Mad Dash for home!

Wake up call was at 6:15, Taxi at 6:30, "Security" opens their doors at 7. I get all the flight plans, paperwork figured out, paid my bill and wait for security to show up. Security is a total joke. Much like my stop in Turks Caicos I pay more in fees than I do in fuel. One amusing thing I found out about Aruba is that the Venezuelan jet set keep their planes in Aruba. The story is that having Venezuelan registered aircraft makes traveling the world difficult so they register in the US... Problem is that Fidel's only friend, Hugo doesn't let US registered aircraft in Venezuela any more... that kind of puts the Jet Set in a pickle. So they leave their planes in Aruba and take Venezuelan registered planes between Aruba and home. Crazy world!

The guys that park me when I arrive at Aruba are calling me Mr. Redbull air race, I let them sit in the plane and get pictures. They are all shocked that such a small plane can make it so far. After a while they realize that I built it. That is one of the sticky parts about flying an experimental(home built plane) outside the US, technically it isn't legal but it happens so rarely that they aren't exactly watching out for it plus in many places it just seems ridiculous to even have a private plane let alone one you built. I've never heard of anyone getting busted. You just don't go around bragging about it being "non standard."

On the way out the best I can do for a weather briefing is look at a web page that shows where lightning strikes are in the Caribbean, there are none on my route so I assume that I'm good to go. In the US weather briefings are free and easy to come by... Not the case here. I also checked the National Hurricane center the night before and they aren't expecting anything. I'm not sure if there is anything else I can do...

I made the trip south over the Dominican Republic and because of some 10,000 foot mountains they had me fly way east of where I would have liked to have been so on the return I filed a route over Haiti which should take a half hour off the trip.

Both DR and Haiti operate their own airspace as "Non Radar" environments which means the controllers don't actually know where you are: they depend upon you reporting your position and they coordinate all the position reports to try to stop people from hitting each other. This practice is basically never, ever used in the US. As soon as you get airborne in the US they tell you that you are "radar contact" which means we know where you are, go about your business and we'll yell at you if you get out of line. This non radar bit seems incredibly outdated but that is how it is done in most other places. In the Non Radar environment the controllers use markers on a table to show the various positions and then adjust them as you make position reports. They call the markers "Shrimp Boats."

Strangely DR had radar but still required position reports. Haiti didn't have radar and were generally indifferent. Going over Port Au Prince I actually heard a American Airlines jet depart without a transponder code because the local controller was too lazy to call the larger overlying sector and get the code. So the airliner departed without a transponder code, not really unsafe but it would never happen in the US. The Haitians must not be very intelligent about how they place their antennas.(Afterword: I got a bit of flack for this, well I'm not saying they aren't intelligent in general, just not intelligent about antenna placement, I am aware this is pretty low on your list of concerns when you've got social and political issues like Haiti has.) Port Au Prince sits in a valley between huge mountain ranges and until you are basically over the city you have to relay your position reports through aircraft that can reach the controllers.

So anyway, After I got on the north side of Haiti and was talking with Miami Center I really understood how good the flying public has it in the US. As you go further south evidently it gets worse and things like this happen.

As I cross Haiti and try to get some pictures of the border but the cloud cover was too wide spread. This Satellite picture shows the stark deforestation differences between DR and Haiti:

The ground in Haiti wasn't as brown in this picture but not nearly as green as the DR. Perhaps things have gotten better since the sat picture was taken. I know it is at least 6 years old. This Article refers to the 90's as the time when trees were having a really rough time in Haiti. Perhaps with Aristeed gone things have gotten better. One thing I have noticed while traveling through tropical jungles is that they recover very quickly since all the plant essentials are in abundance.

As I approach Turks Caicos there is a friendly line colored on either side literally "deep" blue and light blue. This marks the transition between the shallows around the Bahamas and the deep water south of there. From here back to Florida there are islands sporadically all along the way. Even still they are too widely spread to guarantee that you could glide to one... So I'm still wearing the life jacket! Another Friendly sight is the US Coast Guard helo that seems to be based at Provo(Turks Caicos).

The trip from Aruba to Provo is about 3.5 hrs and now that I'm familar with the process I'm able to get fueled and turned around in 30 minutes. My time constraints are 2 fold: I have to tell US customs when I am arriving and they close at 6 PM. I reserved for arriving in Fort Pierce, FL at 4:30, I can call if I'm going to be late but with their closing time I can't be too late. I'll end up having to fly into Miami if I think I'm going to miss their closing time. I budgeted an hour for this "turn" as they say in the airline industry and getting out 30 minutes early will not only let me get to bed earlier but keep me well within my customs window. Turns out that since it's a Saturday they charge you over time at Turks Caicos which means extra special fees from Her Majesties immigration service. Since it is an arrival and departure they literally get you coming and going too. Ouch. Turks Caicos is really beautiful. It's shame I can't spend a few days...
I depart, open my required flight plan to Ft Peirce, FL and head that way. For the first 100 or so miles I can't reach any air traffic facility and I'm completely on my own, not talking to anyone, this was also the case on the way down, no coverage at 12,000 feet. I'm out in the middle of nowhere so I'm not too worried about hitting anything. After about 30 minutes I get a hold of Miami Center and they keep an eye on me for the ride back to FL.

US Customs has got their game pretty well set. Basically they publish the rules and if you don't abide by them they don't much care because they will just fine you $5000. So rather than say don't do whatever they just say here is the deal if you don't like it get your check book out. The procedures aren't too complicated though: notification of arrival VIA the internet, get transponder code before penetrating the Air Defense Identification Zone and file a flight plan. You have to buy a sticker for $29 also... it's funny the publications say that you might have to hire a mechanic to disassemble the aircraft for their inspectors!
The last time I did this was from Montreal to Burlington, VT. The process was much more serious. They made us sit in the plane and wait. When they came there were three of them, all armed, 2 approached from behind and were waived off when the other decided we weren't a threat. The guy that checked our passports gave us the third degree... it was just a major hassle.
Ft Pierce was a breeze, I park in the customs box at the airport, walk in, fill out the same form they give you on an airliner, they look at my bags and send me on my way. It didn't take more than 10 minutes.

I get fuel and a burger at the "airport Tiki Restaurant" and have a conversation with another guy that built and flies an RV-8 and used to be an Army Apache pilot. I mention that I just got back from Aruba. In his heavy southern drawl he paid me about the best compliment I've ever heard "well I just don't understand, how did you get off the ground with the weight of your balls on board?" I'm still laughing about that one. 5 hrs and 15 minutes flight time later I'm back at home putting the plane away. I got a few nice shots of the Shuttle assembly building and launch pads at Kennedy Space Center and a nice sunset. Perfect way to end a perfect trip. Thanks for reading.

Touch down in Aruba

Short and Sweet: The flight down was a blast. Procedures are a bit different here but all in all not too difficult. The people at my fuel stop and in Aruba were all wondering what kind of nut does this sort of thing. Some wanted to know if I was in the Red bull Air Races. It's been really fun seeing people's reactions to it.

Anyway, the wind blows 20 knots all the time here so I've got some windsurfing to do. heading home tomorrow.

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Time Passes
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Well I'm back from Windsurfing and I'm pretty sure that I'll be nearly crippled tomorrow! I get to do that maybe twice a year and there is never enough wind but here there was plenty of wind. I stayed out for 2 hrs and that was all I could take. I'm not much good at it so I've got bruises every where. Good fun.

So now I'm recuperating at the hotel and I figured I'd do a quick update.

Flight From Ft Pierce was delayed thanks to Fog and a really long weather briefing. I wanted to be off by 6:30 and ended up getting off around 7. The flight over the Bahamas was really cool, lots of little islands, many were just completely uninhabited.
I didn't actually have to fly around a single thunder storm during the whole day. I did however get great pictures of one breaking down(raining) and creating a rainbow. Pretty cool.

One leg down, 5 to go

Well, the first part of the trip was a good stretch. The initial plan was to fly to Jesup, GA then to FT Pierce but after tooling down the road a few hours it was clear that I could make it all the way to FT Pierce in one hop. In this case that one hop was 4 hrs 37 minutes, ~725 nautical miles, longest leg I've ever flown. This was a great verification that I've got the legs to make it to Aruba. All my calculations say that it isn't a problem but when I leave the southern side of Hispaniola(Hati and the Dominican Republic) all that math doesn't make me feel much better. What does make me feel better is having proof in a really long flight over land where there are plenty of places to land should I come up short. I didn't come up short and so I'm feeling great about the 2 legs tomorrow.

The first leg will be, 569 nm out of Ft. Pierce, FL over the Bahamas into Provinciales, Turks Caicos, more commonly known in little airplane pilot circles as just "Provo". Lots of small aircraft making their way to and from South America come through Provo. Ahem, Insert drug runner joke here.
It's really sad I'm not taking some time to smell the roses along the way. I'm sure there is Scuba Diving and all kinds of other tropical Goodies I could get into but alas I've got a schedule to keep and a Job to get back to...

From Provo I'll motor 589 nm to Aruba. This will be the leg that gives everybody the willies. After I pass over the south side of the Dominican Republic I've got ~340 nm of nothing but deep water. I even checked the Depth: ~4000 feet. That is deeper than I can stand in so I brought a few things to keep me safe:

1. Personal Locater Beacon or PLB
2. Life Jacket
3. 2.5 gallons water
4. Raft
5. EPRIB
6. Hand Held Radio
7. Granola bars

I put them in the order in which they are valuable in the event I get forced down in the water.
First Item is a PLB. This gadget is the reason why the idea of this over water stuff doesn't bother me so much. It has a GPS receiver along with a transmitter. When you "hit the button" (actually when you press the 2 buttons for more than 5 seconds) it takes your coordinates and sends them up to military satellites and they look up the info associated with the PLB. They try to call you. If they don't find out that you are OK then they send out the cavalry. The US Coast Guard will tell you that if you are a lone person in a life jacket in the ocean you are dead. The ocean is just too big and you are too small but since this technology has come along they have actually picked up people in the ocean with just a PLB at night! So this PLB technology is pretty good stuff and takes the worry out of getting lost at sea. When it works this takes all the guess work out of search and rescue. Even if they have a good idea of where you went down the uncertainly about how you glided and where you drifted leads to huge areas to search in but with this gadget they just come and pick you up.

Life jacket: Treading water gets old after about 15 minutes. With the PLB I've been told that ~4 hrs is a reasonable wait time for a rescue so Life Jacket seems prudent. It's also required. The water is 80 F and you can survive a long time in 80 F but not treading water.

2.5 gallons of water: You can survive a long time without food but water... not too long. this should let me survive for ~3-4 days.

Raft: Well if your going down in the water a raft will make it much more comfortable. This is really a necessity in the North Atlantic but a bit creature comfort here.

EPIRB: Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon. This is an old school PLB. it's just a beacon that they need to pick up the signal of an then home in on you. They are not tied to a particular person, there is no body to call when one goes off, they all look the same electronically, and so the have to track down every single one that goes off as if there is an emergency. This slows down the response time greatly. The number of False alarms is very high and the emergency response to an EPRIB isn't nearly what it is for the PLB. Still its way better than nothing.

hand held Radio: Well its always nice to have someone to talk to... This would let me tell aircraft overflying me about my predicament and try to get help. This is like a 3rd level backup.

Food: Not going anywhere for a while? If you're stuck in the middle of the Caribbean sea you might was well have something to munch on. Not really all that necessary though.

As for the actual landing in the water part. This has been done with favorable results:
http://www.vansairforce.net/articles/Ditching.htm

So really, the water isn't all that bad. If I get forced down for some reason I'll lose the plane for sure but it is insured for that sort of thing. I'll miss it, I don't want to lose it but I built it to fly where I want to fly and in the end I can build another.

Illusion of Utility

So any private aircraft offers an illusion of Utility. For instance: I got invited to a friends destination wedding in Aruba. Hot Damn! I'm flying to Aruba.

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I didn't even actually shop for a commercial ticket because this is just the kind of flight I've always wanted to do: I love to use the airplane for an actual purpose rather than just aimlessly boring holes in the sky. The downside of this is that you have to actually meet some objectives and when you fail there are some implications. The illusion is that you are going to save time or money by doing such a thing. That just doesn't happen. The amount of time I spend training and maintaining will almost always eclipse the time that would be spent driving or flying commercial. As for the cost its the same story: Commercial flights are dirt cheap. My costs just for a particular flight might compete with a commercial airline but once you figure that I've got to maintain and store the plane were' talking about way more dough than you'd pay for a commercial flight. That's not the point though.

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This is a love affair with flying, with gradually increasing commitment. The first commitment is your first takeoff: That is a commitment to land. Each flight is an entire life with which your own life is intertwined. If the romance of flying captures you then you become more comfortable with the idea of flight and you want to make it a bigger part of your life. From there, on the spur of the moment, you might start flying to see friends and have a quick lunch before returning home in the same good weather window. You might get more adventurous and do an overnight trip risking that the weather might be bad and scuttle your return. This may prompt you to learn how to cope weather. Gradually you build confidence with flying in the weather and you make longer trips, planned well in advance, bringing friends where they are putting their faith in you to not only for safety but to get somewhere and hopefully feel a bit of love for flying too.

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Flying has been a tremendous unifier for me. I have seen friends and family far more as a result of having an airplane at my disposal. This is truly priceless.

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Now flying to a friends wedding in Aruba is a commitment not only to show up but also not mark their union with your demise!

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As for the technical details this trip isn't anything too different: the legs are shorter than I've done before and to total distance away from home is less than I've done before. The difference is that I'll be flying over water most of the time after I leave Florida and I've got a myriad of administrative crap to deal with while gallivanting across the Caribbean, customs, non radar environments, controllers who only speak English for controllers. The flight plan is to get up early and leave Fort Pierce Florida by 6:30 AM, motor all the way across the Bahamas, land Provo in Turks Caicos for fuel and then motor my way across Hispaniola and then 300 miles of Caribbean sea to Aruba. Once I get there I'll be able to see Venezuela. This should be interesting!

Yellowstone, Idaho and Oregon

It rains intermittently all night and the weather is still marginal when we wake up. We're given a restriction on the crew car: Get back by 7:30. Given all the stuff to do in Guernsey this isn't much of a restriction. We get a great breakfast at the other restaurant and head over to the airport. The other flight arrives and they take the car. I commence looking at weather and resolve to wait for the weather to improve a bit before departing.
When we depart the clouds are around 1200 feet above the ground and there are plenty of holes between them.
I decide to stay below the clouds for a bit. This is not much of a risk since the holes between clouds very common leaving me plenty of options to get up and out of danger if necessary. The landscape is really amazing. Dry with lots of Mesas and small canyons along the way. For the first 50 miles we stay under the clouds at about 1500 feet. Normally I'd be guzzling fuel and going slow at 1500 above the ground but here the ground is a around 6000 above sea level so I'm in thin air at 7500 feet, air that my craft passes through easily, at normal fuel burn and good speed. Sometimes you can have your cake and eat it too!
After a while I can see ahead and it looks like the Bighorns are "obscured" as they say or in the clouds. We climb above them and to the north we can see that the 13,000 foot peaks are covered in snow despite the fact that it's September. We climb to 12,500 to get above the clouds that encapsulate the lower section of the Bighorns where we pass over. Because of the cloud cover we really don't even get to see them. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said it best:

"Navigating by compass in a sea of clouds over Spain is very well, it is very dashing, but -- you want to remember that below the sea of clouds lies eternity."

Eternity will be avoided on this trip!

After a sun drenched stint above the sea of clouds we descend between them into rough turbulent air. We land at Cody in another stiff breeze that is cheerfully down the runway and prepare for crossing the Rockies.

The first time I did it, crossing the Rockies was a big deal, really challenging. This time I'm not worried at all. Unlike the east coast the weather is great from Cody all the way to the Pacific. Preparation for the crossing amounts to a solid lunch and telling my dad how to use the portable oxygen that we end up not using on this flight.

Interestingly this flight take us over Yellowstone, near the Grand Tetons, which I knew I was going to pass over. The thing I wasn't aware of was what my friend Mike calls the Saw Tooth Range. Idaho ends up having some of the most rugged terrain I've ever flown over. Colorado, Utah, Nevada and Wyoming all have very rugged terrain but most of the time there is always a flat area within gliding distance that would turn into an airport if my engine decides to stop turning money into noise. Well, in this area of Idaho there were 150 mile stretches with no suitable landing areas, nothing, nada! Steep mountains leading down to narrow valleys that have small stream at thier apex. No place to land. Unfortunately this area was also marked by continuous turbulence and we didn't get any pictures. As we passed over we saw many small back country air strips that even the idea of flying in an out of gave me the willies: Short runway(strips more like) at high altitude make for challenging flying. If anything goes wrong the options are few and unforgiving! We fly about 2 hours and land at a small airport in central Idaho, get some inexpensive fuel and motor another few hours to Aurora, Oregon. We get a great view of Mt Hood on the way to Aurora. We can first see it about 200 miles away which for the West is pretty standard. Mt hood is so enormous that it looms huge in the window, endlessly, seeming like we are sitting still. It is an awesome site. Further away but still in easy view are Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Jefferson, and Mt Ranier. Fantastic vista everywhere you look.
Aurora happens to be where Vans Aircraft is located, the manufacturer of my airplane Kit. We landed well after they are closed but tomorrow we'll stop by and get a tour along with a little assistance in fixing my tail wheel which has been misbehaving. The fix turns out to be easy, we get a short tour and we are on our way to McMinnvile to see the Sprucegoose.

Onward, Upward, Westward... Guernsey, WY

We depart Clinton, Iowa, get a few shots of the Landing Ship on the Mississippi and point the nose West. The weather forecast for our route isn't particularly good. We are flying above an undercast for large portions of the flight. While tooling along above the clouds I got an eerie picture of a TV tower poking up through the clouds. This is why it is almost always better to fly high than grovel between the clouds and the ground. you can almost bet eventually the ground will rise up or the clouds will sink down leaving you no place to go but in the clouds or ground. This is a death sentence for a pilot who isn't trained to cope with cloud flying. I'm trained and ready for it but I avoid the clouds when I can, it just makes dealing with unexpected problems much easier. Dealing with a dead engine is difficult enough, dealing with it in the clouds is just no fun. Spend as little time as possible in the clouds and the chances of dealing with a failure in the clouds become minuscule.

The first leg takes us to Valentine, Nebraska where there is cheap fuel and not much else. This area is called the "Sand Hills" and it is sandy. We land, it is cold and starts to rain before dad finishes fueling the plane. I really want to make a go for Cody Wyoming. This is right on the eastern edge of Yellowstone Park. Unfortunately, as you can see in the picture, it's raining. Rain isn't an altogether show stopper but it's cold, between us and Cody are the Bighorn mountains(Heard of Custer anyone?) To get above the Bighorn's we'll have to fly high where it's colder which when there is lots of moisture means ice. Ice is bad!

I spend a bunch of time pouring over the Radar maps, automated reports from stations along the way and it doesn't look all that bad getting to a place about 80 miles north of Cheyenne called Camp Guernsey. The web page for the airport says great things:
Crew car
Cheap fuel
Oregon trail ruts

I call flight service and get a no, hell no from them on flying visually. Guernsey is on this side of the Bighorns and hence won't require me flying above the freezing level if I have to get in the clouds. I wait for a break in the weather, depart and manage to get to Guernsey in great weather. we land and it sure is windy. It took me by surprise and I had to take a second shot at landing. Ole' dad takes it in stride. The nice airport manager give us the crew car and we're on our way.

You have to wonder about any town that has an elevation far greater than population... two hotels and two restaurants and not much else. In many towns going and looking at ruts would seems pretty dull but in Guernsey this is prime time stuff. It turns out that the wagon trains actually wore through the rock and made incredibly deep ruts. I have no idea how the middle got cleared out but it did. The picture makes them look a lot narrower than they are. Weird.

By the time we decide to get some dinner we are limited to the local bar and each have a burger. It's actually pretty decent. head back to the Sage Brush Motel and get a good night sleep.

Go West, to inconsequential Clinton, Iowa

To limit the amount of flying we have on the next day right after the airforce museum we jump in the plane and motor 2 hrs west to Clinton, Iowa on the West shore of the Mississippi. There isn't much to see on the way so I don't have any pictures to show off. Why Clinton Iowa? Free crew car and good fuel prices. I call ahead and tell him we'll be landing around 7 pm, he says he won't be there but don't worry the keys for the crew car will be under the visor, help yourself. People are so trusting and nice! I've ridden in about a dozen courtesy cars and they are a real mixed bag. Once a scored a brand new SUV. That is not normal and was not the case today. The car is a 90's cop car that runs on about half the cylinders that it should, shudders like its going to fall apart when braking and leaves me wondering which is more dangerous: The plane I built or this behemoth? This flying thing sure is glamorous! I can't complain though because it's free!
So we fuel up, gather our things and splurge on a holiday inn express. We, ha ha, go out on the town to the nicest restaurant, I order a fillet for dinner figuring this is Iowa I should be able to get a good steak if nothing else... Well I'm disappointed... Oh well.

We find out that there is an old World War II landing ship docked a few miles north of town so we fly by and get a few picts on out way out.