Time Building - Lukenwolf Style

Now, as my Beech 1900 has reached cruising Altitude towards Magadan and basically Otto is flying the plane, with me being relegated to observer status, just checking the instruments frequently, I can whip out my little netbook to finally finish the post about me being in the middle of russias nowhere.

Recently, when I decided to start this blog, I created a new company and pilot profile for FSpassengers. This is nice on one hand because it won't be cluttered with with earlier flights or line flights of the virtual airline I fly for from time to time. But, that also puts me back to square one in terms of FSPax's career mode, meaning I'm a bloody beginner with zilch hours and only allowed to fly small single engined piston aircraft. Pretty much like in reality. Of course you now have to build up flying time to advance to bigger metal, but luckily you won't have to spend hundreds of hours to be able to fly bigger planes. From the top of my head, you need 22 hours to be allowed flying multi engined piston planes like the Cessna 402 or the oddball three-engined Britten-Norman Trislander. Another 13 hours added to that and you'll be allowed to advance to small turboprops.

So I thought about a way to build up those hours, without doing boring round trips between upper and lower backwood. At that time I read Aviatrix' posts about her new job in northern Canada, flying to places that usually start with Fort or end with either Lake or Inlet, a pretty good sign that they are as metropolitan as a dozen of Yurts in the Gobi desert. I became curious as I've never been to the US of Americaland or Canada for that matter and having read some interesting stuff like Clouddancers Alaskan Chronicles, Dave's (of FL390 fame) musings about flying his Fi-Fi jet to Anchorage made me want to visit some places, so I came up with the idea of circumnavigating the northern hemisphere.

Since I had to start with a small bird-whacker, I chose the Gippsland Airvan as a starting vehicle. It is reasonably priced in FSPax-land and it hauls up to 6 passengers. Now getting from northern Germanyland to Canada is not the easiest task, as there is a quite oversized puddle called the Atlantic in the way, so I had to jump from Island to Island to get there, which is a sort of lengthy task. In fact I was promoted to "second officer" status with the first landing on canadian soil in Iqaluit, Nunavut. That allowed me to upgrade to a twin piston.

For anyone crazy enougth to try it out. I started in Emden, Germany (EDWE) and did a short shakedown flight to the Island of Borkum (EDWR). From there I took off at 05:00 local time towards Bristol-Filton (EGTG) and after refuelling onwards to Stornoway (EGPO) on the Isle of Lewis. Next stop was Vagar (EKVG) on the Faroe Islands and from there to Egilsstadir (BIEG) in Iceland. That was followed by a cross-iceland flight to Reykjavik (BIRK) where I prepared for yet another long water crossing to Kulusuk (BGKK) in Greenland and on to Nuuk (BGGH) on the opposite end of the huge island. The final stint for the Airvan was the hideously long water crossing (4 hours) to Iqaluit, Nunavut (CYFB). At that time it was 23:50 local time, so I had crossed the atlantic in a single engined piston plane and it was technically still the same day I had taken off, timezones are an amazing invention.

Once in Iqaluit I chose PAD's amazing Cessna 414 as the steed to continue on. Be warned though, it certainly is no beginners plane. While the Airvan was as easy to fly as Microsofts C172, this plane is very twitchy especially concerning the pitch. There were three places, that I definitely wanted to see. Yellowknife and its famous "Ragged Ass Road", Anchorage and a place called Kotzebue in Alaska, not only because no German can say that name with a straight face (Kotze is german slang for "vommit") but also because it is the center of Clouddancers Adventures. He is now a Fi-Fi driver, but his time in Alaska makes an amusing and impressive read.
Since Yellowknife is too far from Iqaluit, even for the C414's impressive range, an intermediate stop in Rankin Inlet (CYRT) was needed to finally get to Yellowknife (CYZF). That marked also the first airport since Reykjavik, that had a control tower. And another thing (literally) dawned on me. While it was now almost 03:00 the day after I took of in Emden, it had never really gone dark. The sun dipped below the horizon shortly between Nuuk and Iqaluit, but it never went completely dark. That was the best sign of being as far north as you can get without being an Inuit.
Since I had just over 30 hours by the time I landed in Yellowknife I decided to make a beeline for Anchorage, putting to test the alleged 1.100 nm range of the C414. If anything would work out the way I planned, I would be allowed to drive turboprops by the time I hit the deck at PANC.
It worked out, sort of. The flight from Yellowknife to Anchorage was a mammoth 5 hour drive of 997 nautical miles. I made that one after coming home from an 8 hour day at work and once I slammed the wheels at the tarmac in PANC I was knackered beyond belief. Just to put some perspective to it, I was sitting in front of a computer screen, in no real danger of going west should I screw up and I was completely knackered. People like Aviatrix do that for real and if she screws up it may well endup with a totalled plane and a seriously dead pilot. Deep respect is not enougth to put it in words.

Anywho, once in Anchorage I had the 35 hours to upgrade to more capable hayturners. Now the fleet management of FSPax comes in. My plan is to resurrect an airline that should never have gone west (more about that in a later post) and my current long-term plan is to build up a regional fleet (7 Beech 1900, some ATR's or Dash-8's, one Dash-7 and a handfull of CRJ's). So I helped myself to 7 Beech 1900D, the type that I had my first ever real life f(r/l)ights in.

So on we went towards Kotzebue (PAOT). Having now visited all the places I wanted, I'm now on my way back home, crossing the vast russian nothingness. The first flight took me from Kotzebue to Bukhta Provedeniya (Providenya Bay, UHMD), a small gravel field, that amazingly, has a control tower. In fact I have yet to encounter a russian airfield without one. The next stop took me to Anadyr (UHMA) and onwards to Markovo (UHMO), a 7.000 feet dirt runway that even has a VASI, a really rare luxury in those regions. As I type, I'm still eating away at the 600 nm from Markovo to Magadan (UHMM) and since it is early morning on a bank holliday over here in Germanyland, I'm hoping to reach Yakutsk or even Irkutsk by the evening. Maybe I'll post some pictures of that tomorrow.

Ouch, that got sort of longish, so if I bored anybody to death - sorry mate, didn't mean it...

Cheers and always keep the takeoff-landing ratio at 1:1