Following on from the previous post regarding the 23rd and final Q300 being delivered to Air Nelson this past weekend, it harked me back to the first Q300's arrival and the route it flew as part of a flag waving exercise for the manufacturer, Bombardier. Here is the story in full as written by the Air Nelson Captain who was tasked to accompany the Bombardier ferry pilots.
Arriving to a water cannon salute on what was already a wet winters day at Auckland! MC photo
C-FCPO/ZK-NEA cockpit shortly after its arrival at Auckland 28Jul05, MC photo
The pristine 50 seat cabin, C-FCPO was the only Q300 ferried with all the seats installed as subsequent ferry flights required a large fuel bladder to be installed for the Pacific crossings.
MC photo
The Big Ferry Flight (by Captain Mike Ford)
At 3:30 am on Tuesday July 19th (2005), the alarm went off in my hotel room in Toronto Canada. Today, Brian Price, Phil Coates and I were to begin the journey home to Nelson with Dash 8 number 611, aka C-FCPO, and soon to be known as ZK NEA. An hour later, I met Brian at his office at Downsview Airport to prepare for the planned 6:00 am departure. The weather for the first day of our journey looked good, which we took to be a good omen. Brian filed our flight plan to Goose Bay, then together, we loaded 10 day’s worth of snack food and a whole bunch of survival gear, including a life raft and 3 immersion suits, into a ute ready to transfer to the aircraft when it emerged from the hangar.
Just before 6:00 am, C-FCPO was towed out to the ramp, and Phil, Brian and I commenced our pre flight rituals. Brian and Phil are old hands at this kind of flight, and had things pretty well organised.
A small crowd of interested persons had gathered for the departure, despite the early hour. Geoff (Eban) and Kevo (Gregory) were there, as well as Mike Hawkins from Air NZ Fleet Planning and a whole bunch of Bombardier people who were obviously keen to see the first Air Nelson aircraft safely on its way. Anyway, by 0640, we were standing in front of the aircraft having the customary photographs taken, and shortly thereafter, following some good natured banter about on time performance, we were on our way.
The first stopover point was Goose Bay in Labrador. There is not much there, except lots of forest and lakes, and a large Air Force base. The Customs lady was a big Rugby fan, which I found pretty interesting, seeing as how they don’t actually play rugby in Labrador! Such is the power of modern media. After she had stamped the export certificate for the aircraft, we climbed back on board for the flight to Narsarsuaq, on the southwest coast of Greenland.
The coast of Greenland consists of thousands of islands and fiords. Narsarsuaq is about 80 km from the open sea at the head of a long fiord. The scenery was nothing less than spectacular, with icebergs floating in the bay, glaciers coming down the valleys to the sea, and lots of steep terrain all around. The runway itself is quite long, but due to the nature of the terrain, all landings are up the valley and takeoffs down the valley. For pilots who have read Ernest Gahn’s “Fate is the Hunter”,(A staple for budding pilots) this was the airport that he found in thick fog back in nineteen fifty something in a DC3. Seeing the place gives an appreciation of what a feat this was!
After refuelling, and a brief chat to an Icelandair Fokker 50 crew who came in shortly after us, we headed north east for Reykjavik, Iceland, arriving at about 9 pm local time. After such a big day, we should have been pretty tired out, but the sun was still high in the sky, and it was a beautiful evening with a temperature of about 15 degrees, so we checked into our hotel and headed down town. I guess the locals were making the most of the balmy mid summer night, because there was plenty happening. Even after midnight it was still broad daylight, and there were plenty of people out walking, biking and skateboarding.
The next day our schedule had us going to Innsbruck, Austria via Bergen, Norway for fuel. Unfortunately, the forecast for Bergen indicated possible fog, so Brian got on the phone to our handling agent in Dallas Fort Worth, Texas to refile via Glasgow, Scotland. During our time in the Flight Planning Office in Reykjavik, I discovered that the young lady running the office had been to school as an exchange student at Wanganui College! A “small town incident”, as Brian put it!
The flight to Glasgow was uneventful, and after taking on board more sandwiches and fuel, we took off for Innsbruck. It soon became clear why the original plan had been to avoid the busy English and Dutch Airspace. The flight plan pretty much went out the window, with Air Traffic Control vectoring us all over the sky in a zig zag pattern. It was pretty hard to keep up on the airways charts when half the places we overflew were not actually on the flight plan!
Innsbruck is in a deep valley in the Alps, and is quite spectacular to fly into. The approach starts at 11,500 feet over the mountains, and descends into the valley, overflying the airport at 5000 feet before breaking off 10 Km further down the valley. You then have to turn back 180 degrees to fly visually to the airport. One of the features that stands out is the Olympic Ski Jump, which overlooks the city. Now there’s a sport that takes some special skills and attributes! It makes you appreciate just how mad “Eddie the Eagle” must have been. Innsbruck is a beautiful city, with many very old but well preserved buildings. Not far from the hotel is a place where Mozart used to give concerts, a century before European settlement came to NZ! Unfortunately, after a quiet beer at an outdoor bar by the river, we discovered that the only meal available in town was a hot dog from a street side caravan!
Day three arrived all too soon, and after a substantial breakfast we were on our way to Hurghada, Egypt with a refuelling stop at Iraklion, Crete. The route took us from Austria, over the Alps to Italy, and right down the middle of Italy before heading out over the Mediterranean Sea. After leaving the Italian mainland, the islands below started to look pretty dry and sparsely vegetated, and by the time we hit the African coast we were flying over full blown desert. We were leaving the long summer evenings behind us now, and our landing at Hurghada was the first of several night landings.
Day four was a day off at a Red Sea resort hotel. The highlight of day was a snorkelling trip to a reef 10 km off the coast. The Red Sea lived up to its reputation of having some of the finest diving in the world, with outstanding visibility and heaps of colourful reef fish and coral. We were warned not to touch anything in order to a) save the coral reef from damage and b) avoid being stung by a stonefish. I think I managed to spend 1 and a half hours without touching the bottom, not so much to save the coral, but to preserve myself!
The next day we woke to the news that Sharm-el-Shiek, 50 nautical miles away on the Sinai Peninsular, had been bombed in a terrorist attack with the loss of about 80 lives. Hurghada is a very similar resort to Sharm-el-Shiek, and it was sobering to consider that it could well have been our resort that was hit. I for one was pleased to tuck the wheels in the wheel wells on the next leg of the journey to Bahrain and Karachi.
In Bahrain, we were met by none other than Captains Grant Jolley (Neil Kenny’s predecessor as Line Ops Manager for Air Nelson) and Geoff Devlin, an ex Air Nelson Metro pilot. Grant and Geoff, along with Steve Wilks (who once held John Hambleton’s job) are part of the senior management team at DHL in Bahrain. It was good to catch up, and to show them over our new toy.
After Bahrain, the most arduous part of the journey began. Karachi, Pakistan was very crowded and busy, and the hotel we stayed in was the same one where the NZ cricket team were staying when a bomb went off in the foyer a few months back. Getting through security and into the hotel was like going on a flight to the USA! We were in at 10 pm and out again at 0600, glad to be on our way. Fortunately, the handling agent was very efficient, and the departure process was pretty smooth.
We stopped briefly at Varanasi, on the Ganges River in India. The customs officials here took a dim view of the hundreds of jars of maple syrup we had on board, despite the fact that all we were doing was taking on fuel and moving on to Myanmar. It was a good thing that Brian was an old hand at dealing with this sort of officialdom, and after some fast talking we departed with the maple syrup still on board.
From Varanasi to Yangon, Myanmar (used to be Rangoon, Burma), the Monsoon was very much in evidence. There was water everywhere! We were in fact very lucky with the weather in this region, as there is usually a lot of major thunderstorm activity associated with the monsoon. We had to do a bit of weather dodging over the east coast of India, but overall we got off very lightly. The following week, the news was reporting 1000 people drowned in the Ganges region due to flooding after torrential rain!
The flight from Varanasi to Yangon was also our longest sector, at 950 nautical miles. It took us 4 hours and 50 minutes block to block, and to save fuel we flew the aircraft in “Long range cruise” mode, which meant that the true air speed was back at 235 knots instead of 270 knots, the propeller RPM was set at 1050 RPM instead of the usual 900 RPM in the cruise, and the main topic of discussion for most of the flight was the fuel state!
The next day was another biggie. We flew 3 sectors, to Penang, on to Kuching and then to Makasar in Indonesia. After landing at Makasar, it took an hour to complete the usual formalities of customs, immigration, fuelling and the like, then another hour to get to the hotel. We finally piled into the sack at 11 pm, after sampling what could only be described as a dodgy local beer. Although the cleanliness of the rooms was somewhat questionable, we decided that enough was enough, and that a sleep in was in order. The previous 3 days had taken their toll, and all 3 of us were feeling pretty washed out.
The next morning, Phil, Brian and I met for breakfast at 9 am. Breakfast is probably a slightly misleading term actually, because it wasn’t really obvious exactly what it was that was being served up, and combined with the uncertain hygiene standards that the establishment had, well, suffice to say we left Makasar still feeling a bit peckish!
It was a pleasure, several hours later, to touch down in Darwin, with enough time for a leisurely meal and still have a relatively early night. Phil certainly enjoyed tucking into that big Aussie steak, his first decent meal since leaving Hurghada 3 days earlier!
Day 9 was an easy trip down to Mt Isa, then we flew on to Coolangatta on the Gold Coast, where Bob Guard was waiting to join us for the last legs of the journey. One last hurdle awaited us, and that was to get across the Tasman Sea. We had the choice of going to Auckland via Lord Howe Island, which was marginal for our operation with its short runway and a reputation for tricky windshear, or via Norfolk Island, which was on the limit of our fuel endurance. Once again, the weather gods smiled upon us, and Lord Howe Island enjoyed the best day they had had all winter. The forecast wind was 10 to 15 knots and straight down the runway, so it was decided that LHI was the place to go!
We certainly caused a stir on the Island, being the first Q300 ever to have touched down there. The locals were very excited about the whole deal, and many photographs were taken. After taking on fuel, the four of us climbed back on board for the penultimate flight to Auckland, New Zealand. A wet welcome in the form of two fire trucks from the Airport Fire service awaited us in Auckland. It was terrific to be finally on NZ soil, but we were anxious to get on our way to Nelson, where we knew that Geoff, John and a host of others were waiting patiently.
Visions of a nice triumphant fly by disappeared when we checked the Nelson weather! Overcast at 1000 feet and 5000 metres visibility in light rain. The only landing on the trip that was in the rain, and it had to be the last one. You can’t win ‘em all, I guess.And so we came to the end of an epic journey, having come more than half way round the world in 20 flights over 10 days. The last highlight of the trip came when my family were the first people to appear on the flight deck after Phil had opened the airstair door. It was great to be home.
