Flying the Atlantic to Geneva

When JetPROP decided to attend the European Business Aircraft Association annual meeting in Geneva, and they needed to display an aircraft, and as I was going to take delivery of a new JetPROP DLX about that time, it seemed like a very good excuse to make the trans-Atlantic trip.

JetPROP is contracting with a ferry pilot who move airplanes back and forth to and from Europe, so I made arrangements with him to meet up in Spokane in late May when I expected to pick up the new plane. As it happened the new plane wasn’t ready, so we went to Plan B and used my current airplane, and the one I flew to Europe last year. That was probably a better choice as this was a known, reliable plane, while my new one would probably have had some bugs to be worked out, and the middle of the ocean is not the best place to do that.

So, I flew up to Spokane from Monterey to meet up with the ferry pilot and we spent the day with preparations and going over our emergency equipment which he had brought over. The liferaft was probably the most important item. The North Atlantic waters are so cold that a person can only survive for a matter of minutes if immersed, and it’s imperative to get out of the water and into a raft as soon as possible if one has to ditch. We also had survival suits in the plane, which would have extended the immersion time to a couple of hours if we had to use them. They’re made of the same material as skin divers wet suits, but much thicker, and encompass the entire body including hands and feet. Theoretically we were supposed to wear them while flying over water, but they’re so bulky that it would have been impossible to move around in the airplane. Instead we laid them over the back seats with the hope that we would have ample time to don them before we went in the water.

In any case we both agreed that, as the Malibu is a pressurized airplane with a good, tight cabin, we were going to stay with the airplane as long as it was afloat. Assuming it didn’t break up if we ditched, it should float for at least several hours, and in the meantime we hoped that every search and rescue group throughout the North Atlantic would be looking for us. With any luck at all we wouldn’t even have to get our feet wet. How’s that for positive thinking?

We launched from Spokane early and made our first fuel stop in Winnipeg, Canada, followed a couple of hours later by another fuel stop in Timmins, Ontario, way north of Ottawa. At that point we had to make a decision. Should we press on to Goose Bay, Labrador, another 900 miles up the road and much further north, arriving around midnight in bad weather and low on fuel? Or should we wimp out and fly another 500 miles or so to Sept Iles, Quebeque, much further to the south and stay the night there? That option would have had us flying for a good twelve or thirteen hours the next day in order to make Reykjavik, Iceland, which we needed to do if we wanted to make Geneva in time for the start of the meeting the following day.

So we decided to do the manly thing and head up to Goose Bay and take our chances that we would have enough tailwinds to make Goose with some fuel reserves and that the weather would be good enough for us to land. There are a couple of small airstrips along the way, but we weren’t sure if they offered fuel so they didn’t represent much of an alternative. Fortunately the JetPROP is so well instrumented that we were able to track our fuel consumption precisely and as the winds and weather cooperated, we made Goose Bay just before midnight with ample fuel reserves. Total flying time that day - 9.6 hours.

The FBO at Goose is a 24 hour operation because it is the main jumping off and entry point for most transatlantic flights of private and military aircraft.

Rooms in the newest hotel in Goose were arranged, and we were in bed by 1:00 AM with a wakeup call for 6:00 in order to be back in the air at 7:00. I should comment on the hotels in Goose, as they really don’t look like hotels. If you have ever seen pictures of construction shacks in the far north or Alaska, you have a pretty good idea what the goose hotels are like. Nevertheless, this one was clean and comfortable – and the heat worked – an absolute necessity in that part of the world.

We almost made it off on time and launched into mixed rain and snow with low ceilings and a little ice in the clouds during the climb. We broke out at 10,000 feet on our way up to 27,000 and were in the clear from that point until our descent into Narsassuaq, Greenland 2.8 hours and 674 nautical miles after takeoff.

On the way we were no longer under radar control as we had been in the U.S. and Canada. Instead we had to fall back to the old method of position reporting before the days of radar, in which we were in radio communication with Gander, Newfoundland, the control center for that sector of the ocean. When we filed our flight plan we were given several latitude/longitude points we were to cross, and at each point we called Gander with our crossing time and an estimate of the time we would cross the next point. All transatlantic flights, including the airlines, use this same method, and someone is plotting our tracks on a board somewhere to keep us from running into one another – I think.

We were high enough that we were able to maintain contact with Gander all the way across, but smaller airplanes at lower altitudes lost communication about a third of the way across and had to ask the high altitude planes to relay their position reports. We were in the clear all the way at our altitude, but a unpressurized plane below us had to slog its way through the lower cloud layers in the turbulence and icing. Not my idea of fun.

The weather in Narsassuaq was bright and sunny and we had a most excellent view of the landscape flying up the fiord, at the head of which is Narsassuaq.

It was lunchtime by the time we arrived in Nars so we stoked up, fueled up, and would have been out of there in an hour or less, except that I left my credit card in the hotel restaurant a half mile from the ramp and had to go back and collect it, a process that delayed us for another half hour.

The airport at Nars was built during the second world war as a landing field for all the aircraft being ferried to Europe and was operated by the U.S. Air Force until the early 1950’s after which it reverted to Danish control. The strip is located at the end of a fiord, and actually slopes up hill at a pretty good angle. So the procedure is to land uphill and take off downhill, no matter which direction the wind is blowing. On the uphill side the terrain immediately rises to the head of a glacier a few miles up the gorge, (you can see it in the final approach picture) so unless one’s airplane has a pretty good climb rate, it would be impossible to make it over the glacier. From that point it’s solid ice on up to the 10,000 foot top of the Greenland Ice Cap. Makes me really admire the military pilots who used this place during the war. With their primitive navigation equipment, it must have been a real bitch trying to find the place.

The approach into Nars is pretty scary in bad weather as it’s surrounded by high peaks and the navigational aid is of a type which doesn’t allow for approaches down to a low altitude. Flying up the fiord under the clouds doesn’t offer a real good option either, as this isn’t the only fiord along the coast and it is almost impossible to tell which fiord to take to get to Nars. Not to mention the fact that one has to make a couple of right angle turns at low altitude to avoid the rock walls on either side. Experienced ferry pilots don’t even try to make an instrument approach into this strip. If the weather is bad, they just don’t leave Goose Bay until it improves. Fortunately, all three times I’ve flown into Nars the weather has been superb.

After our lunch and fuel stop we launched for Reykjavik, Iceland, straight across the ice cap and over the water, neither of which offers much in the way of survival opportunities if we had to go down. But again the weather at our altitude was clear and the visibility was great. Until we got about 100 miles out of Reykjavik when it turned bad. Not bad enough to require in instrument approach, but still not real good springtime weather either.

As we proceeded eastward across Greenland and over the water, we were handed off from Gander center to Iceland center and they tracked us the rest of the way in. Or I should say that we tracked ourselves and let them know where we were until they picked us up on radar about 100 miles out.

English is the universal language in aviation and I was grateful for that, except when we were inbound to Scotland – but more on that later.

We arrived in Reykjavik around 7:00 PM after a 3.1 hours and a 668 nautical mile flight. At this latitude it was still broad daylight. In fact it never got dark the entire night and one of the pictures in this series shows how bright it was at 11:30 PM.

Reykjavik is a great place to stop as the Loftlieder Hotel, a very nice place, is just across the street from the FBO. Good rooms, a very good restaurant (especially if you like herring prepared in about 30 different ways – I don’t) and a staff accustomed to crazy pilots arriving at all hours of the day and night from all over the world.

I should mention that we had to clear customs each time we entered another country. Normally in Iceland this is pretty perfunctory, but this day the customs folks decided to give us real going over, complete with a dog which clambered up into the plane looking for whatever, along with a fifteen minute or so interrogation and a complete review of all of our documents. I’m not sure why we got such treatment, but surmise that were chosen at random to allow them to practice their hardcore inspection.

After a pleasant dinner (no herring for me) we retired after planning for a 7:00 AM departure the next day.

We departed Reykjavik again more or less on time and after climbing through the normal North Atlantic weather, broke out and we were in the clear all the way until off the east coast of Scotland when the weather turned sour again.

On the way over, we were handed off from Iceland center to Scottish. Not Scottish center, not Scottish radio, but just Scottish. Don’t ask me why. In any case, my comfort in being able to communicate with the controllers was deep sixed when I checked in with the first Scottish controller. This was a lady with the worst Scottish brogue I had ever heard, and I have spent a lot of time in Scotland in previous years. Furthermore, her radio was so poor it would have been nearly impossible to understand her in any case. It sounded like she was talking into a tin can. And that with the brogue was too much for me. I turned the communication over to the ferry pilot who seemed to understand her perfectly. When I asked him how he was able to do that, he replied, "I can’t understand her either, but I know what she’s supposed to be saying so I just act like I understand".

We landed at Wick, Scotland on the northeast coast after 3.2 hours and 630 nautical miles, in near gale force winds with intermittent rain blowing horizontally. Don’t know how people live in this place.

Wick is another favorite stopping place for ferry pilots. Fuel is relatively inexpensive and custom clearance is a non-event. Don’t know as I’d care to spend a night or two there, as from the air I couldn’t see much more than a lot of sheep farms and I suspect the accommodations would tend to be spartan at best.

We managed a fuel stop, customs clearance, a bowl of soup, a weather briefing and flight plan filing in about an hour and then launched on the final leg of our flight to Geneva. This one was going to be a long one at 815 nautical miles and through very busy air space, so we knew we were not going to be able to fly in a straight line but would be vectored around airspace over London and Paris. Furthermore, for the first part of the trip we expected to have headwinds shifting around to tailwinds on the last part. As a consequence we weren’t certain we would have enough fuel to make it all the way and made contingency plans to stop somewhere in France if we had to. The ferry pilot knows the enroute airports very well so he picked a couple of alternates just in case.

The wind forecast was right on the money and the expected tailwinds allowed us to make it to Geneva after a 4.3 hour flight with ample reserves. We also left the bad weather behind somewhere over northern France and by the time we spotted the Alps near Geneva, the weather was severe clear.

The approach and landing in Geneva was uneventful but we were treated to some of the best views of the Alps I have ever seen, and I lived in Switzerland for six years. The airport of Geneva parallels Lake Leman and the entire approach is just a visual delight. Almost forgot that I was supposed to be flying the plane, but recovered in time to make one of my better landings.

Total flying time from Spokane – 23.0 hours. Total distance – 5000 nautical miles.

After landing we had a little misunderstanding with the ground controllers in which I was objecting to them parking us a couple of miles away from where I thought we should be. I tried to explain to the controller that this plane was going to be on display and therefore should have been parked in front of the exhibition center adjacent to the terminal, and he was trying to explain to me that the exhibit didn’t start for another day and therefore he wanted me out of the way. I lost the argument, so we buttoned the plane up and caught a ride to the hotel where we met up with the team from JetPROP, who had also just arrived on a commercial flight from Spokane.

The next day was spent in getting organized for the meeting and the exhibition. We had also invited all of the European JetPROP owners to join us in Geneva for a seminar and dinner, and of the 20 owners, 18 showed up for the meeting and dinner.

The next day we taxied the airplane to the exhibit site and cleaned it up. We were by far the smallest airplane in the exhibit, as the meeting was primarily devoted to companies flying large, corporate jet aircraft.

But we were pleasantly surprised by the number of people interested in the JetPROP, and by the time the meeting was over we had a pretty good idea that more than a few sales could result from the effort.

The meeting lasted three days, after which we were planning to reverse our steps back through Wick, Reykjavik, etc. The JetPROP sales manager was joining us on the trip back, so we had three pilots to share the workload.

Unfortunately, during the course of the meeting we discovered that our standby alternator had died on us and even though our primary generator was OK, we didn’t want to fly back across the ocean without a backup. Fortunately, we have a maintenance facility in Belgium, so instead of heading back to Wick, we diverted to Genk, Belgium where we stayed overnight while the alternator was being replaced.

The shop didn’t have an alternator, but they did have another JetPROP sitting in the hangar. That plane was for sale and as no one would be flying it very soon, they took the alternator out of it and installed it in mine. Interestingly, that plane also belonged to me some years ago. I sold it to a man in Poland, who flew it for a couple of years and then put it up for sale in Belgium where he has had it maintained since buying it from me.

Flying from Geneva to Genk also illustrated some of the complications of private flying in Europe. I already mentioned that we had to clear customs at each point in our travels, but that’s only if the destination has custom facilities. Genk, Belgium has a small, private airport with no such facilities. Complicating the matter even further was that Switzerland is not a member of the European Union and we therefore had to stop somewhere in one of the EU countries to clear. We chose Maastricht, Holland as it was just across the border from Genk, and after clearing, flew about 10 miles to land at Genk. So what should have been a one hour flight from Geneva to Genk turned out to consume a couple of hours while we tracked down the customs people in Maastricht and received our clearance.

We launched the next morning, but before heading back to Wick, we once again had to clear customs and file a flight plan. This time we chose Liege, about a five minute flight from Genk. But once again we were held up because the flight plan we had filed for Wick had been rejected by the Eurocontrol computer. The bureaucrats behind the desk at the Liege terminal weren’t very helpful either, so once again we fell behind our schedule while the ferry pilot tried to get the flight plan fixed. As every flight plan specifies a departure slot time in order to fit us into the heavy European air traffic system, missing a slot time requires re-filing with a new time. We finally managed to get it all straightened out, but wasted another couple of hours in the process.

Following that we launched for Wick, and this time the weather in Wick was a little better. After the usual briefing, flight plan filing, refueling and a bowl of soup, we left for Reykjavik. After an uneventful flight of 3.3 hours with moderate headwinds we landed in Reykjavik early in the afternoon (this time the time zones were in our favor) and we went off to town to do some sightseeing.

Another pleasant evening in the Hotel Loftlieder and we were all ready to retrace our steps back to Narsassuaq, Goose Bay and onward. But this time the winds were not cooperating and the southern route across Greenland looked problematic. After much study and calculations we decided that a more northerly route to Sondrestrom, on the northwest coast of Greenland, then across northern Canada was the best route, taking into consideration our fuel consumption and available airports along the route.

Flying time from Reykjavik to Sondrestrom was uneventful and we made it in 3.2 hours, confirming that the wind forecast was pretty accurate. The weather in Sondrestrom was clear and it was a very pleasant spring day in that area. Like much of Greenland, there isn’t much green around. Instead it more resembles a cold desert with small shrubs here and there and some grass where it isn’t otherwise solid rock.

At this point we had to make a decision as to whether we would head southwest toward Goose Bay, or continue in a west-northwest direction to a place called Iqaluit near the north end of Hudson Bay in Canada. Once again the wind forecast was the determining factor and we chose the northerly route. And once again we flew in clear weather at an altitude of 26,000 feet. On the approach into Iqaluit we descended through some clouds, but other wise the weather was benign. Well, almost. The temperature at Iqaluit was below freezing and there was still a good bit of snow on the surrounding hills. It really never gets warm in this part of the world. This was confirmed by the fact that all the structures around the field were on stilts. All the ground here remains frozen year around and this condition is called permafrost. Because of this, houses and other buildings cannot be built close to the ground, otherwise the residual heat from the building would melt the permafrost and the building would sink into the resulting mud. As a consequence, all large structures, including the airport buildings, are built on stilts about 6 or 8 feet off the ground.

Once again we stayed only long enough to refuel both ourselves and the airplane and to make a decision about the next stopping point. We had to decide whether to take a route along the top end of Hudson Bay and make a stop at a small airport there, then proceed down the western side of the bay and then head southwest across Manitoba and Alberta. The alternative was to fly directly across Hudson Bay to Churchill, on the southwest shore of the bay, and then head in the general direction of Spokane. This second option was the best in terms of time and distance, but had the disadvantage of flying over a body of water – and ice – which was far more inhospitable than the portions of the North Atlantic we had just crossed. Additionally, we would not only be out of radar range but also radio range, so calling for help wouldn’t have done us much good. Finally, the north end of Hudson Bay is a combination of water and ice floes so there were no good options of landing either in the water or on solid ice. Any type of landing would have ended up crashing into ice floes as big as houses.

But the plane was working well as were the pilots, so we opted for the straight shot to Churchill. The winds were more or less in our favor and we landed in Churchill after a 3.9 hour and 797 nautical mile flight.

Churchill was only a fuel stop and there was no reason to stick around otherwise. It may not be the most desolate place in the world, but it’s right up there with the best. Absolutely flat terrain without a tree or even much in the way of shrubbery. And on this June1st day, it was cold and windy. Not a place to be stuck in.

From Churchill it was an easy 2.8 hour flight to Saskatoon, where we spent the night before proceeding to Spokane the next morning, arriving in Spokane around midday with enough time for us to unload and for me to launch for the 3.5 hour flight back home to Monterey.

All in all, a very good flight. And apart from the alternator going bad, we had no equipment problems. My air crew tended to be a bit insubordinate at times, especially when I was giving them advice on some of the finer points of airmanship from the back seat, but having three pilots on board certainly decreased the workload and made for some very pleasant, interesting and entertaining flying.

I may do it again.

[Warren]

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