35.
The Final Countdown
‘The suspense is terrible . . . I hope it’ll last.’
WILLY WONKA, WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (1971)
I had been quietly flying over the Philippines, enjoying the view of farmland, seaside villages, reefs and islands for several hours, when a large helicopter flew past in the opposite direction, but at the same height. Blimey, I thought, that was close. And what are they doing out here anyway?
Several minutes later I noticed a helicopter to my left, about a kilometre away, flying in the same direction and at the same speed, but about 1000 feet higher. Painted grey, it seemed to be a navy helicopter. I wondered if they were looking at me. I assumed it was the same helicopter as before.
There was a large storm front ahead that I needed to dodge. David Geers, a fellow Searey pilot in Australia, had offered to look up weather patterns online if I was ever unsure where to go. For the first time I called him on my satellite phone. He was pleased to hear from me. It turned out he had been following the Sun’s progress on the website, which he said he always kept open on an iPad, even taking it to bed, which was starting to wear a little thin with his wife, Cheryl. David said he would check out the weather and call me back.
From where I was located, going right would have taken the Sun further out to sea. Going left would have taken her closer to land, where I could find an airport if the weather was impassable. I needed to make a decision quickly, and my instinct said go left.
I turned 10 degrees left, which was towards the helicopter. I looked out at the cloud and then focused on my map. After less than a minute I looked up and was shocked to see the helicopter barely the width of a road from the Sun, rocking its rotors left and right – the international signal for ‘you have been intercepted’.
What the hell? I thought. I rocked my wings back, acknowledging that I understood.
The side door of the helicopter was open, and manned by a soldier who was aiming a large machine gun straight at me. Standing behind him was another soldier, who was pointing a video camera. A camera mounted on the front of the helicopter was clearly looking in my direction too. I carefully took a photo, all the while thinking, What if I’m never seen again?
I tried calling the helicopter on the radio frequency assigned to the area.
‘Helicopter intercepting seaplane, November Four Seven Three X-ray Papa, do you copy?’ I said.
There was only silence. I repeated the message but still there was no response.
I rang David back and told him what was happening. I wanted to know if he thought there was anything else I should do, which he didn’t. Airliners above me were talking on their radios, which was distracting, so I turned down the radio while I spoke to David. We discussed the cloud front ahead, and he said going to the right would get me around the system quickest. The conversation was comforting, and I asked him to note my position just in case something happened. I couldn’t chat for too long because I needed to concentrate, and I didn’t want to run out of phone credit.
The helicopter was a menacing sight. I tried calling it again, but got no answer. I checked I was on the right frequency, and tried a different one just in case. Silence.
As the Sun flew on, I grew more concerned. The international rules of flight dictated that, if intercepted by a military aircraft, I was required to follow it. But why? What was going on? I had heard stories of people being intercepted, diverted to an alternate airport and locked in jail while their paperwork was checked. In most cases they were released within a few days, but still I didn’t fancy it.
I looked down and everything became clear. There was an aircraft carrier accompanied by warships between the Southern Sun and the Philippines coast. The ships’ wakes were parallel to and almost under the Sun’s flight path, until they’d made an abrupt left-hand turn to the east. Now they were heading away from me at a right angle. My flight path would have taken me straight over the fleet.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt, an enormous aircraft carrier, was patrolling this part of the South China Sea to remind the Chinese who owns it, I read that night. On reflection, I could see how a small plane, especially one using the same engine as a Predator drone, heading straight towards the carrier in the middle of the ocean must have seemed suspicious.
I was still worried, but I now understood why I had been intercepted. I continued to fly, keeping one eye on the helicopter and another on my charting software. After forty-five minutes I was about to hit cloud, and had to change direction. I could follow the helicopter, or turn right through the cloudless air and head for my planned destination.
I didn’t want to just follow the helicopter and see what happened. I turned 30 degrees right, towards a clearing between the clouds. The helicopter aggressively followed, but got no closer. I descended to 1000 feet to get under the cloud. The helicopter followed. As I passed under the cloud, the helicopter suddenly turned back towards the aircraft carrier. Phew.
Breathing a sigh of relief, it occurred to me that I hadn’t heard any noise on the radio for a while, which seemed strange. I felt for the knob and discovered that I’d left the volume all the way down after the phone call. I was mad at myself. As I turned it up, I heard the tail end of someone’s voice: ‘. . . Seahawk changing frequency.’
A Seahawk is a US military helicopter. I felt sick. You idiot, I thought. But then they hadn’t answered my first radio calls, which had prompted me to phone David. I could still hear passenger jets flying above me so I listened for a minute. No one was talking about the Sun or the helicopter. Should I say something? I decided to continue along in silence. I was worried I was in big trouble.
My heart sank ninety minutes later as the Sun flew around a headland and towards Zamboanga airport. A helicopter was hovering right between me and the runway. Were they waiting for me? Had I caused an incident? The questions sat heavily in the cockpit for a few minutes.
As I turned the Sun to land, the helicopter slowly flew away. It looked like a civilian chopper. When I landed, it was clear the airport was fairly quiet. But two official cars and half a dozen officials in uniform with gold braid and stern hats were waiting for me.
I shut down the Sun and stayed in my seat. The uniforms approached. As they came closer, my dread dissipated: they weren’t soldiers or police officers, but customs and immigration officials. They smiled and welcomed me to Zamboanga.
My handling agent emerged from the terminal. Still seated inside the Sun, I asked him in a hushed tone, ‘Is everything okay?’
‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Come in, get a drink of water and sign your paperwork. Welcome to Zamboanga!’
My stay in Zamboanga turned out to be one of the highlights of the trip. I knew little about the place, so felt a heightened sense of discovery; it was only later that I learned it was considered a dangerous place for visitors. As much as I was in a hurry to get home, I still wanted a day off flying to explore.
Some quick internet research presented a photo of Rio Hondo, a fishing village of houses on stilts over the water. After a morning walking around the old fort, harbour and even a place of pilgrimage, I tried to get a motorcycle sidecar taxi to Rio Hondo. The first two drivers shook their heads and kept going. The third agreed. After fifteen minutes we reached a security checkpoint, where the driver shooed me out of the sidecar. As I wondered what would happen next, the guards motioned to some teenagers who had BMX bikes and rudimentary sidecars. We were soon pedalling down the road in one of them, with every other bike following, and accompanied with squeals of delight.
We came to a walkway. The charred remains of stumps protruded from the water. The fishing village had been burnt to the waterline in a small civil war, leaving the residents destitute. The United Nations had been building new homes for the fishing families. Despite the hardships they had been through, they welcomed me with open arms. Kids flying kites talked to me in broken English and showed me their homes. I was offered a freshly caught fish to eat. It wa
s a simple yet delightful afternoon. As I so often found, those with the least were the most prepared to share.
From the Philippines I planned to fly to Ambon, in eastern Indonesia, my final stop before Australia. About halfway there, I noticed the fuel gauge wasn’t moving in the direction I expected. Looking at a glass filter through which the fuel passed, I could see no movement. I put my hand on the electric fuel pump behind my seat – it didn’t seem to be functioning.
Oh dear. I had two hours of fuel in the main tank and was four and a half hours from Ambon. After travelling almost all around the world, it was the first time an in-flight technical fault had threatened to force me to divert. There were numerous island airports ahead but I dreaded the paperwork and official encounters of an unscheduled arrival.
I had designed a redundancy into the fuel system in case the pump failed. Anyone who has ever been in a small boat with an outboard motor will have seen the black rubber priming bulbs used to inject a small amount of fuel into the engine to get it started. I had installed one in the Sun. The bulb was within comfortable reach behind the passenger seat.
I started pumping with my right hand and the fuel was flowing within seconds. After about ten minutes the fuel level on the main tank had increased a little. After twenty minutes my forearm was getting sore. After thirty minutes the fuel gauge was staying level. The engine burnt 20 litres of fuel per hour. In Melbourne I’d been able to pump at a rate of 30 litres an hour for two minutes. Now, above the Molucca Sea, I was struggling to keep up with the engine’s consumption.
After an hour I noticed the fuel gauge drop a little more. I wasn’t pumping fast enough. It wasn’t clear the Sun could make it to Ambon. With the control stick wedged between my knees, and still pumping with my right hand, I searched with my left hand on the iPad for the few airports either side of my route. They were all very small and some had gravel strips. The chance of finding spare parts was remote, and hostile officialdom high, which motivated me to keep pumping.
After four hours the Sun crossed the equator. My arm was burning now, but I circled back and crossed again. I wanted to draw a circle on my tracking map as a message to Anne: ‘I’m nearly home!’ Because the tracker didn’t update continuously, though, the Sun’s circle displayed as a triangle. Still, you have to celebrate the little things!
A summer haze had turned the horizon into a blur, which made the first sight of Ambon very welcome. The island was twenty minutes away, and there was one hour of fuel in the main tank. I pumped for a few more minutes but was confident now I would reach the airport. I raised my arm and clenched my fist a few times. Yep, that’s gonna hurt tomorrow . . .
A year later, my forearm still feels odd when I make a fist.
36.
Australia
‘Every human being has a basic instinct: to help each other out. If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search. If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies. This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without exception.’
MARK WATNEY, THE MARTIAN (2015)
Before reaching Australia, I had to get out of Ambon, Indonesia, which lacked the hospitality of the Philippines and Japan. I used my day off to install a new fuel pump from a car parts shop. After the Sun’s electrical fault the day before, I was paranoid about the next day’s twelve-hour leg. It was a serious undertaking, and I still had a lot of water to pass over to get home. Frustratingly, the Ambon airport authorities would not approve the Sun’s clearance paperwork in advance. They told me to return in the morning. That wasn’t convenient, as I wanted to leave at first light so I could arrive in Australia before sunset.
After spending half a day sourcing a new fuel pump and installing it in the Sun, I visited a small ‘twin cinema’, which had eight lounge chairs in each room. When I asked what films were showing, the lady motioned her arm across the shelves of hundreds of DVDs and said, ‘Anything you’d like.’ A quick glance noted that $2 per person seemed worryingly cheap, and when I realised the film titles ‘on DVD’ were actually still showing in cinemas around the world, I decided I couldn’t include this venue in my MBA research on ethical grounds.
I enjoyed a slow dinner by the beach as the sun dipped beneath a golden-red horizon. It was very quiet. I looked across the water and couldn’t believe that this was it. I’d come all this way, and had just one leg to go before arriving back in Australia.
I got to the airport before dawn. No one was there to let me in. After waiting and calling, I eventually reached the Sun by walking through the public terminal, through an unmanned metal detector and out a fire exit. As always, being in the flying suit seemed to grant me special passage. After my pre-flight checks I searched for my handling agent, who wasn’t there. His office manager wouldn’t help me. They hadn’t prepared my invoice and he claimed no one knew how much I owed for landing there. It was ludicrous. I was tired, wanted to get home and really preferred to arrive in Australia during daylight.
There was a solution. If I paid several hundred dollars extra on my credit card, the manager said, he promised to refund the difference when they worked out the true cost – which of course they never did. It was the only time on the trip I felt ripped off, which was remarkable in itself, and it also cost me two hours of daylight. It was hard not to lose my cool, but I didn’t want to take off angry, which would neither help nor get me in the sky more quickly. By the time I was cleared to leave, I knew I’d be landing at least an hour after dark.
The flight itself was glorious. Despite my nerves – including constant thoughts of, This is too good to be true; something is bound to go wrong – the Sun charged along without a glitch. The weather improved the closer I got to Australia, as though welcoming me home.
Horn Island, north of Cape York, was a low-key way to re-enter my native land. The sun dipped below the horizon an hour from the island, but a brightly lit runway guided me down safely. I parked, shut down and soon had visitors. Customs, quarantine and immigration staff – now known as Border Force – greeted me with cans of spray to fumigate the Sun. They had been intrigued by a weblink at the bottom of the emails I’d sent them over the previous week, and had been following the Sun on the internet.
‘It’s very small, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, but she’s got me all the way around the world,’ I said, patting her nose.
It was great to be on home soil. I’d made it back to Australia, and with only one more flight my circumnavigation would be officially complete.
Horn Island has a classic country hotel with basic rooms and big steaks. Just like at Cold Bay, the other guests were working in the area. There were a few charter pilots, a plumber and some builders servicing the surrounding islands. There were no tourists except me; the place was too remote to appeal to the grey nomads. I went to sleep early. At sunrise I planned to connect two dots and complete a continuous line on my map.
As word spread about the journey, more and more people had been following the Sun’s progress online, including several who were making their way to Longreach to witness the completion of the circumnavigation. I planned a day off there so I could finally have a good look at the museum, and to catch my breath before the last two legs home, which would be on consecutive days. I would stop overnight in Rylstone, New South Wales, where a friend, Rob Loneragan, the Australian Searey agent and airport owner, had organised a welcoming party at my penultimate stop. The next day I would fly home to Williamstown, arriving at 3 p.m. on Hobsons Bay, in front of the Royal Yacht Club of Victoria, where Anne had invited close family and a few friends to greet me. It would be a small gathering with no media.
From Horn Island I headed almost due south for Longreach, which was only eight hours away. The fact I was now thinking of such a distance as ‘only’ said a lot about the trip and my new sense of what was normal. Two years earlier, I had been frustrated if headwinds added fifteen minut
es to a ninety-minute trip from Williamstown to Bairnsdale.
As I looked down at the sea, I realised I was passing through too quickly. The bright green and blue sea was spotted by lots of sandy islands. I wanted to get home, but the ocean that had been hidden in the dark the evening before was stunning in the morning. I decided it would be wonderful to come back and explore the islands and crystal-clear waters another time.
Two hours into what was looking like a humdrum flight, a red warning light illuminated on the dash. The word beneath the light read simply ‘charge’, which meant the battery was no longer charging. My heart sank. I felt it hit the bottom of my stomach, maybe twisting a little as it fell. Not today!
It was the second problem I’d had in three flights. While I’d made it through some incredible situations, perhaps this was the final reminder. Maybe I wasn’t meant to make it. Had I dreamed too much and pushed my luck too far?
If the warning light was correct, the generator might have died, or perhaps an electrical component. Maybe a wire had come loose. Whatever the cause, I couldn’t keep flying. The Sun would only stay airborne for another hour or two, and Longreach was still six hours away. If the battery was no longer charging, the electric fuel pumps would stop when it ran out. The engine would then stop.
The fault was serious, but soon my disappointment was tempered with relief. Almost anything can be fixed on land, and an emergency landing in the desert would be preferable to putting down in the middle of the ocean, even in a seaplane.
The mining town of Weipa, forty-five minutes away, wasn’t the closest airport. But from the back of my memory somewhere I recalled hearing boarding calls for Weipa in a Qantas lounge. I might need replacement parts, and that wouldn’t be easy to organise. The nearest Searey shop was in Florida, and spare parts for the Rotax engine would have to come from Melbourne. Weipa had regular commercial flights that could transport parts or a mechanic, if needed.
Voyage of the Southern Sun Page 26
