Leg #25 Goose Bay, Labrador to Reykjavik, Iceland on 17 December 2014

December 18, 2014

An early start. We had no idea if the a/c would have had hangar space and when we looked at the snow outside we prayed for it, whereas we are not even religious.

We got an excellent service from Irving. The sight of the Antonov aircraft close by was impressive. Looking at the photograph however our Avionetta did not look too small, isn’t it?

Preparing and refueling our PC12 for a long flight over the atlantic in front of a Russian AN-124

Once again we were able to avoid picking up the military cable over the runway (..)

after DEP in Goose Bay right turn on course

bye bye Labrador

No special report on our flight over the ice cold water, but we would like to share with you -at least if you are not a pilot yourself knowing it probably better than I do- some of the information we are receiving every day from our dispatcher in UK Andy Farmer.

The first page we show you is one about the Wind and the Temperature.

This document shows the direction and the strength of the wind at 24.000′ in relation to our planned route. It are the usual wind veers used also in the maritime world. The wind goes from the end of the wind veer to the beginning of the line. Each wind veer represents a windspeed of 10 knots, one closed triangle represents 50 knots, two 100 knots etc. One can see we had a strong tailwind on this leg. Capito?

The second page is called ETOPS/ETP

ETOPS means extended twin engine operation. It would go far now trying to explain the history of it. Where the verticle lines crosses the route line between the circles (which are not real circles) are the equal time points. The equal time points are corrected for the prevailing winds. These are only to be used in case of an emergency to reach in the shortest time either the departure airport in Canada (Goose Bay, CYYR) or the en route airport in Greenland (Narsarsuaq, BGBW) or the destination in Iceland (Reykjavik, BIRK). It only would work if the engine keeps running (..).

The third one is called Significant Weather

This document shows the Jet Streams close to our routing and moreover the ATC routing itself.

Fortunately we had no emergency and we flew the a/c exactly as per ATC’s routing.

direction 59N050W

over Greenland 1

over Greenland 2

Then I had the courage to try on my emergency (helicopter) suit. I managed quite easily to get it on, but I could not get out anymore.

Harry’s daily emergency training

So I kept it on for an hour or so and made then a frantic effort to get my head out of the collar. I succeeded to get the collar over one eye and more importantly over my nose enabling me to have a rest and breath at the same time. It became quite an operation which must have been similar for a woman to get a baby. At least now I know how that feels.

In the last hour we got bad weather and strong winds for which Urs had been warned already by Gilles Glatz, making a ferry flight with a brand new Pilatus PC-12 to Denver CO.

Strong gusts and an icy runway did not scare Urs to make a good landing. We asked for hangar space but we got it only after the FBO made sure they could still free to hangar door of some snow walls.

Our hotel Natura was still at only 50 meters from the FBO. We checked in and prepared ourselves for the next day, our intended last flight to Budel.