We enjoyed our visit to Aswan and had a splendid dinner last night from the 13th floor of our almost empty hotel in a completely empty restaurant. Hopefully the tourist industry in Egypt will eventually revive; there are some good things to see.
A long flight today; 600 nm of desert followed by 250 nm of Mediterranean Sea. Samy, the handler, collected us promptly from our hotel at 7:45 am but on arrival at the airport disappeared for around 20 minutes so we were late on our planned airborne time. Then the destination airfield (Heraklion on Crete) – LGIR – had been mistakenly entered on the flight plan as LGIB, which does not exist, and despite my attempts to correct it, the Tower refused to allow a change, so easier to sort it out down the line.
Phil’s Coelus flight planning program gave me a flight time of 5 hr 34 min and this would have been spot on had Cairo not added a 50 nm dogleg. The weather was good, a headwind slowly became a tailwind and the outside air temperature steadily dropped from 10ºC to 0ºC as we entered European airspace. On handover to Athens, the controller knew nothing about us (probably the flight plan to a non existent destination had been binned by the computer), but all was well. I had rung the handler on the sat phone with our ETA so he at least was expecting us.
After settling in at our hotel, we wandered around the centre of the town, had the usual post flight beer and planned our sightseeing for tomorrow as we are here to Saturday.
Aswan to Heraklion: 847 nm in 5 hr 48 min