‘Ah, affirm tracking north for Amman, November X-ray Papa.’
Oops. Given the security concerns and procedures in this part of the world, the Sun had better just stick to the flight plan and follow the agreed course. Flying a few circles was probably not what they wanted to see an aircraft doing!
After a while the radio seemed suspiciously quiet, and I realised I had accidentally switched back to the Aqaba control tower’s frequency, now long out of range. I toggled back to the Amman controllers, only to hear them calling other aircraft, trying to locate me on the radio. Oops again, I thought. Although ever pilot has done this at some point, it wasn’t a great part of the world to drop out of radio contact.
Not surprisingly, the procedures for entering Israeli airspace are strict. Pilots, once airborne, need a specific clearance on an Israeli security frequency. If they don’t get it, they will likely be intercepted and potentially even shot down. After the problems I’d had with air-traffic control in the Middle East and Pakistan, I was nervous. Amman radar handed me over to the Israeli security frequency. But there was no need to worry: my first call was immediately returned, and I was soon handed over to a Tel Aviv controller who could not have been friendlier.
As the Sun crossed the border, the weirdest thing happened. The GPS indicated ‘no signal’, which meant it couldn’t find any satellites. That’s why pilots still need written flight plans, I thought. The signal returned after several minutes. Curious.
While I would be spending a few days in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, today my destination was Haifa, a city 90 kilometres north of Tel Aviv, which had been suggested by the Israeli Association of General Aviation, where landing and plane storage was much more easily organised. A Haifa controller directed me to the airport at 1500 feet along the Mediterranean coast. Soon he came back with a new instruction: I was to head 101 degrees, an unusually precise heading, which are normally in increments of five or ten degrees.
‘Confirming one zero one heading?’ I asked.
‘Affirm one zero one,’ he replied.
Haifa was north, yet 101 degrees was a heading just south of east. That’s strange, I thought, but I’ll do as I’m told. I was conditioned to following controllers’ orders. But as soon as I turned, I saw a clear problem. In about ten minutes – no, probably five minutes – I would fly into a mountain.
It felt like a communication issue. Most of the radio conversations on the airwaves were in Hebrew. When I spoke, they responded in English, which is the international language for aviation. Within a country, though, the government decides what language can be used for local flights.
I queried the heading again, but it was confirmed a second time. I told the controller the direction would result in a ‘charlie foxtrot indigo tango’, or CFIT, which is the acronym for a very dry aviation term, given the enormity of what it describes: ‘controlled flight into terrain’. In other words: You’re going to make me crash!
Another pilot piped up in a mix of English and Hebrew. By the time the controller got back to me, they had worked out what was going wrong. ‘November X-ray Papa, heading zero one zero,’ was his new instruction. This translated into a heading of 10 degrees, which is indeed all but north. Not only was this away from the mountain, but I was to return to flying along the beach – a much better outcome.
I was so happy to have made it to Israel. The Qantas Imperial flying boats landed on the Sea of Galilee in 1938, when Palestine was a British mandate. Also, some friends from the film industry – Barry, Reparata, John, Brett and Tobi – were in Tel Aviv, fresh from the Cannes Film Festival.
Arriving in Israel in a private plane involved a long and arduous security clearance, which I obtained only with the support of friends and pilots in Israel and Australia, who pleaded my case to the Israeli government. The standout fine chap was Yigal Merav, a pilot and Haifa Flying Club member and the owner of a local pest-control business. Yigal met me on the ground, helped me park and secure the Sun, and shepherded me through customs. That was after he’d spent weeks lobbying the Israeli security service to grant me permission to land, going to countless meetings on my behalf. I had never met him before, but he seemed inspired by my quest. Would I have done the same for someone struggling to visit Australia? I’d like to think so, but I couldn’t help wondering if I was receiving more support than I deserved.
While Israel is in the Middle East, it has a European atmosphere, and when I looked out at the Mediterranean Sea, London seemed close. I felt like I was almost on the home stretch. The Southern Sun had made it this far admirably. With more relaxed European airways ahead, I expected the flying to be a lot easier.
People say Tel Aviv is like New York. It isn’t. The city has a buzz of its own and was much more pleasant, especially with the Mediterranean weather. There were wonderful Bauhaus buildings and other art-deco designs. My favourite public architecture was the exquisitely detailed manhole covers – a certain sign of civilisation and culture.
The authorities wouldn’t allow me to land the Sun on the Sea of Galilee, which forms part of the border with Syria. I took a taxi instead. There are good photographic records of flying boats on the lake in the 1930s, including the huge Empire flying boats on their way to and from London.
That evening I headed back to Haifa and gave a presentation to the Israeli branch of AOPA, IAGA, the Israeli Association of General Aviation. It was the first time I had talked about the trip in any kind of forum, and I’d spent several hours over the previous two days thinking about the journey’s highlights and broader significance, and assembling a slide show of photos.
During stopovers I had been writing an online journal (which my kids tell me is really called a blog). I hadn’t sought attention or sponsors for my retracing of the airmail route, nor had I done anything to promote it online, but I did want to share my story with other pilots and adventurers. A satellite tracking device on the dash of the Sun had been automatically sending her location to the website every fifteen minutes, allowing my family, friends and anyone else who was interested to follow me in real time. At every city I tried to include something a little colourful about the day’s flying and the places I had visited, and I thanked people for their generosity.
I used the blog as the basis for my presentation to the Israelis. It was an honest account, but not a fulsome one. I mentioned my equatorial sink experiment but not the jammed control stick. With the audience I laughed about Riyadh air-traffic control but I skipped over my radio stuff-up near Amman. The ladder-damaged propeller certainly didn’t make an appearance.
To be frank, I was having mixed feelings about what I was doing. I was not only an amateur pilot, but an inexperienced one. By virtue of my passport and my business success, I was fortunate to be able to undertake this incredible experience. Through my own mistakes I had put myself at risk, and potentially caused pain to others. I had benefited hugely from the generosity of strangers, but worried that I had given little back.
I made a big effort to make my presentation engaging and interesting, and the room seemed captivated. As I talked, I knew I was very lucky to be here, on the adventure of my life. I was very conscious that it had partly been made possible by my Israeli friends’ tireless efforts, and they received me with warmth, generosity and enthusiasm.
14.
Behind the Glass
‘You’ll have bad times, but that’ll always wake you up to the good stuff you weren’t paying attention to.’
SEAN MAGUIRE, GOOD WILL HUNTING (1997)
Even though the flight from Haifa to Crete was to be my longest over water to that point, I wasn’t worried. Perhaps I had a false sense of security about the Mediterranean Sea. It was hardly the Gulf of Thailand, where monsoons regularly sweep through, or even the Timor Sea, where the afternoon rains fall so hard that planes aquaplane down the runway when they land.
After departing Palestine, the Empire flying boats would stop for fuel in Crete, the largest island in Greece. They then quickly left for a night in
Athens, which at that time was ruled by a pro-British government led by a fascist dictator, Ioannis Metaxas. To recover from the long flight, I decided I would spend a night in Crete, avoid busy Athens and fly over another 1930s refuelling stop, Brindisi in southern Italy, and snap a photo from above.
There was nothing of note to see while crossing the Med, so I worked on the journal that eventually evolved into this book. I wrote by hand, with the control stick wedged between my knees. As long as the shadow cast over the page by the windscreen frame didn’t move, I knew the Sun was flying straight at a constant altitude. I thought of it as an old-school form of autopilot.
Arriving over Crete was spectacular. Steep mountains rose from the water, some virginal, others intricately manicured into farms. When I saw how beautiful it was, I regretted planning only one night there. With no time to look around, I decided on a quick dinner at the port, followed by cinema research.
There were two cinemas in the capital, Heraklion. The one I visited was part of the British Odeon chain, which was owned by a British private-equity firm, in a fairly new shopping mall. It was uninviting and uncomfortable, and – go figure – all but empty. The floors were vinyl and the cheap tip-up seats were similar to those in the cinemas of my childhood. I understood why cinemas were built that way twenty years ago, but doing so today was just disrespectful of your audience.
The Sun had now flown almost 20,000 kilometres in forty days. She had landed at twenty-four runways, eight waterways and passed through fourteen countries. Her pilot had suffered diarrhoea, nausea and anxiety. But mainly he’d felt delight. He had at times been ripped off, messed around and ignored by people paid to look after him, yet he was having a ball. Even so, I needed a break. All I had to do was get to Croatia, where several friends were waiting for me with another boat – one with sails – for a blissful week exploring the Adriatic coast.
The flight would be fairly simple. The Sun would track along the north coast of Crete, turn right and fly to the south-west tip of Greece, go straight to the ‘heel’ of Italy, and then veer right again to the Croatian port city of Split, where I planned to store the Sun for ten days. Split is the nation’s second-largest city, and was a summer palace for the court of Roman emperor Diocletian. Roman buildings dominate the centre of the city, and draw hundreds of thousands of visitors a year.
This was how I described the approach and landing at Split in my online journal:
There were good openings in the clouds but lots of islands around, so for peace of mind I did a spiral descent over water, as some of the islands were very steep and tall. The descent confused my satellite tracking, as it saw my ground speed go below 35 knots and it thought I had landed! But no, not at that level . . . There was a fair bit of weather around and it kindly started lightly raining just on the way in but the tower were legends and turned on the runway lights, which made it heaps easier.
The reality was much more serious. A blanket of cloud at 2000 feet over the Italian coast killed my chances of taking an aerial photo of Brindisi to capture the Empire route landing spot. Because the clouds were worse a little north of the city, I requested and was granted permission to fly at 8500 feet. A couple of hours later I needed more altitude to get over the cloud, and climbed to 10,500 feet.
When there are a lot of clouds it can be hard to determine from looking towards the horizon what altitude to fly at. The difficulty is establishing a horizontal reference point, which allows you to see which clouds are above or below your level.
It was comforting to be able to see the Adriatic Sea. As long as it was below me, I wasn’t going to hit a mountain. It was rare that cloud completely covered the water, which is so common over land. The fact that the Sun was a seaplane made it feel safer than a regular aircraft.
The weather worsened as I flew north. I got clearance for 12,500 feet, which was the highest the Sun had ever gone. Then the Italian air-traffic controllers allowed me to climb another 1000 feet. Because the tailwinds were stronger up there, the higher the Sun was, the faster she went. The air was so thin that I had to breathe from an oxygen canister to make sure I didn’t lose concentration or black out. My oxygen supply was limited to several cans, but I didn’t believe I would need anywhere near that much.
While climbing, the Sun passed through the tops of a few wispy clouds. I could still see blue sky above, and at one point became aware of a change in the sound of the flowing air – it was almost like a flapping. I looked out to see if something was loose. Ice from the moisture in the cloud was forming on the forward edge of the wings and the struts that connected the wings to the fuselage. It was possible ice was forming on the stainless-steel edges of the propeller blades too, although they were moving too fast behind me for me to tell.
Ice is extremely dangerous on aircraft. By altering the asymmetrical shape of the wings – which is what gets planes off the ground – it can literally pull them out of the sky. Ice on the propeller reduces forward thrust, adding to the danger. I had never seen ice on the Sun before so I was very surprised. But, then, I had never flown so high before, and I hadn’t planned to that day, so I hadn’t taken note of the ‘freezing level’, the altitude at which the temperature, moisture and conditions would likely create ice on metal. I always carefully check the freezing level when flying near mountains, but now that I’d been flying over desert and ocean, I had fallen into the trap of not doing so.
Rather than descend into the cloud, which could have made the problem worse, I climbed towards the blue sky, which was not so far above me. The clear air wouldn’t have enough moisture to generate ice, I reasoned. A minute later the Sun was in sunshine and the ice melted away.
The incident made me paranoid about going back through cloud again. But I had 13,500 feet to lose on a very cloudy day. Normally, if I had to, I would descend partially through a few clouds to get to the ground. I had been trained to do this. This time, I looked for a hole in the cloud cover big enough to descend in a tall, continuous spiral.
After I found one, the air-traffic controller in Split gave me permission to descend to 2000 feet. The Sun was out of the cloud, but now beneath it, in a rainstorm that made it almost impossible to see what was in front. I still had a good view out sideways. The heavy cloud had made it dark around the airport. The controller, instead of directing my approach, let me find my own way in. I wished he had taken the lead to help me home. I was flustered and still didn’t have the confidence to do what I should have, which was to ‘request vectors’, a series of compass headings that would take me to the runway.
Split airport is right alongside the coast. There is an island close to the shore on the approach route to the runway I was assigned. As I neared the airport, the controller directed me to descend further. I was distracted, trying to follow the directions from my GPS, and I didn’t realise the island was there. Instead, I discovered the island when it was just 500 feet beneath me. Although the controller, using his radar, knew the Sun’s altitude above the island, the sight of land emerging out of the rain freaked me out. It wasn’t exactly a near miss, but not having seen it gave me a big shock. If I’d been flying any lower, the consequences could have been disastrous.
According to my GPS, the runway was two nautical miles away (3.7 kilometres). But I couldn’t see it through the rain pelting on the windscreen. VFR pilots like me are used to being able to see where they are going to land from at least 10 kilometres out – it gives them time to prepare for landing. In this case, I felt like I was going in blind.
Suddenly, the airport appeared from the gloom like a welcome Christmas tree. The control tower had switched the runway lights on so it was now easily visible. I landed safely and thanked the tower. Their reply was telling: ‘We’re just happy to have you on the ground safely.’
I never told anyone how difficult my landing at Split really was. I sat in the airport’s cafe for over an hour, digesting the last stage of the flight, and wrote frankly in my diary – my leather-bound confessional. When I met my frie
nds that night, they could tell I wasn’t myself. One friend, Nick, said I was white as a sheet and seemed to be in shock. He had just arrived on a commercial flight that was diverted away from Split because a storm had made it too dangerous to land – the same storm the Sun had flown under and around.
Even though I was eating and drinking with my friends, I was full of guilt and fear, and so I clammed up. But my diary reveals my true state of mind: ‘You promised Anne you’d be safe, and today you broke that promise a few times. Today wasn’t so marginal but if you push things further when the conditions are worse, you will go too far.’
Over the following year, I mentally blocked out what had happened. On reflection, though, it taught me a couple of important lessons. Firstly, just wait. The Sun had three and a half hours’ worth of fuel on board, so I could have easily circled for twenty minutes until the storm passed. Secondly, if you aren’t sure, be sure. At least ask. I could have asked air-traffic control for a weather update rather than being so determined to land as soon as possible. I should have requested specific directions to the runway, or flown entirely over the water. The Sun could have flown to the west of the island to be 100 per cent safe.
They say that once you get your pilot’s licence, it is really a licence to keep learning. For me, Split brought that home.
15.
Casino Royale
‘The unknown future rolls towards us.’
SARAH CONNOR, TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY (1991)
After a week with some of my fellow cinema owner friends – Valhalla founder Barry, John from Nova, Ingrid of Luna, Nick de Dendy and Rachel of Orpheum – sailing the Dalmatian coast from Split to Dubrovnik – which included a day trip to Montenegro, an experience I highly recommend everyone have at least once in their life – it was time to fly again.
Voyage of the Southern Sun Page 11
