Show Me The Way To Go Home... (Part Two)
by ANN Correspondent Kevin "Hognose" O'Brien
Reporting Your Position
Once the flight is
underway, position reporting becomes an issue. Only the northern
route allows the pilot the luxury of radar coverage enroute - most
of the North Atlantic is a non-radar (not to mention, non-SAR,
non-hospitable, too-cold-to-swim) environment. Hence, position
reports. Each one says where you are, what time it is, where you're
going next, when you expect to get there, and where you're going
that. You need to report every five degrees of longitude, or every
hour. In fact, you need to do this even if you are flying the short
legs of the northern route and enjoying radar coverage.
A look at the chart might make you wonder how you're going to
make these reports - usual UHF airplane radios won't cut it. The
answer is, HF radio. If you can't get through on the HF radio (a
not uncommon occurrence), you can dial up the North Atlantic
air-to-air frequency. 131.8, and try to raise a higher-flying
commercial flight. They are usually willing to relay for you.
It's important to log the position reports. Pilots have been
accused by irate Icelanders of not reporting… a log of the
reports you made, including those via relays, could be necessary to
prevent you from being voted off the island.
Emergency Procedures
With planning and preparation, everything should go right. But
too many times it doesn't. "Most of the time," Ed says, palpably
irritated, "they run out of gas." Despite that, a pilot may well
find himself gliding towards the drink through no fault of his own.
In that case, if he has followed Ed's instructions with respect to
survival gear, and position reporting, then his odds improve.
"Always plan for the worst."
Ditching is not a death sentence; I personally know people that
have ditched and lived to fly again; the battle with their insurers
has usually made them forget any unpleasantness associated with the
actual ditching. Everything from a Champ to a 210 to a Navajo to a
DC-9 has been successfully ditched at one time or another (true,
not everyone on the -9 survived, but almost all of them did. By the
way - he ran out of gas). The procedures taught to private pilots
for ditching really do work, and Ed reviews them, talking you
through an imaginary ditching in a 182RG. The real-value added
comes when he includes a couple of expert old North Atlantic hand
moves, such as having a prepared door-wedge to ensure you're not
trapped by a distorted doorframe. He also discusses egress. Without
a dunker this is about as good as you can do preparing for a flight
like this: to sit in the plane and brainstorm how you would get out
of it if you had to set it down.
If you splash down close to one of the way stations, you're
comparatively in luck; you could be rescued by helicopter in as
little as an hour. But if you are more than 150 nm from any of
those fields, then you might be spotted by fixed-wing air but
physical rescue will depend on surface vessels - trawlers or
freighters. It might be a couple days in coming.
Even the hour for a helicopter rescue is too long in the cold
waters of the Atlantic. Without an immersion suit, the frigid water
will sap your strength and you'll lose consciousness and die in
minutes. Without a raft, you're only good for hours, even in an
immersion suit… so Ed makes sure that his students know how
to equip themselves with survival gear. An immersion suit and a
raft are musts, and he goes into detail on how to use them - even
dunking Gerard Picquard, an executive from the Winslow Raft
Company, in a pool to illustrate how his lifesaving device is
used.
What Does it Cost?
Well, if you don't like avgas prices in North America or Europe,
just hand the guy in Greenland your credit card and sign without
looking at the receipt. It ran (at the time Ed made the video)
$8.50 to $9.00 a gallon. Cha-chingg!
Most European airports charge stiff landing fees for GA
aircraft, and Greenland and Iceland are politically European.
(Greenland is loosely Danish, and Iceland is independent). The
landing fees at Narsarsuaq, for example, range from $135 to $350.
Cha-ching! Again.The lowest fees of the airports Carlson recommends
is Wick, Scotland - ten pounds.
You also get hit with radio "user fees." In all of the routes he
describes, you have to pay to talk on the radio, or to use
airspace or control. About two or three months after the trip, the
bills will start trickling in. Shanwick bills in Irish punts,
Eurocontrol in (what else?) Euros. These are not as stiff as the
landing fees, but still: cha-ching!
A price you need to factor in is insurance. When the video was
made, insurance was available to first-timers, but it was very
expensive. Now, it is not available at all - no underwriter in
Lloyd's wants to touch it with a bargepole. So your options are to
fly bare, or to fly your first trip (at least) with an experienced
Atlantic hand as your copilot. This is a problem if you are talking
about a light two-seater - because even with a gross weight
increase, it isn't a two-seater once you tank it up. (Insurance
being as costly as it is, a cha-ching! isn't appropriate here. Cue
SFX: coins cascading as from a slot machine).
Ferrying a plane, then, costs thousands of dollars. Most small
planes being ferried across the Atlantic are being delivered to
customers on the other side who consider the ferry cost just part
of delivery. Still, for many Europeans, it is cheaper to buy a
clean N-registry American plane and have it ferried than to buy one
already in Britain or on the Continent. This factor insures that
there will always be steady work for a few pilots who are willing
to brave the oceanic emptiness.
Production of the Video
Hal Shevers of Sporty's, a man renowned in the industry for not
spending money frivolously, has sunk a lot of cash into
state-of-the-art video production facilities - and it really shows.
The video is professionally shot, the sound even and balanced
throughout (if you don't think that's a big deal, you haven't
watched as many aviation training videos as I have). The
transitions between scenes (I think of them as "commercial breaks"
where I can pause the DVD and stretch my legs) have a professional
animation around the title of the next segment.
The program on this video is two
hours long (124 minutes, to be exact). In addition, there is a
promo for other Sporty's videos, but it it at the end (if you've
ever watched a Disney DVD, for instance, thirty or more minutes of
promotional spam you can't fast-forward through leads off). For
some reason, I didn't mind watching the trailer after Capt. Ed's
class was over, while when trailers come first, they're quite
annoying.
One very nice feature of this DVD is that all regions are
enabled - you can play it on a machine that is regionalized for
anywhere in the world. It also plays on PAL as well as NTSC
players. Thank you, Hal Shevers and Sporty's, for doing The Right
Thing for international pilots.
I did encounter one point on the DVD where there was a skip. It
was not significant, but you do miss a couple of Ed's sentences. If
I had paid $90 for it, I would have returned it for a replacement.
My deadline on this review didn't give me time to do that and test
Sporty's customer service.
Summing Up
You won't be ready to fly the Atlantic just from sitting through
this DVD, but if you follow the steps Ed explains, you'll be pretty
close. The tough nut to crack will be insurance. These ferry
flights are pretty much individually underwritten by Lloyd's
underwriters - of course, you can reduce your costs enormously (or
for first-timers, get insurance at all) by hiring an experienced
transatlantic pilot to fly with you (Ed helpfully provides his
phone number). So the DVD is no substitute for hiring an
experienced ferry pilot, or even for attending a school like the
one Ed runs at the Mansfield, Massachusetts airport (1B9).
The video will definitely whet your appetite for doing this, and
for attending Ed's course. It's also a great entertainment for the
Walter Mittys among us. It's a bit pricey at $89.95 (you can get a
discount of $4.50 with your AOPA credit card). I thought it was
worth it.
ANN's Daily Aero-Linx (04.13.24)
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