"Caravan" to Africa

Iraklion, Crete (Greece)

(Posted Saturday evening from Khartoum because I was unable to find internet access from Iraklion on Fri. evening.)

We arranged refueling in Valencia this morning with relatively few delays. The Caravan's wing was too high for the fuel truck's ladder, so Mike did the wing tank fueling from on top of the wing. The man in this picture is standing on top of his ladder.



Fuel in Europe is expensive (by US standards). Or perhaps I should say, fuel in the US is cheap (by European standards).

We had good weather for our departure from the east coast of Spain...



...and for a while were able to enjoy a view of the sea.



But by the time we were passing Mallorca...



...it was starting to get cloudy. Indeed, most of the western and central Mediterranean today had clouds and rain. Unfortunately for us the freezing level was low - as low as it had been in the middle of the ocean, at 5,000 ft. We could fly below that without difficulty, even through clouds and rain. The problem is that the Mediterranean is full of islands with mountains on them, so flying below 5,000 feet requires finding a route between, but not over, the islands. And today flying above 5,000 required finding a way around, over, or under, clouds containing ice. So Mike and I had puzzles to solve all day, deciding which of these games to play, and then how to play it. The controllers were all very accomodating of our numerous proposals to turn right, or left, or climb, or descend. We were playing with a handicap because one of our best tools (weather radar) quit working. Poor Chad, in the back today, awoke briefly and asked us what in the world we were doing. We told him to go back to sleep and not to worry about it. For a while, it looked like the combination of southern Italy and Sicily, with all their mountains and icy clouds, would prove an insurmountable barrier, and we would end up spending the night in Palermo. But at the last moment we found a layer of clear air at 11,000 ft. that allowed an ice-free and obstacle-free passage to areas of better weather to the east.

Over northeastern Sicily, we shared a clear space between cloud layers with the 11,000 ft. summit of the volcano Etna, its slopes all white with snow, and its crater emitting puffs of smoke.



One of the things I enjoy about flying across the Mediterranean region is listening to the chatter on the air traffic control radio frequencies. From west to east, the controllers are first Spanish, then French, then Italian, and finally Greek, in their respective sectors. All speak English (each with an easily recognizable accent) to the crews of international flights, as required by convention, but speak their own language to local pilots. The degree of formality varies widely. It seems to me that the Italians are the most verbose. They begin every exchange with a greeting, and end it with a farewell. Mike says that he has Italian ancestors, from Sicily, so I invited him to do the radio work as we crossed the Italian sector. He practiced up on his "bongiornos" and his "ciaos" and after an hour or so was as good as the natives (well, maybe).

In the back, Chad woke up and began flight planning for a trip south across Egypt. There are apparently huge areas in southern Egypt where the map has no labeled features other than "Sand Sea" and "Crescent Dunes".

One of the things that helped wake up Chad was a feature of our airplane which I have not yet mentioned, although it has been present ever since Bangor, Maine. Our extra fuel tanks are made of welded sheets of flat aluminum. Whenever they are not entirely full (which is most of the time) they contain a pocket of air which expands when we climb and is compressed when we descend, at rates faster than the small vent lines can accomodate. Like the air inside your eardrum, which exhibits this same behavior. The result is that every climb or descent triggers, at unpredictable moments, loud bangs that sound like explosions, as the sides and tops of the tanks pop inward or outward in response to pressure changes. Pilots are instinctively inclined to be suspicious of loud explosions heard inside airplanes in which they are flying - at least until they get used to it - and with all our climbing and descending today the cockpit sounded like a battle zone.

In spite of our best efforts to speed things up, we are still landing in darkness at the end of each eastbound leg. We have now crossed 7 time zones since leaving the US, so that this evening when we landed in Iraklion at 8:30 PM after about three hours of night flight, my watch read only 1:30 PM, which would be accurate back home in sunny PA. Now, though, we turn south, and hope to land somewhere in Africa in daylight tomorrow, having only one more time zone to cross. Word is that the AIM-AIR folks in Nairobi have had good success in arranging for the necessary flight permissions. Posted by Barry at December 20, 2003 01:57 PM