To get experience we flew around quite a bit on long cross country flights. We explored Texas and flew all over the South from Louisiana to Arkansas to the Florida Keys. We went to the Bahamas, to Colorado and to New Mexico. And in the summer of 1991 we made a trip to Alaska with N8289A logging over 80 hours, much of which was over desolate terrain. Most of this flying went smoothly, but occasionally there were periods of sweaty palms and crooked toes. We had a vacuum pump go out on us at night in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, an engine fire (fortunately on the ground), a smoking alternator belt and a fire-extinguisher go off all on its own. But the most frequent event were was deteriorating weather and I was glad to have spend quite a few hours practicing instrument work.

General aviation routes across the Atlantic

Route #2 leads from Newfoundland to Iceland and on to Scotland, with a potential stopover in Greenland. The shortest route to Europe is the direct route from St. John's to Ireland. This route has also the longest overwater leg. The recommended route in the winter-time leads towards the Azores to the lower lattitudes. 

The next day, again on an IFR flight plan, we flew to Bangor, Maine, where we parked at Aerofusion. This shop specializes at preparing light aircraft for ferry flights. There are a number of commonly used routes for small planes to cross the Atlantic and only one of them can be used without additional fuel. This route leads way up into the far North and was not suitable this early in the year. The other itineraries have overwater legs that are significantly longer and, with the mandatory three hour reserve, require additional fuel. I purchased a 100 gallon tank which boosted our total capacity to 172 gallons. The guys from Aerofusion were very professional. They installed the tank, complete with plumbing and 337 form and hooked up the HF antenna within a matter of hours. In addition they prepared our ferry permit, which allowed us to fly 25% over gross, and computed our new weight and balance. It was a bit of a trick to keep the center of gravity within limits and we had to shift a lot of our luggage up front. There were a few planes ahead of us in the queue, but by 5 pm we were all done. We went to the compass rose to swing and adjust the compass and, despite the fine weather, decided to spend the night in Bangor to have a couple of beers with the ferry pilots who we had met the previous evening.

That night the lid went onto Bangor. In the morning the ceiling was about 600 ft and the freezing level was high enough to let us go IFR, but Moncton was below minimums. It was frustrating: the cloud layers weren't all that thick and we could have enjoyed a beautiful ride on top to St John's where the weather was fine, but we had to have the inspection by the Canadians. At night it began to rain, and it stayed that way for several days with the ceiling dropping steadily. We tried to sightsee some but, though we were told the scenery was breathtaking, we never did see more than half a mile. After two days the rain turned into snow and the outlook was gloomy. There was no way we could go: ice in the clouds and not enough room to fly under them: we were stuck. To top it off, for some reason unknown to us all the hotels in town were filling up and we found ourselves moving from one place to the next, and finally ended up in the nurses home of the local hospital. Which sounds more exciting than it actually was.

Saturday morning things improved some: the ceiling lifted to about 800 ft and Moncton was VFR. A cheerful chap from Flight Service, however, promised this situation was not going to last long: we were likely to encounter snow showers and some of the higher mountain tops were obscured. IFR was out of the question because of the icing and the only way out was good old scud running. Which is what we did. We landed in Moncton in beautiful weather with only very high cirrus clouds. Indeed we did encounter some snow in which the visibility had dropped quite a bit and we could not see all of the mountain tops, but we did not feel we had taken any undue risks.

Canadian law prohibits transatlantic flights from Canada in single engine airplanes, unless a number of regulations are complied with. These conditions are laid down in the North Atlantic International General Aviation Operations Manual and stipulate required navigation and survival equipment as well as basic skills required from the crew. So, on the ground in Moncton we called the inspector from the Canadian authorities who most kindly had promised to come by on his day off. He inspected the airplane and gave us a little quiz. We were surprised that he wanted to verify that both the bags that had SURVIVAL SUIT printed on them, actually contained survival suits. When we told him we were not in the business of shipping old rags he give us a few samples from his experience how people had tried to fool him to sidestep the rules. One guy had glued a glossy picture from an ADF on his panel instead of the real thing. He told us about illegal contraptions used by some to make standard ELTs watertight and to add oil in flight to worn-out engines. And, yes, some people had stored underwear in survival suit bags. The guys at Moncton are a realistic bunch and very helpful. We got our permit and on we went to Newfoundland.

After about half an hour after takeoff night fell but even during that short period of daylight we were struck by the beauty of the scenery. This stretch was also a good opportunity to give all the equipment which was installed in Maine an operational check-out. We used fuel from both wingtanks, and from the ferry tank to make sure all the plumbing was in working order. And we tried out the HF radio and antenna with which we were to give position reports while out of range for VHF equipment. HF radios are a bit more complex to operate than VHF equipment, but the range is not limited to line-of-sight. With proper conditions and set up of the rig it is quite possible to talk to the other side of the world. In fact, radiosignals ar capable of circum-navigating the globe. But this performance depends on many factors, such as the time of day, the time of year, and the frequency. Also there are "holes" in the coverage. Therefore, instead of using one frequency, the airtraffic controllers rely on a number of frequencies. If one doesn't work, go ahead and try the next. Because of the wavelengths that are being used, the antenna must be quite a bit larger than VHF whips, and they have to be tuned each time a different frequency is dialed in.

I had purchased an amateur radio which had been converted to operate on the frequencies used for airtraffic control. Although we were not certain of the legal details of this affair, the use of converted ham radios is accepted practice. These little rigs are technically very advanced and we feel they do add a significant safety margin because they enable you to communicate continuously with amateur stations during the crossing. For an antenna we used a wire which went through the stormwindow at the pilots side, to the vertical fin and back to the left wingtip. It was hooked up to an antenna tuner and the whole combination worked like a charm. To try the radio we talked to a number of ham operators in Holland and Canada.

The plan was to spend about a day in St John's and then move on to Santa Maria in the Azores. The FBO in St John's not only supplied us with gas, but also with local stories and sightseeing suggestions. We rented a car and were all set to go, but decided to stop by the meteo office. The weatherman there informed us the weather was going down in a hurry. "Low ceilings, ice in the clouds and freezing rain below. Forget about the Azores tomorrow; in fact forget about flying for at least four days. But Ireland looks fine tonight. You have a problem flying at night?". Well, after looking at the ceiling of the nurses home for four days, we had no problem flying at night. We had lunch, got some sandwiches for supper, turned in the car and went back to the met office where we received a customized meteorological package, including satellite pictures and maps of predicted isobars and winds at altitude. The meteo man suggested to deviate from the great circle route to make optimum use of tailwinds and an altitude to stay above the tops of cumulus clouds in the second half of the trip. So we punched the numbers into GPS and LORAN, hoisted ourselves into the survival suits and filed for Shannon, Ireland. At quarter to seven pm local time the wheels of N1927H left the ground of the North American continent, most likely, for the last time. We were on our way.

All in all the trip went quite uneventful. In particular the takeoff and climbout went surprisingly smoothly. The runway, of course, was very long, but I did use some flaps. We were, after all, more than 500 lbs over maximum gross weight. We broke ground much sooner than I had anticipated and climbed out at a brisk pace. Within a minute or so we crossed the last cape of the American continent and headed East towards the icebergs we could see in the distance. The GPS told us the next landfall was 1723 nautical miles away.

We levelled off at 10000 ft, switched to the ferry tank and leaned the engine. With the throttle firmly up against the firewall and with an outside air temperature of minus twenty degrees Celcius we trued out at about 130 knots while using 9.5 gallons per hour.

During the first couple of hours we had the autopilot hooked up to the LORAN, but in the wee hours of the morning we began to lose LORAN coverage. The GPS worked magnificently throughout the entire journey, and navigation boiled down to tiny adjustments in the heading bug to keep the track equal to the bearing to the next waypoint.

One of the regulations of transatlantic flying requires a position report about every hour. The first and last reports were within VHF coverage, but we had to use HF communication for the reports in between. The characteristics of HF radio are quite different from VHF and different frequencies usually give different results. Communication went something like this:

N1927H roger, I got you this time. Contact Shanwick at 25° W. Goodnight.

In most cases we could get the message across in a couple of minutes, but sometimes we had to try different frequencies to get it all done. And the big boys were going through the same thing, we heard KLM, Lufthansa, British Airways and many more, and we saw a few of them pass high overhead.

As we progressed towards the East the wind picked up in speed and backed some, just as the weatherman back in St John's had predicted, and by the time we were approaching Ireland we had a 40 knot tailwind. At about five in the morning the horizon started to pale and an hour later we had to put on our sunglasses, flying above a blinding white overcast with towering cumulus clouds. About a hundred miles offshore Ireland holes began to appear and we got glimpses of the Atlantic with an occasional fisherman and, later on, from the green Irish coast. We were handed off to Shannon approach who gave us our first exposure to European aviation terminology: N1927H descend and maintain 5000 ft on the aerodrome QNH. We were cleared for a visual approach and five minutes short of twelve hours after we began the takeoff roll in Newfoundland we pulled the mixture in Shannon, Ireland.

We checked into the local bed-and-breakfast, grabbed a few hours sleep and had a pint or two in the original "Durty Nelly's" later on that night. This inn's name has been used for several pubs over the world (isn't there one on the river walk in San Antonio?). The name apparently, is a tribute to the lady who ran the establishment around the turn of the century and who was notoriously frugal with the dishing water.

We decided to take an easy pace on the remainder of the trip home. First of all we had about a week to cover less than a thousand miles, and also the price of avgas was about twice of that in the States. So the next day we set the power to 55% and flew to Waterford on the East Coast of Ireland. And a splendid trip it was, at five hundred feet over the lush green Irish country side with flocks of sheep, through wide valleys with bright yellow patches of flowers, following creeks and country roads, admiring ruins, castles and churches and occasionally dodging a rainstorm. It was the first easy VFR part we had on the trip and we enjoyed every bit of it. The next day we crossed the Irish Sea to Cardiff in Wales and the English Channel to St Malo in France. By that time we were getting accustomed to flying in Europe. In particular the diversity, both geographically as well as culturally we found delightful.

France, of course, was an experience all by itself. Most communication between airtraffic control and local planes was conducted in French. For them a very natural situation I'm sure, but after spending 2.5 years in Houston my French was rusty at best, particularly aviation French, spoken rapidly and mutilated by VHF radios and headsets. We were addressed in English, but had no clue what the other guys were up to. As we came in for landing we noticed the local gendarmerie practicing touch-and-goes in a Cessna 152. We could not help wondering whether this was their principal vehicle for hot pursuits of the bad boys. This was definitely France.

With its walled city Saint Malo offers the perfect decorum to sample the famous French cuisine. We studied the menu and, feeling brave, I decided to order the fruits-de-mer. Just in time, however, I noticed how our neighbor was using a set of dentist tools to attack a heterogeneous collection of spiny looking creatures, that, I was told, only this morning crawled about on the shores on Brittany. I thought for a moment about the days of fajitas at Cyclone Anaya's, chicken fried steak in the Hill Country and blackened redfish in Kemah. I stuck to wine and cheese and thought becoming a hard-core European again would have to wait a little longer.

The towns on the coast of Brittany and Normandy are really very picturesque. Possibly topping the list of touristic attractions in that area is Mont Saint Michel, a fortified monastery build on the remains of an ancient volcano. This place lies just offshore and could in the past only be reached on foot at low tide. With the inevitable advent of tourism a dike was build which now permanently links the island with the mainland.

In days gone by, many places in the old world were the site of mysterious phenomena: Lourdes, Santiago de Compostela and many more. To the best of my knowledge Saint Malo is not amongst these places. Despite this, we did witness something quite out of the ordinary, something for which we do not have an explanation. We were getting ready to leave for Rotterdam and I asked the fuel man to fill her up: "le plein, s'il vous plait". I told him she would probably not take much, as we had topped off in Cardiff and had flown only 1.5 hours at low power: 15, possibly 20 gallons. After a few minutes the man came back: "Non monsieur, it did not take much." And handed me a bill for 2 liters. How could this be ? Could we have used the ferry tank ? I didn't think so. The tank held 100 gallons and we'd flown for 10 hours on it at 9.5 gallons per hour. At home we drained nearly 10 gallons from the tank. Did somebody inadvertently fuel her up ? Unlikely, since the airplane was tied down, locked, handbrakes on and the FBO did not have a mobile tanker. Were we carried on wings of angels ? Perhaps. Miracolo, miracolo!

During our home run we were in the clouds all the time. Saint Malo, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and, finally, Rotterdam Approach: N1927H, goede middag, you are cleared for the ILS approach to runway 24. Maintain 2200 ft until established on the localizer and report outer marker.