flying | Across Africa Challenge

Feb

2014

Greetings from Sabi Sabi Game Reserve

Over the last two days we have covered an extremely long distance. We left Luanda, Angola in the early sunday morning, to fly via Windhoek in Namibia to Keetmanshoop. After five hours of flying we reached Odangwa, where we would fill up the tanks again, which took us about one hour.

From Odangwa we flew to Windhoek. Enroute we encountered the spectacular scenery Namibia is so well known of. We arrived at Windhoek shortly before 16:00 LT, and we still weren’t at our final destination of the day, which was Keetmanshoop.
We left Windhoek after another hour of formalities and refuelling. We arrived at Keetmanshoop around sunset, which was a little later than planned. We had flown 11 hours and covered over 1200 nautical miles, and were exhausted. But we were back on schedule!

The next day we left at 7AM in the morning, to fly to our lodge at the Sabi-Sabi Wildlife Refuge in South Africa. Via Upington we arrived there at around 17:00LT, which was a little later than we hoped for. The strip is actually owned by the resort we will stay in for the coming days, and they made no fuss about it.
Now it is time to have some rest in Sabi Sabi. The scenery and wildlife is spectacular here. We hope to post some more pictures and stories from here in the coming days, as we have a little more time on our hands. Totsiens in Sabi Sabi!

Posted: Sjoerd Jan

Categories: Flying in Africa

Jan

2014

Back to Europe

But only for a few days. We left Fés in Morocco yesterday around 1100 in the morning, bound for Tenerife-Norte (Los Rodeos) where we would have to pass immigration back into Spain. It was a long flight over the Atlantic ocean, and it took several hours before we first saw land again (Lanzarote).

We arrived at Tenerife at around 16.00 local time, knowing we had to leave for El Hierro as fast as we could, as the airport of El Hierro would close at 18.00.

But Murphy’s law started to wag its tail. The first delay happened because of a royal visit – the son of the King of Spain came in with his Dassault Falcon, and that grounded us for a significant amount of time. Then, when we were allowed to leave for El Hierro, the cloud ceiling had dropped to below 500 feet. Because of that, ATC no longer allowed us to depart under VFR.

Our OPS-team back in the Netherlands quickly came in to help and prepared an IFR-flightplan which was approved and active within minutes, so off we went. We tried to enjoy the spectacular scenery of the Canary Islands during the sunset, while we flew to El Hierro as fast as our Piper would allow us to. We touched down at El Hierro at 17.58, just minutes before closing.

Now came the driving part, and that would prove to be more tricky than flying. We had to drive to our hotel, but because of the recent volcanic activity on the island many main roads were closed. We had to drive during the night, over small and curved mountain roads. Visibility gradually dropped to 50 meters or less. It took us two hours, before we arrived at the hotel.

Today we relaxed at our hotel, enjoyed the mild temperatures of 20+ Celcius and had some fantastic scubadiving experiences. We will upload some videos as soon as we can. So stay tuned!