Zero2Sixty

North Atlantic - Goose to Greenland

by Tracy on

Art in his immersion suit May 16th, we're enroute currently flying a 700 mile leg from Goose Bay to Nuuk, formerly known as "Gothard" Greenland, the country's capital city. Our plans to fly direct to Reykjavik and over-fly Greenland ended with a last minute change in the forecast weather; "critical" was the word from the tower at the Reykjavik airport. After much debate amongst our Air Journey group, and a four hour delay, we decided to fly to Greenland- overnight there, then hopefully take off for Iceland tomorrow. We're currently at 18,000 feet, we had filed for FL270- (27000 feet) however, altitudes must be reserved in advance through Gander control to fly this airspace, when we changed our flight plan, we lost our slot. There's no radar coverage out here, the controllers rely on radioed position reports from the pilots and then keep track of the aircraft by hand- moving markers across a map. Our HF radio (High Frequency) is not working like we had expected, we can hear Gander HF controllers but they can't hear us, so we're relaying our position through other aircraft on our same route. Oh yeah, we're having a great time!

Bite me Al Gore, there's lots of ice down there Squeezed into our Gumby cold water emersion suits, eating Swiss chocolate, and spotting ice bergs out the window - this is the North Atlantic. Al Gore is a big fat liar- there be ice bergs out here! Actually given that it's mid May, there's an awful lot of ice. A very inhospitable place to have to put a plane down, the ice fields are breaking up in a late Spring thaw- any landing would be ugly. We were able to relay our current position to JP , our group leader, flying with Jeff in the turbine conversion "Royal Duke", but we've since lost all contact. We're less than an hour from Nuuk, we have plenty of fuel, and we still have some chocolate so the flight is going well overall. We consider ourselves to be so modern and technologically advanced- 21st century Americans. But leave the States, especially on your own, in your own aircraft, and that all changes in a hurry. We might as well be flying a WWII bomber at this point- but we're flying, that's the important part.

Sorry, comments are closed…

Comments so far