Where I normally fly I usually start my flight planning the
same morning of the flight. If it is a longer flight and I suspect unusual
weather I take a brief look at the weather the night before and do some mental
planning. When crossing half the US continent in February and then the Pacific Ocean,
you start looking at the weather forecasts and reports well in advance. For the
last few weeks I have been monitoring the weather along our planned route. We
look at the constant shifting weather systems, the winds aloft at different
levels and see what ground speed they give us with a given true airspeed. We study Area Forecasts and look at forecasted icing and how that will limit us. And the closer you get to
the time of departure the clearer picture you have of the route ahead of you.
The last few days and weeks the weather along our route has been quite
miserable. When we did our final planning in the evening before there was a small chance that we would not be able to continue past Prescott, Arizona, due to icing at lower
levels over California. So we decided to depart and have Prescott as a first alternate.
9:04am local time I departed from Wichita for the first
1,182nm (2,189km) leg to Santa Maria, California. The heaviest I have ever been
in a caravan is 100kg above max takeoff weight. This was when I evacuated our
remaining team out of Juba, South Sudan, after the fighting in July 2016. Today
I was 1,000kg over and I was quite curious how it would feel. I had decided to
add another 10kts to my takeoff speed, but the aircraft very eagerly wanted to
get airborne at around 70 kts. I still kept it on the runway a little longer
and also added another 10kts to my climb speed. I was positively surprised
how well it performed at that weight.
Our minimum altitudes along the route varied between 6,000 and
12,000 feet. And the higher you went the stronger the winds. I leveled off at
12,000 feet with a depressing 45kt headwind. Later we experienced headwinds of 58 kts! Because of our heavy weight I also
didn’t get as high true airspeed as I would normally get at max weight. The
caravan was cruising with about 5 degree nose up. My GPS gave me an estimated
time of arrival (ETA) in Santa Maria of 6:30pm local time. That would be 11,5
hours in the air on a flight we had planned to be 9:40. However, we had 16
hours of fuel on board, and I knew that the winds were changing enroute and were different at lower levels. I requested to descend to 10,000 feet and was very
happy to see only(!) 35kts of headwind. My ETA now looked a lot better and it
looked like I would make it before dark. After such a long flight I wanted to
avoid landing at dark as fatigue then becomes more of a factor.
1 hour into the flight it was time to do my first fuel
transfer. I’m glad that our first leg on this ferry flight was over land so that
in case there was any issues with the tank system we would discover them before
flying over water. This leg to Santa Maria gave us a chance to fill up the
tanks and transfer fuel from all tanks into the wing. I timed the transfer and
kept a log of it. The rate of the pumps is about 2 US gal per minute. So in 22
minutes I could transfer 1 hour worth of fuel into the wing tank. So as soon as
my wing tank was down to 800 pounds I selected which tank to transfer from and
started the pump and the timer. For timing we use the on-board stopwatch. But
since it is good to have a reminder in case you get distracted by other issues we also have a simple egg timer sitting on top of the instrument panel. You don’t
want to overfill the wing tank. The fuel would then go straight overboard
through the tank vents.
Our caravans have the G100NXi avionics. And here in the US
we have available in cockpit something called Nexrad weather radar service and
XM weather. This gives us real-time weather information in cockpit. So enroute I
could at any time check the weather at any location and also get a picture of possible
weather along my track. It is amazingly accurate and gave me peace of mind as we
progressed towards Santa Maria. Man would I have loved to have this when I was
battling bad weather enroute the three hours to Renk in South Sudan, only having to turn back and return to Juba because of bad weather. That was my longest flight so far.
One of our
alternates was Albuquerque in New Mexico. We knew the weather was beautiful
there but I wanted to get some more info for the route ahead before continuing past
Albuquerque. Another very helpful service they have here in the US is Flight
Service Stations (FSS). You can get them on phone before you depart or you can
call them on the radio on 122.2MHz. I called them up and a lovely lady replied,
“N618MF, good morning! How can I help you?” After telling her my route and altitude
she gave me a thorough briefing on the weather ahead of me. It was helpful to
be able to talk to someone and get a second opinion on the weather. She advised
me to contact them again when passing Phoenix to get another update. The radio
was quite busy with airlines reporting turbulence and icing at higher levels. I
have to say that at my levels it was mostly a very smooth ride and the
temperatures were rarely below 3C. As we approached Prescott the weather reports
and forecasts for California improved, the Airmet for icing was gone and I realized that we would make it all
the way.
Soon after being handed over to Los Angeles Center I was in and out of
clouds most of the way until I approached Santa Maria. I landed 5:35pm local
time, 8 minutes before sunset and 52 minutes longer than our planned flight
time. We concluded that we were a little too optimistic with our true airspeed
due to our heavy weight.
It was beautiful to finally get out of the plane in the
warmer California evening. The time enroute went surprisingly fast. I wasn’t bored
a minute and it was an amazing experience to fly across half the US and look down on the beautiful and shifting scenery.
Below is a video summary of the flight:
Flying for Christ 