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Singapore to Maldives Darwin to Singapore Cairns to Dawin
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Satellite data provided by The Living Earth ® Inc./Earth Imaging © 1996, All Rights Reserved. | |
Leg 8: YPDN-WSSL Darwin, Australia to Singapore Seletar 1 August 1998 8.5 hours
"Bali, Bali, This is November Eight Niner Eight Whiskey Whiskey position on one one, How Copy? "November Whiskey Whiskey, Bali I read you three, go ahead". Indonesian volcanoes glide by below. Lush Borneo passes to starboard as the Java gives way to the South China Sea. Now This is beginning to feel exotic.
"First Sight of Indonesia, the disputed island of Timor"
Radio Woes:
We normally alternate seats with the right seater responsible for normal copilot altitude and airspeed calls, checklists, and communications. The left seater is responsible for flying. Doug flew right seat on this leg and it was a tough one. Maintaining contact with ATC was difficult, sometimes ten radio calls were made before a successful contact. Part of the problem is that often several ATC branches use the same HF frequencies, and unlike VHF where "stepping on someone" results in a loud squeal, you can generally hear all conversations at once. On this flight we could hear Perth Radio, Jakarta Control and Brunei information simultaneously on HF frequency 11356. Sometimes it just seemed that the controllers didn’t understand us well and didn’t want to talk. End result, several hours of the flight were spent fiddling with the radio.
Normal Fuel Management:
At 8.5 hours, this was the longest leg since the flight to Honolulu. We took off with over 5,000 pounds of fuel. The normal servicing drill is to check tire pressure, then to fill the mains, the aux tanks, and finally the ferry tanks in the cabin. In flight, we burn the mains down for an hour (to avoid the venting problem described in leg 1), then run the aux down to about 1/3 of their capacity. Then one of the three ferry tanks is selected to refill the aux tanks to about 2/3 capacity at which time the ferry tank is shut off. The aux are then allowed to burn down again to 1/3 capacity, and the refill process is repeated until the ferry tanks are empty. This usually requires 6 or 7 iterations before we are on wing fuel only.
There is room for error here. Distractions abound in the cockpit, and if a careless pilot were to leave a ferry tank selected too long, the aux tanks would overfill and the excess fuel would be dumped overboard. Potential Catastrophe! We decided that an infallible means of avoiding the overfill was a necessary addition to the cockpit and settled on a common kitchen timer.
"the kitchen timer"
The transfer rate from ferry tanks to aux tanks is pretty uniform so we can time the refills. By setting the timer after each ferry tank selection, and placing the timer in plain sight on the dash, we’re always aware of the state of the transfer (another example of the superiority of analog displays). We have found that the chime of the timer will awaken even the most channelized pilot.
The timer has also proved useful as a reminder for ATC clearances, etc. A typical request would be to "Contact Brisbane information at 1310" which might be as much as an hour away. If you’re in the middle of a midday meal and Bob Marley, a gentle reminder is helpful.
The Flight:
We had originally planned to fly to Singapore’s main terminal of Changi. After learning that private aircraft normally go to the satellite airport of Seletar (also the location of a Hawker Pacific service center where we hoped to have a compressor wash accomplished), we filed for Seletar and launched. I am embarrassed to say that only in mid flight did we discover that Seletar had no instrument approaches. Hasty alternate plans were made to divert to Kuala Lumpur if the weather was low. Fortunately, the lowest cloud layer was over 2,000 feet so vectors for the visual worked fine.
In Singapore, our rooms are at the old, British colonial hotel, Raffles. Here, the old yarn goes, a tiger was shot beneath the billiards table in the early part of the century.
"John at Raffles… bewildered by tea"
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Satellite data provided by The Living Earth ® Inc./Earth Imaging © 1996, All Rights Reserved.
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