Advertisement
Published: August 11th 2011
Edit Blog Post
After only one day back in Holland, its still quite early to look back at this trip. It was a long vacation with many strong impressions, many fascinating events, and fortunately no bad experiences.
The flying statistics are quite impressive: total flying time is almost 100 hrs (recorded from take-off to touch-down is 97:42 hrs, so I probably spent some 110 hrs in the cockpit). The total distance flown (as recorded by the GPS) is 13375 nm or 24771 km, more than half around the world. All this was done in 22 days of flying, so I spent about 5 hours per flying day in the cockpit. But I had 13 flying-free days as well - and those were highly enjoyable as well.
The longest flight was on the very first day, going from Stavanger to Reykjavik was 900 nm and took about 6 hrs, and that with a strong tailwind. Here I needed the extra fuel form the ferry tank to extend the range of DDN quite a bit. All other flights were much shorter - on the way to the US, the next longest leg was 4:30 hrs, but the ferry tank gave extra reserves required to
DDN at sunset
in Fremont, Ohio reach alternates (sometimes over 3 hrs extra fuel are the minimum required). On the return trip from Goose Bay to Reykjavik, both legs used all the standard fuel up (177 l out of 184 available), and here the ferry tank is essential in a small Mooney like DDN. Later Mooneys have about 7 hrs endurance - they can do the trip without any ferry tank.
DDN did the trip without any problems, except for a broken nose gear door link (standard problem and not critical), and a loose cowl flap hinge found during the oil change. And the ampmeter seems to be occasionally non operating - not critical, but I'll have to look more into that. Otherwise, the avionics was fully adequate for the trip. The Garmin 430 GPS makes navigation easy, and communication was no problem except for the long Atlantic stretches during the return trip. There, VHF is only working via relays by airliners (fun to do, but not always possible), and an HF radio would have been a good addition for the return flight. It is required for a good reason. And the satphone was not very useful here, either.
Flight performance of DDN was
excellent: average speed is 137 kts (over 250 km/h), on a fuel burn of 9 gallons/hrs (34 l/hrs) - not bad for a 48 year old machine. Alone in the cockpit, it is also quite comfortable. But with survival gear, life raft and ferry tank, there is really not enough space for a second person on board. For a two person crew, it takes a larger plane, like a later Mooney, or a Cirrus, Commanche etc.
All the flight planning was done with FliteStar on a Tablet-PC, which I also used for in-flight tracking (usually with FliteDeck) as back-up navigation. These are comfortable tools and sufficiently reliable to use in flight, although the Garmin 430 remains the primary navigation tool, the computer based navigation has more entertainment values.
What were the trip highlights? The flight over the Atlantic is was a completely new experience, and seeing Iceland and Greenland appearing between the clouds and slowly getting larger was always very beautiful - the pictures can not capture that. The flights in Greenland were visually spectacular, I was very lucky with the weather there. So was the departure from Iceland yesterday morning.
But the most impressive scene was probably the ship tour around the icebergs in the midnight sun in Ilullissat. It is not on the typical ferry routes, but the rather short deviation to the North is certainly worth it.
Visiting the AirVenture in Oshkosh was also worth the trip. Although there were over 2000 non-US visitors (Canada, Australia, Brazil and South Africa leading the numbers, but also over 130 Germans), only very few came with their own pane. Its a good feeling to have gone through all the arrival and departure procedures without hickups.
Flying through the US is great fun, and very simple compared to flights in Europe. Controllers are helpful, and IFR flying easy to do (they don't have Eurocontrol to mess things up), airports are many and friendly, and fuel prices still low (we paid anything between 0.90 and 1.5 €/liter). In many airports there are courtesy cars to go to the next town - that makes flying almost practical.
But the real highlights were the visits of our friends. Marga & Steve, Suzan & Michel, and Linda & Ira, it was so good to spend a few days with you!
Next trip with DDN? Maybe South Africa, but here the problem is the fuel availability in Northern Africa. Maybe a longer stay in Iceland and the North sea islands - what I have seen so far is very tempting. But before any further trip, DDN needs its 100 hour inspection (tomorrow), and then comes the trip to Tannkosh (actually a nicer fly-in than Oshkosh), and the Ariane Air Meeting the week after. So DDN will continue to be flying a lot this year.
I hope you enjoyed reading the blog - it certainly was fun to write it and to review the many events from each day in the evening to extract the highlights.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.201s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 9; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0473s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Markus
non-member comment
Welcome back home...
Absolutely brilliant Martin, well done... I see you're thinking of flying DDN to SA, fantastic, DO IT !!! :)