Category: 2019 – Egypt and Oshkosh

Phil has prepared a map of our route which is below.

Alternates are shown with dotted lines. The plan is to go to New York for a couple of days after Oshkosh before we start our journey home.

It is said that every keen GA pilot should go to Oshkosh at least once ……..

Phil bought his TBM in March 2017. He and I passed our type rating at Carlisle on 2nd May 2017. My bonanza G-TRJB is based there and Phil and I have done a number of trips in her, some of which are recounted in earlier pages of this blog. Our examiner Jonathan Shooter chose Carlisle partly because he wanted a trip down memory lane as Carlisle was where Jonathan had done some of his early flying training years ago.  Later that summer, Phil suggested that we should consider going to the US TBM Owners’ Convention which was being held in the latter half of October. However on further consideration, we decided that from a weather viewpoint, it was too late in the year to embark on trans Atlantic crossings particularly given our then relative inexperience on type. However we agreed we should put Oshkosh in the diary for 2018. In the event, other commitments precluded this but we have made sure our diaries remained free for this year.

Outbound we are meeting up with a group of fellow pilots flying TBM’s and some other aircraft led by David Fabris, a splendid Frenchman who set up a TBM dealership at Biggin Hill some time ago. Understandably David wants the trip to start on French soil so we begin on Saturday with a short flight in the wrong direction to Le Touquet to meet up with our group and hopefully enjoy a gourmet French dinner. Thereafter our route is conventional; we fly to Reykjavik on Sunday (stopping at Carlisle to pick up some equipment) and then on to Iqualuit in Northern Canada, home to man eating mozzies, on Monday and Oshkosh on Tuesday.

We return under our own steam, aiming to take the same trans Atlantic route as I did in 2010 via Goose Bay, Narsarsuaq , Reykjavik and Carlisle arriving back at the end of July. Apart from this blog, there is a tracker link at https://share.garmin.com/GPTXC which will transmit our position when flying every ten minutes. This link will be available from Sunday until shortly after our return. Unfortunately speed is shown in kms/hr (divide by two to get knots) and altitude in metres (multiply by three and a bit to get feet) and it is seemingly impossible to change these units – perhaps my tracker unit is considered out of date.

Soon time for our next adventure; this time we are going westwards to Canada and the USA for a visit to Oshkosh. Last autumn at annual time, Phil Caiger decided to transfer his TBM from the German register to the UK register so D-FLEX became G-PTXC. Here is a picture of Phil’s aircraft at Biggin Hill in her new registration letters.

As well as Phil and myself, Phil’s son Ed is coming too; Ed is a keen photographer so we will largely leave the picture taking up to him.

Watch this space for further news of our forthcoming trip.

In late February/early March Phil Caiger and I did a short trip to Egypt in Phil’s TBM G-PTXC. It was a boys’ outing with our wives left safely at home. Luckily there was no ‘Beast from the East’; indeed the reverse was true and the latter half of February had brought unusual sunshine and warmth to most of the UK. We left Biggin after lunch on 25th February for Split in Croatia where we overnighted in Trogir, a town quite close to the airport where Miranda and I had stayed eighteen months earlier on our way to Tirana. In contrast to my last visit, the town was very quiet and we had to search around for a restaurant for dinner.

The original plan was to fly the first leg next day to Heraklion on Crete but a bad landing forecast required a revised plan. Instead we planned a stop at Zakynthos someway short of Crete and hurriedly made handling and refuelling arrangements which subsequently went smoothly. Phil flew these two legs. A potential complication was that the second leg of the day from  Zakynthos to Luxor was approaching our maximum range but a tailwind was forecast. It was a long flight, just under four hours, culminating in my first night landing in XC. Handling was efficient and we were soon in a taxi in balmy evening air on our way to our hotel – the Winter Palace, an historic traditional watering hole and well recommended by some friends.

We had three splendid days of sightseeing; it was busy but not teeming with tourists and we could walk around without too much hustling from locals wanting to sell us stuff or take tours with them. There were a few tourist boats plying the Nile but many more tied up, reflecting the continued downturn in tourist traffic in recent years.

For the first day, we looked round Luxor itself, known in Greek times as Thebes and wandered round Luxor Temple and about a mile away, the much bigger and more interesting Karnak Temple complex, heavily restored in places.

On day two, we crossed by ferryboat to the West bank of the Nile and hired a driver to take us round the Valley of the Kings. Here, as its name suggests,  a number of pharaoh kings are buried as well as other close relations of noble blood. These tombs are spread out over a wide area of what otherwise is arid rock and in many cases consist of a large number of adjoining underground chambers; most interesting to me where the wall decorations, most of which have been heavily restored.

On the third day (1st March), we took a day trip to Abu Simbel, about an hour’s flight down the Nile almost to the Sudanese border. We had an early start, overflying Aswan where Phil and I had landed on previous visits southward, and landed just before the daily influx of tourist planes from Hurghada and boarded the bus to take us to the the Temple complex of Ramesses II. This was well worth seeing; when the Aswan High Dam was built with the creation of Lake Nasser, the temples which would otherwise have been submerged were moved piece by piece and rebuilt on higher ground – a mammoth task and impeccably done under the UNESCO banner. Ramesses’s temple is particularly impressive but his wife’s temple next door is fine too albeit on a much smaller scale.

 

 

 

 

 

There was much more that we could have seen in this part of Egypt but for a first visit, three days seemed about right. Then time to return home; on 2nd March we left late morning and flew one leg to Heraklion arriving in time for a good walk round the port before dinner at our ‘usual’ restaurant there. Phil had never been to Bastia so he flew the first leg the following day there and then I flew the final leg home to Biggin. Alas the fine balmy weather in the UK had disappeared and been replaced with wind and rain – March is often a capricious month from a weather viewpoint.

Once again Phil’s TBM showed itself as a very capable aircraft able to cover large distances in relaxed comfort. Now for Oshkosh in July although we plan a quick visit to Friedrichshafen GA fair in April.