  And we don’t really use position reports, anyway, so latitude and longitude is the farthest thing from our minds. 

            When we arrived in Goose Bay , one of the people who came out to meet us was Lieutenant Colonel M. F. LeGresley, Wing Operations Officer (that means he’s the head honcho) of the air force outfit there, which they call, I think, 5 Wing Goose Bay.  He was curious about our Columbia 400, and came out to see it.  (Another airport bum, huh?) He flies F-16’s, and from the sound of things, he had his on personal F-16 to fly around in checking on his troops.  Cool job.  We discussed ditching and immersion suits and rafts and that sort of thing.  His advice:  “Dress warm.”  I got a shot of Bill and the Colonel. I think he liked the airplane.

            Had a good meal (despite the howling child across the room) of smoked char (I think) in a restaurant next door to the motel we are in.  It was one of those meals that wasn’t as good as it tastes, if you know what I mean.  I was very hungry, and anything would have seemed five-star. The motel is a metal building outside, which seems pretty odd, but looks pretty much like a motel inside.  That's it behind me stretching out on the bench with a bottle of wine between my legs.

    On Thursday morning, we rode to the airport in a flying service van with two ferry pilots.  They were taking a Piper Cheyenne to Paris .  Bill talked with them for a while and we chatted further with them at the airport preparing to leave.  One of them, the chief pilot, helped me with our flight plan.  The ocean crossing flight plans are easy, but not until you understand all of the little blocks.

    I've had a few questions about the airplane we are flying.  It was featured in the September 2005 Flying Magazine..  And, you can find it at www.flycolumbia.com; it is a Columbia 400, formerly called a Lancair.  It's a certified, four-seat, single engine airplane with a top cruising speed of 275mph or so.  We are travelling at more like 215-220mph, mostly, to extend the range.   

            And, in case you wonder what a Cheyenne looks like….

 Thursday, August 25, 2005   

            Goose to Narsarsuaq.  We had preferred the more Northern route crossing from Iqaluit to one of the airports on the western coast of Greenland, but the weather was worse there, so we decided we had little option but to take the much longer over water leg from Goose to Narsarsuaq, a challenging airport at the southernmost tip of Greenland.  Though the over water portion is much longer, the entire leg is only somewhat longer, since almost none of it is over land, unlike the more northerly leg.

            The Narsarsuaq destination is one made only with the greatest confidence of good weather, since it is in the middle of some quite high rocks and has a steep gradient on the approach.  Ceilings must be 3500, or you can’t shoot the instrument approach at all.  We had forecasts of ceilings in the 8000 foot range with some scattered stuff below that down to about the 3500 level, which was good.  A typical way of approaching the airport, it turns out, is to fly down the fiord over water, between the high rocks on either side, turn left in a crook in the fiord and then turn right to the airstrip. 

            As we had been taught by Big Pete, we took off our shoes and pulled the cumbersome immersion suits onto our bottom halves before getting into the airplane, sitting in the seats with the top halves draped over the back of the seat.  It’s hard to describe flying in the suits, but, suffice to say, it’s not as bad as I had expected.  The general idea is that one will have it mostly on, and in the case of ditching, can put it on the rest of the way while descending at what will hopefully be the best rate of descent.

            We had onboard two Personal Locator Beacons of the latest type.  They broadcast an identifying code on 406mhz that identifies the person who’s beacon is broadcasting, and also broadcasts the exact latitude and longitude of the unit, accurate within 30 feet.  It derives the lat/long by a built-in GPS unit.  Theoretically all of this happens in about 3 minutes of activating it.  Hope so.  Hope I don’t find out.

            We departed three minutes behind the Cheyenne (a twin-turboprop, cabin-class, pressurized, corporate-type airplane) and climbed to 17,000 feet.  Bill was flying. The altitude was chosen to put us above the clouds we expected from the weather maps we had studied, and to take advantage of tailwinds up high.  An added bonus would be the faster airspeed available as we climbed the turbocharged engine to higher altitudes.

            While airborne we were supposed to monitor the international emergency frequency, 121.5, or the international over water frequency, 123.45.  We did monitor one or the other most of the time.  At times there was friendly chatter between pilots on 123.45.  Clearly, the region’s freight and charter guys bump into each other at airports from time to time and become acquainted.

            We were soon talking to Sondestrom Center and could hear the Cheyenne pilots talking to them, as well.  Twice they called us on an air-to-air frequency and gave us weather information for Narsarsuaq, and it was what we expected. Pretty nice of them to do that, and we appreciated it.

            Boring through the cloud tops as they came up to meet us at 17,000 (called “Flight Level 170” on the radio), we began to pick up a smidgen of rime ice in temperatures below freezing, so we got permission to climb to FL190.  Off came the oxygen cannulas (the thing under the nose) and on went oxygen masks, required above 180.  At 190 the ice came off slowly, but the clouds came up to us again. As luck would have it, the controller called and asked if we were "able level 210".  The question he was asking was, "Are you able to climb as high as 21,000 feet?"  He apparently had conflicting traffic coming our direction at 19,000. We answered with an "Affirmative", since the Columbia 400 is certified up to 25,000, and then we went up to 210.  That did the trick, we were above all the clouds and ice;  eventually most of the cloud cover began to fall away and it was clear below.

            At one point we saw the highest ground speed of the trip, 243 knots (279mph).  Those winds helping so much going East will slow us to a crawl going home.  Oh, well.

            On descent, we got through the cloud levels fast to minimize the possibility of icing.  The manual for the Columbia suggests flying fast if you get caught in icing conditions, saying that a fast-moving airplane picks up less ice.  OK.  That’s what we did.  No ice on the way down, either. But there were a lot fewer clouds, too.

            We talked to the Cheyenne pilots who were ahead of us about 20 miles now, and they were flying the fiord down low at 2500 feet.  We followed, flying the fiord, too, but at more like 3000 feet.  It was gorgeous.  I did notice something that would become a continuing theme.  What was forecast as a layer of scattered clouds was ultimately found to be a solid ceiling.  Take a look at the picture below and you can see it.  Scattered clouds are no big deal.  They can be flown visually.  A broken or solid ceiling requires a bit more planning, and it requires executing an instrument approach, since we will be in cloud on approach to the airport.  We got luck on this one and descended below the level of the clouds before we actually got to them.  That bit of luck turned into an incredibly scenic flight down the fjord.  A solid cloud layer above, rocks on both shores rising above us and water underneath.  Nice. 

            We were also, as it happens, seeing our first icebergs, and pretty excited about the whole thing.  Another thing we were excited about was keeping pace with the twin-turboprop Cheyenne so well.  The pilots were still on the ramp when we taxied up. Any time a piston-engine airplane keeps up with a turboprop, that’s news.

            The first of the two pictures below shows us entering the fiord at an altitude near 3000 feet, still descending, and the second shows us at maybe 1500 after making the left turn.  If you look close, you can see the airstrip in the second picture to the right.  It’s in that little valley that slopes down to the water.  And you can see a couple of isolated icebergs.

            Narsarsuaq is something of a notorious approach, well known on the North Atlantic route for its difficulty in bad weather.   Called “Bluie West One” during WWII, it was an important way station for transports crossing the pond, and is prominently mentioned in Earnest Gann’s Fate is the Hunter, as is Goose Bay.  An excellent picture from a higher vantage point showing the glacier behind the airstrip, as well as an interesting history is found at http://iserit.greennet.gl/bgbw/index.html.

            Once upstairs in the flight service office, we again met the Cheyenne ferry pilots.  One was from France, or a French-speaking country, I would guess, and the other, a quiet, tall black man from Puerto Rico. He exuded intelligence and looked like he was living the life of the long-suffering co-pilot, keeping a stiff upper lip. His apparent boss, the Frenchman, was a talkative cat.  Odd couple. The Cheyenne pilots helped me file the flight plan again; we paid some ridiculous amount for “handling” and other fees along with big bucks for avgas, and then headed back out to the airplane for the most scenic leg of the trip.

Narsarsuaq to Kulusuk.   We were headed for a little place named Kulusuk, on the eastern shore of Iceland.  Say it:  KOO-LOO-SOOK.  Equal accents on the syllables. It sounds cool.  Cool Kulusuk.

Kulusuk has a huge, wide, long, gravel (!!) runway.  Rocks flying everywhere.  Good for wheel pants and propellers, huh?  I was flying and gave it my best effort to “grease it on” as we say, touching down as lightly as humanly possible, but the rocks didn’t give a damn about my technique, they started flying as soon as we touched.  The sound, frankly, is horrible. The picture below that has a runway that looks like it might be gravel, is gravel. 

We were met by a man who looked exactly like Nikita Khrushchev.  But, he was another soft spoken, nice guy.  His name is Benny, and he’s the airport manager.  He told Bill that the airport gets an average of 5 airplanes a day, virtually all of them stopping for fuel (as were we, but not our buddies in the Cheyenne …. They flew direct from Narsarsuaq to Reykjavik ).  

Benny had sort of a Scandanavian/German accent.  The population is 350.  We wondered the obvious….  What in the world do these people do with their lives?  The place is truly desolate, and must be brutal in the winter. If you look close in the above picture, you can see the entire city over to the left.  And the glacier out behind the airport.

Once again, for all flying services (weather, filing flight plans, advice) we went up to the control tower.  At Kulusuk the controller was there with his wife and small son visiting, and after a few minutes the visitors left and we went to work.  We were both struck by his “flat affect” as a psychologist would say.  The man was as nice as a human being could possibly be, but he never, not once, smiled.  Bill and I both shot him million-watt grins, but neither of us could get him to smile.  Awfully nice guy, even so.

And, he smoked.  God, did he smoke.  There were cigarettes pretty much everywhere evident from packs, butts and ash trays.  But he wasn’t alone.  It seems that the cessation of smoking in the World is pretty much an American phenomenon.  Everyone else still smokes.

Since we could have been through flying for the day, and Benny had told us there was a good enough hotel there, we were trying to decide if we were going to continue to Reykjavik or stay for the night.  The controller made up our minds, “In this part of the World you don’t want to waste good weather.”  We packed up and began to prepare for takeoff in the gravel.

Kulusuk to Reykjavik .  Really, there is not a lot to say about this leg. 
Weather cooperated.  Everything went fine. 

There was not a single hotel room to be had in the entire city.  We had the lady at the FBO on the airfield call a number of places, then Bill walked over to a hotel on the airport and got them to call, as well.  Nothing doing.  We ended up in a guest house named Guesthouse Duna all the way across the city.  You know, it was fine.  Very clean. Spotless.  Folks leave their “outdoor” shoes by the door as they walk in, and walk around in sock feet or in slippers.  They don’t expect this of Americans, it seems, or of most Europeans, either.  So, in the dining room there was a mixture of folks like us in shoes and others in socks.

Our host, Torfi H. Agustsson, was thoughtful, and we liked the place.

Both Bill and I thought that Reykjavik was the best, and most interesting, city we had seen.  Very urbane, very clean, very neat, and the people are very nice and quiet and helpful.  Mr. Agustsson sent us to a restaurant named pRiR Frakkar, as closely as I can get it.  It bills itself as a “Fish Restaurant”, or “Hja Ulfari.” Very small, very nice, warm, interesting.  We had, for kicks, an appetizer made from puffin.  You know…. the cute bird.  Won’t do that again. Look, I’ll eat any damned thing, but the puffin was bad.

The folks at the restaurant sent us to The Hotel Holt for a drink.  It has several super upscale bars, one dedicated to single malt Scotch.  If I had my druthers, I’d stay at the Hotel Holt next time. 

I was struck by how quiet the people were.  Pretty much everywhere we went, folks were quiet and polite. 

Both of us would like to go back some day.

Here is our actual route, as opposed to the route I entered into the portable GPS….

Friday, August 26, 2005, Reykjavik to Manchester .  

The first leg today was to Stornoway, Scotland, for fuel.  I flew, and it was without much to tell about except one thing. 

About half way there, Bill said, “Jack, I hate to even mention this but the oil pressure is dropping.”  I looked, and it was oscillating about 5-6 pounds per square inch.  This was new.  It had always been rock steady at about 46 inches of pressure. 

Now it was moving slowly and jerkily from 47” to 41” and back in an irregular sort of way.  Otherwise, everything was in good shape.  I quickly selected the “nearest airport” page on the GPS, and only one came up:  Vagar, Faroe Islands , 108 miles to the North.  On one excursion the pressure went down to 38”.  We wished it back up.

We kept flying to Scotland (210 nautical), though, the vacillating needle eventually settled in on 46 pounds and stopped moving around.

We landed in a horrible crosswind.  The damned airplane was all over the place.  I finally got it down.  It wasn’t pretty.

Both of us thought the controller was simply mistaken about the winds he reported from our 10-11 o’clock position; they turned out to be directly off of our left wing, and they were screaming.  I got in OK, but this landing was no work of art.  A Cessna Citation (jet) pilot there was complaining about the winds, too, so I didn’t feel pregnant.

            Since then, the oil pressure needle has behaved, knock on wood, and I hope it stays that way.

            Here is the email Bill sent out tonight:

 From:  "Hammack, Bill (RHD-HQRAL)" <Bill.Hammack@rhd.com>
Subject:  Update from yesterday...and brief from today!
Date:  Fri, 26 Aug 2005 15:53:38 -0400
>We're in Europe !   England , that is!
>
>Jack and I are now in Manchester , England after a successful flight from
> Reykjavik , Iceland to Stornoway , Scotland , across the North Atlantic .  The
>flight was at 17k feet and went off without a hitch...great tailwinds again.
>I'm beginning to be concerned about the flight back...those will all be
>headwinds on the return.  Jack handled the left seat and did his usual great
>job, including an unbelievable 20 knot gusting cross wind landing.  Scared
>the sh**  out of me!
>
>Unfortunately, the flight from Stornoway to Manchester was a little more
>challenging than either of us expected.  We're just learning about the
>weather "system" that they have in England .  Seems when we got the update on
>the weather for our next stop, a small airport outside of Manchester , we
>only got the local airport forecast, not the enroute weather.  We took off
>from Stonoway into beautiful blue skies and thinking that the next leg was a
>piece of cake and we'd easily make Paris tomorrow.  Not so!
>
>We filed for 11k and after about 100 miles began to encounter layers of
>clouds.  About an hour out of Manchester we hit solid IFR, including
>freezing temperatures.  After picking up more ice than I want on this
>airplane, we quickly descended to 6,000 feet to get out of the freezing
>temperatures.  While that shed the ice, we then spent about an hour bouncing
>around in rain and turbulence, solid IFR.  Who would have thought, great
>flights across the ocean and the worst weather was over England .
>
>Jack was bitching about not being able to see the countryside.  I was trying
>to fly the airplane!  A long story short, best told over an adult beverage,
>we shot an approach into the "big" airport in Manchester and decided to call
>it a night!   We actually created a bit of a problem for the only FBO
>there...they only handle jets and didn't know what to do with us, especially
>when I told them I wanted our bird in the hangar.  They were very friendly
>and eventually helped us get a hotel after agreeing to put the Columbia 400
>in the hangar.  (I promise all the Columbia folks that I will send detailed
>performance data after I get to Paris and I have some down time.  The bottom
>line, it's a great airplane and has done a wonderful job.)
>
>Jack has been handling the photography and we'll probably send some picture
>tonight or tomorrow.
>
>Cheers, from Manchester !
>
>Bill
>

            Bill’s right about us not being able to see the countryside.  In fact, we’ve seen very little ocean, either.  Everywhere we have been we’ve had cloud cover, and flown over it (if not in it). Before leaving, we had a mental image of flying nervously over miles and miles of freezing ocean, but we actually saw little water.  And, dodging ice and storms kept our minds on that, mostly, not the freezing ocean.

As we were leaving Stornoway a couple of days ago, Bill decided to sign the guest book.  There on a line above, with the ink still wet from a couple of hours before, was Big Pete Powell, who we had barely missed.  Remember him?  Oh well, I’m hoping he taught us well enough, or gives refunds. On second thought, fat chance of that.

            From an email I sent:

OK,

    Bill and I made it to Manchester , UK .  The home of the Manchester Union .  After a couple of bum steers, we made it to a true, no-foolin', big-time, 5-star hotel.  The Lowry Hotel.    Finally, a nice joint.  Had a big dinner and a couple of martini's, a bottle of wine, a couple of after-dinner snorts, well, you know.  A nice time. 

    I'll try to summarize some high spots, in no logical order: 

    Everyone in the world speaks English, except the Quebecois.  Other than that, they're OK by me.

    We've now run into ice on two occasions.  When we were making the cross from Reykjavik to Stornoway (Scotland) we had some at 17000 going through cloud tops, then again at 19000.  That put us up to 21000 feet.  We broke out the oxygen masks, as you can no longer use the cannulas above 18000.  Then, today, coming from Stornoway to Manchester we really had a serious encounter with ice.  That's a story for another time.

    In Iceland, we stayed in a guest house.  Every hotel room in the city was taken.  Incredible.  They were having a series of conventions or something.  Weird.  We ended up in a very nice, clean place with a bathroom down the hall and breakfast in a big room downstairs.  People there leave their "outdoor" shoes outside their doors, and wear their "indoor" shoes inside, or just socks. Glad I got the experience.  Glad I'm in the Lowry tonite.

     Needless to say, there's lots more to say, but I haven't got the energy to write it and you certainly don't have the energy to stick with me on it;  I'll add some pics.  The guys in the tower are at Stornoway with Bill.  Here, as in most of these places, you actually go right up into the tower "cab" (as they call it) and get your briefing and file your flight plan.

                                   See you soon,

                                     Jack Paul

PS:  Look close for airports in almost all of these pictures, they are there.  And, have I told you about the billions, I mean billions, of icebergs out here in the North Atlantic on the east coast of Greenland ?  I knew there were icebergs breaking off of glaciers, but I had no idea that it was dozens of glaciers and thousands of icebergs!  They are everywhere on the coast near Kulusuk.

PPS:  Everyone else in the world has broadband internet access.  Everyone.

An interesting thing that happened….  At Stornoway, the guys in the tower helped us figure out a place to go and a route.  We all chose a field in Manchester .  But while we were flying there, bouncing around in pretty good bumps, Bill got to looking and realized that it was very short…. About 600 meters, or 2000 feet.  I looked, and noticed something else….  It was a grass field!  We quickly asked “control” to amend our flight plan to put Woodward Field in as our destination.  That took a long while, since all flight plans have to be approved by the main office of EuroControl in Brussels .  Finally they came back on the radio and said Woodward was closed!  No choice left, as we were wanting to get down and out of the weather, so we took the main airport, Manchester International.  Arguably, that was a mistake.  Big airport. Big fees. Big, big fees.

Saturday, August 27, 2005 

            In Paris, now.

            This morning, before leaving Manchester , while we were getting the flight plan filed with EuroControl, checking the weather, getting the airplane fueled and oiled and packed, I began to worry about a spot of weather on the horizon.  There was an overcast, but under it we could see to the horizon. And the overcast was bright, indicating that it was thin. Flying through it would be a piece of cake.  That was true everywhere but one direction where the clouds were dark, and shafts of rain angled down.  That was where we were going to fly. 

            I was concerned, but Bill wasn’t, so I hopped in, buckled up in the left seat to take my turn as PIC (Pilot in Command, as the FAA calls it…. The guy in the left seat) and away we flew. 

            Climbing out, I had two sensations. 

            One was the feeling all pilots have when climbing into dark clouds, not really having any information much about what was there, and having to ignore all of the stuff going on…. Mild turbulence, rain streaking up the windshield, flashes of light as we entered and exited cloud masses.  It was over 8000 feet when we eventually popped out on top of the clouds and could see far into the distance.  Weather?  No problem, as it turned out.

            I had another sensation, one I’ve had numerous times in this airplane, the Columbia 400.  It was essentially the feeling of flying a little rocket ship.  The feeling that I suppose jet pilots have as they bore long, skinny, barely sub-sonic holes in the sky.  We were climbing out of Manchester, England, very, very fast.  The smooth, huge 300-hp Continental TSIO-550 engine on the nose of the sleek, shiny little missile was pulling it at record speeds into the sky.  The feeling is imparted to a pilot by the tight, quick reaction of the airplane to the controls in little bumps and drafts.  You feel it even though the autopilot is doing the actual flying.  The forward speed exceeded the top speed of my own Mooney, even though we were climbing at 1000 feet per minute.  If there is any piston airplane that could simulate the flying of a Learjet, this must be it.

            We crossed the White Cliffs of Dover, under our left wing.  I tried to get a picture, but couldn’t.  Then, over the Channel, over the cliffs on the French side, and into France .  And French Control.

            For the first time in a long time, we saw boats.  We had commented after leaving the North American continent that we saw very few boats…. Less than a half dozen on the entire trip.  But boats were back.

            Bill and I had, as usual, begun listening to the ATIS (information about the airport) frequency long before we could actually make out what the recording said so that we could pick up the runway and instrument approach in use early on.  Once again, when we could receive it, the voice was extremely difficult to understand, but Bill (apparently better at deciphering these folks than I am) eventually understood that the active runway at Le Bourget was 07.  Unfortunately, there is no GPS approach to that runway in the Garmin 430 database, but we had airport information, and briefed ourselves for the approach.  We set up the comm radios and navigation radios for the frequencies we knew we were going to use.

            Inbound, we had one controller we could understand pretty well, and he simply consented to our requests to descend and gave us a few headings to fly, vectoring us to the airport around various airspaces and traffic.  Then he handed us off to a controller we could not understand at all.  We had to ask him to repeat himself on every transmission.  Usually several times.  On one occasion he was mispronouncing an English term so badly that it took us five tries to get it.

All this, despite the fact that English is the official world language of aviation, and all controllers are supposed to speak it fluently.

Ultimately, we landed Le Bourget in good weather. 3 customs guys came out to ask us about our trip. The three joked around with us for a while, making fun of Bill spending so much money on such a nice airplane, and teaching us a few French words.  They glanced at our passports, gave them back, and drove off.  We forgot to get our pictures with them.  Too damned bad.

Anyway, we are here.  I have to learn French, fast.  It’s been a good trip with some weather worries, a very few airplane worries, and some general working-with-people worries.

Frankly, the worst of it really has been the controllers…. It’s hard to understand them, even when they say simple things, like “Contract London Control on 133 decimal 42, tell them your heading and your level”….  I can’t understand it fully, but two of us listened time after time, and time after time we had to ask them to repeat themselves, sometimes time after time.

And, there is another thing….  In the US , about half of all controllers are pilots, so they know more pilot-type stuff (e.g., that an airport would have grass runways) than non-pilot controllers. And the non-pilot controllers presumably learn some of that stuff from the controllers who are pilots.  That is not the case here.  None of the controllers seem to be pilots.  Also, in England and France , from our limited exposure, there seems to be very little of the small-airplane general aviation that we have in the US .  It just doesn’t really exist over here like it does in, say, Louisiana .  So the controllers aren’t all that sure of what to do with us.  It’s just different.

These numbers were today while I was flying at 17000….sort of typical performance for the Columbia rich of peak:

    KTAS 210

    KGS 212

    2490 RPM

    32.8” MP

    24.8 GPH (R.O.P.)

After I got into the hotel, I went immediately next door to an nearby bar and chatted with the folks working there and told them of the trip and had a martini.  Two, in fact. Then, Bill and his wife, Janice and her best friend Mary Catherine came and rescued me and we all had a good meal in a good enough restaurant and I’m going now to hop into a good enough bed and have a great night’s sleep.  

Things I’d like to mention:

The White Cliffs of Dover are impressive, even from 17000 feet.

Seeing the billions of icebergs flaking off of massive glaciers and dotted into the ocean where they either sank or swam….  Billions of them.  Gazillions.  And there, in the distance, far away from the masses and the glaciers, were the huge survivors that had broken away and floated tens of miles out into the ocean, where they ruled the waves.  So beautiful to look down on, where the blue of the ocean covered the submerged white ice, reflecting an absolutely gorgeous aquamarine shallow along their curves.  

Looking back, the worst language barriers by far were the issues with the French-speaking peoples, in France and Quebec, both.

I really love the Signature FBO’s in the US, but this one was only good, not great.  All over North America, the Signature facilities are decorated to almost a ridiculous extent, are beautiful, functional, welcoming and have people who can’t do enough for you…. Here, unfortunately, no one came out to the airplane, no one did anything.  There were six (6!) employees behind the desk, none of whom seemed interested in doing anything much.  And the facility was tired, beat up. Eventually Bill got them interested and everything went great, but I’m surprised at the difference.

            (Later, in Glasgow , I met the manager over all 23 European Signature’s, David Best.  He told me they were just beginning a renovation in Paris, and he was well aware of the condition of the facility.  I’d like to see it when they get through.  Signature spares not a nickel on their facilities here in the US, and I suspect Paris will be their flagship operation).

            I could get used to this Paris thing.  Tonight I went to a sidewalk café by myself, drank a Margaux, had a somewhat involved salad that was very good, cheated on my diet and had some cheesecake, read more of Fate is the Hunter, then met Bill and Janice and Mary Catherine in the bar at the Intercontinental Hotel for a drink.  Perfect.

            It will get better.  Mary Ellen will meet me here on Monday, and we’ll get to wine and dine and do the things we love to do.

Now, of course, I’m worried about getting back, against the wind, against the weather, and against the clock in areas where the airports close at 4:30 or 5 in the afternoon.  It doesn’t sound all that much of an issue until you do it.

            But we will.

- o -

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Last modified: April 08, 2006