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and a bit to get feet) and it is seemingly impossible to change these units – perhaps my tracker unit is considered out of date.
