I had wanted to spend two nights in Nuuk, where there was a lot to explore. But it was a Friday, and it turned out that all airports in Greenland are closed on Sundays. It would have to be one night or three. I bought a coffee in the airport terminal and studied the weather. The Sun’s entry point into my next destination, Canada, would be determined by forecast cloud and rain. I was tossing up between Iqaluit, due west, a town of 7000 people well inside the Arctic Circle, or Goose Bay, a photogenic air force base much further south, in Newfoundland.
Iqaluit was only 800 kilometres from Nuuk, or five to six hours of flying. Goose Bay would be a 1300-kilometre, nine-hour Atlantic Ocean marathon. The weather on Saturday looked good, but it would not be so benign on Monday. To be safe, I needed to ship out in the morning. The forecast winds favoured the longer route, which would get me a lot closer to New York.
On paper I was choosing the sensible option – but in my heart I knew the longer flight was inherently more risky. It would require more time over the almost-freezing sea. I told myself to trust the Sun. She hadn’t failed me before, mostly, and I believed she would get me home safely. I filled out my flight plan – destination Goose Bay – and dropped it off at the control tower to avoid any delays in the morning. The staff helped me fax the required form to Canadian customs to advise them of my likely arrival time.
Having decided on my destination, I now had to top up. Getting ready to fill the tanks with avgas, I noticed a stronger than usual smell of petrol, and suspected a leak. A fabric bladder in the Sun’s passenger footwell had been full of fuel since Scotland. It helped balanced the plane and provided extra fuel, just in case. I lifted it up to check it wasn’t leaking from the hose outlet and, sure enough, it was. As I examined the fitting, the thread separated from the bladder in my hand and fuel gushed into the bottom of the plane. As fast as possible I manhandled the thirty-kilogram bag into a position where it wasn’t spilling fuel, but a lot had already flowed out, creating a fire hazard, as well as a mess.
I needed to empty the bladder, which was useless in its damaged state. Trying to keep the bladder upright with my right hand, I reached over with my left and switched on the electric fuel transfer pump, which drained the bladder in fifteen minutes while I precariously held it to avoid further spillage. I then removed the bag, shook out some remaining fuel and had a close look.
The nylon fitting where the hose connected to the bag had given way. It was a serious equipment failure, which I was relieved had happened on the ground and not in flight, when I would have been forced to fly the Sun with my legs while leaning over to the passenger seat to try to stop thirty litres of fuel draining all through the cockpit.
The separate fuel bladder under the cockpit floor had brass fittings, which weren’t going to give way. To save weight on the footwell bladder, I had chosen nylon fittings, which are commonly used in the industry – and, it turns out, a mistake. I made a mental note to revisit that decision once the Sun and I got to the United States.
Being a craft that travels on water, the Sun has a bung, or screw-in plug, at the back of the hull. When I opened it, fuel gushed out for what seemed like at least a minute; I estimated it was about five litres of highly flammable petrol. I had dodged a bullet.
I checked into a hotel in the centre of Nuuk, quickly changed and started exploring. It was too late for the city museum, but with sunset not till 11.30 p.m. I had plenty of time to look around. I walked briskly for a couple of hours, which helped me decompress both physically and mentally.
Nuuk has one cinema, which doubles as a theatre and community hall, although the staff told me it is mainly used to show films. The movies are a mix of Hollywood and art films, much like our cinemas in Australia. I wandered along the shore and back to the hotel for dinner, where I was told there was a very good steak restaurant on the top floor. Coming from the world’s biggest beef-exporting country, I was keen to try the Greenland version. The restaurant had a great wine list and, with Thomas joining me, I was excited about ordering a bottle of good red. It would be a nice break from my usual: ‘Do you have wine by the glass?’ ‘Yes, sir, both a red and a white.’
The steak menu was impressive, perhaps too impressive, so I enquired about the provenance of one cut.
‘Australia,’ the waiter said.
‘How about this one?’
‘Australia.’
All the steak was imported. The ox fillet was local, though, and delicious.
Thomas had grown up in Greenland and worked all around the world. He and I had a long, interesting conversation, from travel, to flying, to living in a remote part of the world. After dinner he drove me around on a tour of the town, and dropped me back at my hotel at dusk, which happened to be midnight. You can certainly squeeze a lot into a day with so much daylight!
I stayed up for a while, studying maps and weather forecasts. The route from Melbourne to London had been arranged months in advance, each stop rigidly locked in, so deciding where to go the following day was unsettling. I was convinced Goose Bay was the right call, but it was going to be a long, foreboding flight.
23.
Saved by the Sun
‘Set the controls for the heart of the sun.’
ROGER WATERS, PINK FLOYD: LIVE AT POMPEII (1972)
Gerry Humphries was a Royal Air Force pilot. On a sortie over the Atlantic Ocean, his Harrier jet suffered a catastrophic instrument failure. Not knowing exactly what was beneath him, he landed on the fog-covered ground where he thought the airport was. He walked away unharmed. When the fog lifted, the wingtip of his Harrier was three inches from another Harrier.
Humphries is now retired and living on a farm with its own landing strip near the Irish city of Limerick. He had been following the Sun’s progress online, and I had met him, along with other members of the flying club there, when I did a presentation about my trip. He made a point of flying to the airfield the day before I was leaving for a quiet word. As he described what had happened to him when his instruments failed, I was forced to focus on the danger of crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a light aircraft. Humphries later emailed me a manual on Atlantic crossing procedures, which helped with my planning, and suggested I download an iPad app called MeteoEarth, created by the German MeteoGroup, one of the world’s leading private weather-forecasting companies; it supplies the data used by many TV stations. The app presents a seven-day forecast map of wind, cloud or rain over any area of the planet, at any altitude, which is invaluable for aviation.
The app is a great example of how technology is making flying safer and easier. MeteoEarth’s accurate maps helped me decide to fly to Goose Bay, rather than make the shorter crossing to far northern Canada. While the weather suited flying to Iqaluit that day, I was able to determine that the Sun would have had to slog through headwinds for the two following days and would likely be grounded by weather another day.
For a flight of 1300 kilometres over remote sea, the trip from Greenland to the Canadian coast was remarkably straightforward. The tailwinds started in the Sun’s favour and kept getting better. After one hour they were 10 knots. After two they were 20 knots, which gave me the equivalent of a 20 per cent discount on flying time and fuel.
Icebergs dotted the sea for the first hour. A couple of hours later, having seen none for a while, I came across one so big that it was emanating waves in concentric circles. The sight was incredible, and one that would have sent a chill up the spine of any long-distance sailor. I marked the berg on my route as 61 degrees north, 54 degrees west. If the location were flipped to the Southern Hemisphere, it would have been at the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, which juts out from Antarctica towards Argentina. I would hate to be sailing around here at night, I thought, but it also made me realise just how far north I’d trekked in the Southern Sun.
I flew at 4500 feet all the way to the Canadian coast, a journey of six hours. The air was so calm that I was able to write in my journal, the notepad resting on my knees. I looked up at the instruments and o
ut the windscreen between every sentence, rather than every few words. I enjoyed the solitude, and the opportunity to put my thoughts down on paper. I felt satisfaction at seeing a complicated plan come together.
Maybe I got ahead of myself. Perhaps it could have happened to any amateur pilot. The ease of the flight could have made me overconfident. Either way, the trip would not be quickly forgotten, perhaps marking a turning point in my life. That night in my hotel, safely on the ground at last, I cautiously described on my blog what it had been like to get caught in cloud on the Newfoundland coast. Not wanting to scare Anne, Jack and Tim, I wrote the following under the headline ‘Some bonus extra flying time’:
I had already planned a route that brought me down the bay rather than direct, but even crossing the small peninsula below wasn’t possible. I started venturing in, got very uncomfortable with the view ahead and turned back, and decided to stay over water or very low land. This is the beauty of carrying extra fuel. I quickly worked out I had four hours’ spare fuel, so even flying an extra 60 miles just didn’t matter.
The reality was a lot more complex. After six hours’ flying, the Canadian coast appeared on the horizon under a blanket of cloud. A second layer of menacing white sat above it. There was a narrow, cloudless gap in between. After such a straightforward flight, I was going to have to finagle the Sun through the poor weather to the airport, which was still 150 kilometres away inland. It was going to be hard work.
I could have flown over the upper cloud bank and, unable to see the ground, used my GPS mapping to navigate to Goose Bay. All I would have to do was follow the map and enjoy the clear sky. But if there wasn’t an opening when I got overhead of the airport – and the forecast suggested there would be a few gaps – I would have to descend through the cloud. As a VFR pilot, I was only allowed to fly through cloud when there were no other options, and I always tried to avoid that situation. But going over the cloud would be easier, and possibly safer, than flying between the two cloud banks. I had no way of knowing how far the gap extended.
Another option was to fly along the coast to Brig Harbour Island, at the mouth of Hamilton Inlet, which connects to Lake Melville. Goose Bay sits on the lake’s western edge. If at any point the clouds got so low that I had to land – which was possible but unlikely that day – I could have put the Sun down on the wide lake. This simple, safe option would have added forty-five minutes’ flying.
I called Goose Bay airport on the radio for assistance. They would have the latest weather information and could advise on the safest route in. ‘Goose Bay, Searey amphibian, November Four Seven Three X-ray Papa, request.’
No one responded. I was on my own.
Eager to land and celebrate a successful Atlantic crossing, I made a rookie error: I took the shortcut. I flew between the two cloud banks, hoping for a clear path all the way to Goose Bay, which was about an hour away.
I wasn’t sure but the cloud below me seemed to be getting higher, and the bank above lower. A few minutes later there was no doubt: the cloud banks were merging. The Sun was flying into a tightening vice.
Even small aircraft like the Sun can’t reverse their direction quickly. It takes a full minute to turn 180 degrees in regular conditions. In an emergency, the Sun could switch directions in half that, but even that wouldn’t be fast enough on this day. I was flying at 1500 feet, which is low enough on clear day to see people waving up at you. It also takes less than a minute to hit the ground if you lose control.
Being in cloud is like flying on a moonless night – except more dangerous. All you can see is white. If you are not changing direction or speed rapidly, you lose all sense of motion. The plane could be heading straight for the ground and you wouldn’t know. All you can rely on are your instruments. And I had been repeatedly warned that visual pilots who inadvertently enter cloud have an average life expectancy of just thirty seconds. A few times on the trip I hadn’t been able to avoid flying through clouds. Even with time to prepare and focus on the instruments, I was always relieved to emerge into sunlight.
Now I knew I needed to escape this situation fast. I tipped the Sun into a gentle 180-degree turn – but instead of turning to the left, which would have given me a better view of the sky, I instinctively turned to the right, as though I were driving a car in Australia or England. The Sun ran straight into a cloud I didn’t realise was there.
Caught by surprise, I didn’t process properly what had happened. Why am I in cloud? I asked myself, which was absurd, because there was no reason I wouldn’t be. I was in denial.
If the Sun hadn’t been in a turn, I would probably have been fine. I could have put her into a gentle climb and popped out above the cloud a few minutes later. Now the instruments indicated the Sun was slowly turning and losing altitude. That didn’t make sense to my overwhelmed brain. I adjusted the controls but couldn’t get her to fly straight and maintain altitude, which would give me a chance to pull myself together.
Fearing I had just thirty seconds to escape the cloud, I panicked. I slammed on the rudder to pull out of what I wrongly thought was a descending spiral. The instrument indicated the Sun was banked at 80 degrees – almost on her side – and started diving towards the ground. The warning system was screaming ‘terrain, terrain, pull up, pull up’ and ‘speed, speed’ through my headset. I should have been looking inside the plane, at the instruments, and using my limited (and dryly named) ‘recovery from unusual attitude’ training to regain straight and level flight. But instead I kept looking outside and only saw white.
She was going so fast that the rigid plastic windscreen started caving in – something I hadn’t known was possible. My heart was racing with a sense of dread and mortal fear; it had all happened so quickly. She was about to slam into the ground. I all but gave up, realising I’d lost control, and expected the plane to break apart before I hit the ground. I felt the deepest sense of sadness. It was over. I was about to die.
I thought of my family – I had let them down. But then something appeared, like a dull streetlight on a foggy night, or the first glimpse of light at the end of a long, dark train tunnel. The sun.
Still engulfed in white, the sun looked like a tiny, silhouetted dot. It was late in the afternoon and I was so far north of the equator that the sun was close to the horizon, making it an ideal beacon to steer towards. Even though I couldn’t see anything else, it was enough and I regained my sense of orientation. My hands and feet moved instinctively in unison. I levelled out, and eased the throttle a little and flew towards the shining white dot in the cloud. A minute later the Sun broke free of the cloud. The ground was only a few hundred feet below. At the speed I was descending, that would have been roughly ten more seconds.
My body was shaking, and my heart was pounding so hard that I thought I was having a heart attack. I knew I had to pull myself together – it was still at least an hour to the airport. Think of your family, I told myself. If you want to see them again, focus. You know what to do. You’ve been flying for ten years. You’ve flown half way around the world. Get to the coast and navigate the safest way, back to the water’s edge and follow the coast all the way to the airport.
I flew until I saw the beach and turned right – I would follow the shore to safety. The path ahead was clear. The sense of relief I felt quickly became something else: my shoulders slumped and I blubbered like an inconsolable child.
Goose Bay is an air force base that was once home to thousands of troops. When I arrived it had a skeleton staff. That meant a huge concrete runway with few other planes, which was very welcome, given my emotional state. I parked next to two Canadair water bombers, and after shutting down just sat in the cockpit, silent and still, barely knowing what to do next. Was I really here?
The moment was broken by the arrival of the customs and immigration officers. I opened the window, climbed out and got on with the procedures. I tied down the plane, walked into the handling agent’s office and arranged to be taken to the closest hotel. Exhausted, I
didn’t want to rush back to the airport the following morning.
That night, with good internet reception for the first time since Iceland, I downloaded all the detailed aviation maps for Canada and the United States which I’d been unable to get over the last week. I couldn’t bring myself to call Anne to explain what had happened. I was barely coping emotionally as it was. I told myself that to share it would have been unfair on my family. They would have been very worried for me, and other people would have contacted them to discuss it. There was no need to start those conversations when I was on the other side of the world. In truth, once the news of what had almost happened was ‘out there’, I don’t think I could have continued.
My angst was of my making. I needed to own it. I confessed the truth to my personal journal in a handwritten script so jittery I could barely read it later. I didn’t hold back my anger at myself. I had a very quiet dinner and went for a long, lonely walk. I didn’t want to be alone in my room. I broke into tears a few times. It was a horrifying experience, one I still can’t help but think about often, but don’t like to discuss. I choke up when trying to explain it.
One welcome email had arrived: the Narsarsuaq airport tower in Greenland had found my soft, comforting cashmere jumper on a couch in the tower and promised to post it home to Australia. I breathed a deep sigh. At least something good had happened that day.
24.
Canadian Bacon
‘This box is full of stuff that almost killed me.’
SERGEANT FIRST CLASS WILLIAM JAMES, THE HURT LOCKER (2008)
After the trauma of the previous day, I wasn’t eager to get back into the Southern Sun. Hanging around wasn’t going to make me feel any better, though. After a restless night, I slept in. I made espresso and ate a muesli bar in my room, and methodically updated every topographic and aviation map on my iPad. One of the reasons I’d made bad decisions yesterday was lack of information: my charts, made for instrument flying, didn’t show the precise height of hills. If I’d had that knowledge, I would have been more confident about flying beneath low clouds.
Voyage of the Southern Sun Page 17
