I must have been quite tired from yesterday’s flight from
Hawaii, cause I slept like a rock until 6:30. Woke up to the sound of the
Pacific waves outside my window. Just beautiful. After breakfast we headed over
to the airport to try to fix my HF. Our mechanics in Mareeba suggested we take
a look at the coax-cable connecting the antenna in the aft fuselage. We opened
up the panels, located the cable and sure enough the coax connector was
completely off the antenna connection. I guess some turbulence would cause a
connection every now and then and that’s probably why I had HF reception on the
first leg but not on the second. So I tightened the connector and then we
tested the radio. Voila! Praise the Lord. I was fearing a more complicated
issue and that would jeopardize me continuing to Australia tomorrow.
A Kiwi guy working with a helicopter company came over and
said hi. Their helicopters are used to spot tuna fish and he works here 3
months and then have one month off. He welcomed us to use their WiFi and
printer in the hangar so we went over there to file our flight plan and print
our documents for tomorrow’s flight to Australia. We decided to go fully electronic on this trip and that has been amazing. We are using Garmin Pilot App on our iPads and then we are using FltPlan.com and Rocketroute.com to plan and file flight plans. Skyvector and Windy are other services we have used as well. Coming from East Africa where getting permission for a flight requires visiting six different offices and showing proof of payment before you can file your flight, this is a pilot’s heaven.
There is a cyclone sitting
east of Australia and another cyclone sitting west of Marshall Islands and
these are causing headwinds for us pretty much the whole way to Cairns. As it
looks now we might have to land in Honiara, Solomon Islands and continue the
next day. So we applied for a landing permit there and it just got approved this evening. We will see how the winds are tomorrow. Our route goes over Honiara anyway so if the winds are too strong we can land there. That is the green dot on the route below. The equator goes between the two cyclones. Notice how the winds go opposite direction as one is on the northern hemisphere and the other one on the southern hemisphere.
Flying for Christ 