Voyage of the Southern Sun

by Michael Smith

  I started by breaking the first rule of air-traffic control communication. ‘Darwin approach, Searey amphibian, November Four Seven Three X-ray Papa, with delta, VFR aircraft request inbound,’ I broadcast.

  ‘November Four Seven Three X-ray Papa, Darwin approach,’ came the reply. ‘Please contact Darwin delivery on one two six decimal eight.’

  Oops – I was getting ahead of myself and was on the wrong frequency.

  I radioed delivery, and they cleared the Sun to enter Darwin’s airspace. They gave me a ‘squawk code’ for my transponder, a device that sends information about the plane to the flight controller when scanned by radar. The code was a four-digit number allocated to a plane for the duration of a flight; it told the air-traffic controller who I was, as well as my altitude, direction and speed. It’s a fantastic system that has worked for decades and makes for safer flying.

  I was on my way in. I muddled my calls a little and had to ask, ‘Say again?’ a few times. My lack of experience was showing; I was going to have to get better at this. Every flight from Darwin to Britain would likely be controlled this way.

  Eventually I realised my problem: I was so worried that I would make mistakes on my calls that I was being overly cautious, rather than just relaxing and responding. Once on the ground, I requested taxi assistance and was guided to a parking bay with instructions at each intersection. The air-traffic controllers at Darwin, who are military personnel, were very friendly and forgiving.

  Clearing customs could not have been easier. I was met at the plane by a ground handler, who escorted me into the terminal. From his office we printed and submitted my flight plan for the next leg (or so I thought). We then went to see customs and immigration. They asked for my passport, where I was going, and my ‘Gen Dec’.

  ‘Huh?’ I muttered. I had never heard of the document before. It turns out that if you’re flying your own plane overseas, you don’t fill out a customs form but rather a General Declaration, or ‘Gen Dec’. This is used by flight crews on commercial airlines all around the world. When I said I didn’t know what a Gen Dec was, the official said, ‘Don’t worry – have a good trip.’

  As I was escorted back to the plane, I was thinking, ‘Well, that was pretty easy.’ I got into the Sun, turned on my radio and contacted the control tower, only to be told there was a problem with my international flight plan. The plan I had filed was the same one I was carrying in the plane with me. It was a domestic flight plan, showing the headings, distances, times and fuel consumption that I would use while navigating throughout the flight. It had never occurred to me there might be a standard format for international flight plans. But there was, and I sat there for nearly an hour while it was sorted out.

  The time was precious, as I wanted to arrive in East Timor before the tropical afternoon showers hit Dili airport. The air-traffic controller was sympathetic, and helped me file a flight plan over the radio so that I could eventually get going. The learning curve was steep! Once the paperwork was sorted, the flying itself seemed easy.

  I was starting to clue in to one of the great secrets of aviation: it is much easier being told where to fly by air-traffic control rather than navigating by GPS and a map, especially when going solo. Instead of fearing air-traffic control, I had begun to recognise that they were a great resource. It was just a matter of doing as I was told. Commercial pilots did this as a matter of course, but like many amateur pilots I had always nervously avoided air-traffic control.

  As the Australian continent faded into the distance behind me, I felt an eerie chill mixed with exhilaration. The seemingly vast Timor Sea was all I could see, and after half an hour I could no longer raise Darwin on the radio. I was very much alone. But the weather was glorious, and my adventure was now truly underway. It felt great to be alive.

  7.

  The Year of Living Dangerously

  ‘There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’

  DONALD RUMSFELD, THE UNKNOWN KNOWNS (2013)

  Billowing cumulonimbus were building over Timor as the Southern Sun approached. In the world of clouds, these are the most dangerous. Vicious updrafts could flip the craft upside down or rip a wing off. Lightning could fry her electrics. Even professional pilots – who, unlike me, were permitted to fly through clouds as a matter of course – wouldn’t risk a cumulonimbus.

  East Timor is still a nation rebuilding, and there was no radar at Dili airport. That meant its air-traffic controllers were unable to see my position or direct me around the mountains and clouds along the island’s spine. I could communicate with them but I was navigating on my own.

  I pushed the Sun up to 10,500 feet, which was as high as she had ever been. Much higher and I would have to break out an oxygen tank to avoid succumbing to the thin air. ‘I’m lucky this damn cloud isn’t any higher,’ I muttered. ‘I’m not ready for this.’

  The Sun’s GPS map showed our position, and nearby landmarks and airports. Using the GPS, I was able to let the tower know my location relative to the airport. The calm and professional staff in the control tower used this information to track me as I approached from the east, past Cristo Rei, a tall statue of Jesus that overlooks the bay towards the capital. The landing was uneventful. Having completed my first international leg, I instantly felt better.

  Angelo Alves greeted me at the airport. He manages Cinema Loro sa’e, a charity Anne and I established to show movies to rural Timorese in their native language, Tetum. Angelo and his assistant, Lou (pronounced Loh), had heard about foreigners arriving in private aircraft before. They were usually twin-engine propeller-driven planes or private jets. They gasped at the size of the Southern Sun, and then started laughing. Lou wanted her photograph taken in the plane, and I was happy to oblige. She sat in the pilot’s seat, the controls at her fingertips, while I pointed the camera and encouraged her to pretend she was flying – so she flapped her arms!

  Alex, my airport ground handler, asked for my Gen Dec. There was that term again – argh! We went to his office and he showed me a blank one, which would have been useful to have got from my handling agent in Darwin. Alex also gave me a copy of an international format flight plan, another form I’d never seen before. I really did have a lot to learn.

  For me, these documents weren’t what Donald Rumsfeld would have called ‘known unknowns’. They were used by pilots all over the world, but I simply had no idea about them – they were definitely ‘unknown unknowns’. In my basic hotel I used a spreadsheet on my iPad to re-create both forms from scratch, adding the Southern Sun logo at the top. I printed twenty-five copies, with all of the fixed attributes filled out to save time along the way.

  An email arrived from Mike Gray of White Rose Aviation in the UK. He advised that I would have to resubmit my planned arrival dates at every airport through to London. Instead of calculating them in Greenwich Mean Time, the reference time of international aviation, I had given the local time in each place. Two more hours wasted because of not knowing what I didn’t know.

  The first stop on my MBA cinema tour was the Platinum Cineplex in Dili, which was built in a shopping centre by a company from Indonesia. It was designed in a standard cheap style, with tip-up seats. It wasn’t very busy and there didn’t seem to have been a lot of thought put into the movies shown. The owners had been forced to cut their ticket prices from $10 to just $3. Even that was a lot for the average Timorese family, which earned just $150 a month. The cinema business is a tough one, especially in Dili, where you have to appeal both to cashed-up expatriates and to the masses, and all the while pirated DVDs are readily available for next to nothing on many street corners.

  I’d been visiting cinemas around the world for years, and knew that the best way to look around was to simply buy a ticket. The movie showing was Furious 7, the latest instalment in the Fast and the Furious franchise. After t
hirty minutes I couldn’t handle the script any longer and walked out. Kurt Russell’s character, a special forces officer called Mr Nobody, should have been called Mr Ridiculous.

  My day off was fairly busy. I had offered to take Angelo and Lou for a flight around Dili, but they declined with a smile. It seemed the Sun was too small to be taken seriously. I offered a flight to Alex, my handler, who had been so helpful in explaining and arranging my paperwork. He excitedly agreed. We flew down the beach at 1000 feet towards the Cristo Rei monument, before returning to the airfield. Alex squealed with delight and snapped lots of photos.

  The afternoon was spent on Cinema Loro sa’e business with Angelo and Lou, and meeting Matt Wilkinson from the Australian Embassy, a new sponsor. Each year we dubbed a new film into Tetum. For 2015 we had chosen beloved Australian film Red Dog, and Matt proved to be a dynamo, helping us develop the program, raise our online presence and connect us with local businesses.

  The airport in Dili did not have avgas, so Angelo spent a couple of hours assisting me ferry containers of fuel from a petrol station to refill the plane. After a few drinks with some expats and locals we’ve worked with over the years, I had a quiet night back at the hotel, writing in my journal and preparing for my second international leg – complete with a new flight plan and Gen Dec forms.

  Dili airport’s control tower took a long time to find my flight plan the next morning, which was surprising given they only had two flights a day. After departing and heading west, I spent a couple of hours trying to raise Indonesian air-traffic control on the radio. Eventually connecting, I informed them I was flying to Lombok, a large island immediately east of Bali. The scenery on the route was incredible, and such a contrast to the flat north of Australia: huge mountains plunging into azure seas, and thousands of farmers’ fields covering all but the steepest terrain.

  It would have been splendid to land at the city of Bima, on the adjacent island of Sumbawa, one of the refuelling stops on the original Qantas route. Indeed, I would have liked to land near a beach and go for a swim. But Bima didn’t have an international airport where I could clear customs, and the Indonesian air force has a reputation for sending MIGs to intercept wayward aircraft in its vast airspace.

  Lombok was covered in a grimy soup; at first I thought it was fog but soon realised it was the pollution that seems to lie over the whole of Indonesia. The visibility for the last hour of the flight was just a few nautical miles. As I was a VFR pilot, this was almost the minimum legal visibility. It was too late to go back, though, and I could see the ground just ahead. I was keen to make my way down to land as soon as I could.

  The flight controller, who had identified the Southern Sun on radar, asked several times if I could see the runway, which only came into sight about two miles out. In the Sun, two miles was just ninety seconds of flying time, and I almost flew right past when it came into view. The airport was big, and I found it hard to believe I hadn’t been able to see it just minutes earlier. The air-traffic controller kept three Airbuses waiting on the taxiway while I landed. I think he knew he needed to get me down on the ground quickly, given the poor conditions. I was handed over from Lombok Approach to the control tower for the final minute of the flight.

  ‘Lombok Tower, this is a Searey, November Four Seven Three X-ray Papa, two miles east,’ I radioed, realising later I was on radar and he knew exactly where I was.

  ‘November Four Seven Three X-ray Papa, you are number two for runway one three after the Airbus,’ he replied, meaning the Sun would be the second plane to land.

  It’s hard to describe the thrill I felt at those words, which would become familiar over the following weeks. For someone with so little experience at big airports, to be among these giant jets was surreal. Being told to land behind a jetliner stirred a boy-like pride in me, a sense that the Southern Sun and I were achieving great things together. I felt I was becoming a real pilot, even though I was only about to double my successful international flights to two.

  It was important that I didn’t follow the jet too closely, because the turbulence from its huge engines and the wake from its wings could flip the Sun like a leaf. The controllers understood that and kept a fair distance between us.

  My nervousness over a number of years about communicating with air-traffic controllers was ill-placed. It was a shame I hadn’t realised it earlier. Once you’re identified by an airport’s radar, it’s like having a co-pilot to navigate, allowing you to just fly the plane. Discovering this emphasised for me the importance of mental framing: how we approach a problem directly affects how we handle it, and the results that eventuate. A positive mind leads to positive outcomes.

  My local handler had booked me into a nearby resort for the night. I sat outside to enjoy a late-afternoon drink, do some writing and check my email. There was one from Anne, who had been researching the local food speciality of Lombok ayam taliwang, a sweet and spicy chicken dish, and was recommending I try for dinner. I showed the server at the restaurant I went to; it wasn’t on the menu, but they obliged and made it nonetheless. It made me smile.

  This was the first of many such emails I received from Anne along the way, who vicariously helped me taste the exotic ingredients of my journey. It was a wonderful link that made me feel closer to her as I travelled ever further away.

  With my next stop, Surabaya, on the Indonesian island of East Java, I was following in the footsteps of the Qantas passengers of the 1930s. But the city had defied my research attempts: there seemed to be no records of its history as a stopover for flying boats. I was determined to find out something about what I thought was a unique part of the city’s past. Surely, once I was there, what I couldn’t find on the internet would reveal itself in living colour?

  I bought a map and located the city’s museum, where I hoped to find a local history expert who could tell me about the experiences of the early Qantas crews and passengers. Dirty, crowded and noisy, Surabaya wasn’t the most pleasant city. The taxi drivers didn’t seem to know where they were going, and my taxi actually broke down. Eventually the driver, having made repairs with what I suspected was a regularly accessed tool kit, delivered me to the museum, which boasted a proud sign declaring it was a prize-winning institution.

  Deflation ensued as soon as I walked inside: the museum celebrated the Javanese tobacco industry, and in particular a family dynasty that had gone from rags to riches picking, rolling, packing and selling the stuff. The founder’s first bicycle was displayed, along with some glorious stained-glass windows depicting smokers, and the original costumes of the company’s very own marching band.

  It was bizarre, but still a dead end – in more ways than one, I suppose. At least the port wasn’t far away. I walked for a while, taking in the street life. There were rickshaws everywhere and I accepted the offer of a ride from one, got aboard and pointed to the port on a map. After fifteen minutes of hard pedalling, the rider pulled up at a shop and went in to speak to someone, who came out and asked me to show him the location on the map. He then pointed us back in the direction we’d come from.

  That was okay. I’d arrived early, so still had half the afternoon to enjoy. Sadly, when I got to the port I saw no sign of an old seaport at all. Over the years it had been turned into a busy industrial dock featuring a predominance of concrete wharfs. It was a hive of activity, and I watched ships being loaded with old-fashioned cranes and cargo nets rather than containers.

  As I walked back, I spotted a gate leading to a Middle Eastern–style bazaar. I bought a bag of pistachios and kept heading deeper into the enclave. A few minutes later I was prevented from going any further by men standing at the entrance to what I then realised was a mosque. At that moment my phone rang. The number started with the digits 972 – Israel. It was a security officer asking about my planned flight to Tel Aviv, and wanting to know more about the countries I would be visiting en route. That’s spooky timing, I thought.

  My next stop was to be in Jakarta, the bustling capital of
Indonesia. But an international diplomatic meeting called the Asian-African Conference was being held in the city, and they had run out of aircraft parking space, so I was told to find an alternative. Didn’t they realise I could park under another plane? Arrangements were quickly made for me to land in Palembang, on the island of Sumatra; I’d never heard of the city, but apparently I could clear outgoing customs there. Palembang had no direct link to the Qantas route, but it would get me within a couple of hundred kilometres of somewhere I had been searching for.

  The next morning I was forced to wait at an airport office for half an hour because no one had the key. Eventually the manager turned up, but by this time I was really annoyed. ‘How could you keep me waiting?’ I complained, receiving only blank stares in response.

  Within a few minutes, I was even angrier at myself for being so terse. But it was good that the incident had happened early in the trip, because it completely reset my thinking. I had read so many books and seen so many documentary films about people who had driven, sailed or flown on long trips, and who complained bitterly about the inefficiency of customs and immigration services around the world. I knew the same would happen to me, and getting annoyed wasn’t going to fix anything. It would just leave me unhappy and frustrated, plus it wouldn’t actually speed anything up. Worst of all, it would inject an unwelcome sense of negativity into my travels. I decided that I had to accept that this was simply part of visiting other cultures, and it was better to revel in the differences than be frustrated by them.

  In Palembang I found a hardware store and bought a small plastic kitchen sink for an important mission the following day. Then I polished up on the procedures for entering the busy airspace over Singapore, which I expected would be the most demanding of the entire trip. On the way there I would pass over the equator, an exciting and romantic prospect for an old sailor like me. I desperately wanted to be looking at my GPS latitude readout when the S became an N. As it turned out, my equatorial obsession would almost trigger a disaster.