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Alice Springs, Australia
It's Saturday morning and time
to move on to Cairns, Australia. We were packed and in the
dining room for breakfast at 7:30 AM. The Cape Lodge doesn't
start serving until 8:00 AM but the kitchen was cooperative
and we were soon eating our cereal and drinking our coffee.
By 8:00 AM we were on our way to the bustling Busselton airport
and by 9:00 AM we were airborne and on our way to our refueling
stop in Alice Springs. It is over 1,200 miles to Alice Springs
and another 785 to Cairns so we were ready for a very long
day.
The flight began as all of our
flights have thus far, routine and uneventful. A couple of
hundred miles short of Alice Springs, we passed over Ayers
Rock, a huge otherworldly red rock formation in the middle
of nowhere. The weather was beautiful and Tom and Pam mused
that we could have refueled at the Ayers Rock airport and
shorted the morning leg. Also, Air Traffic Control was reporting
thunderstorms developing in the area around the Alice Springs
airport. I didn't sound that bad so we continued (our first
mistake).
As we began our landing approach,
Tom and Pam are handed off from Air Traffic Control to the
airport tower at Alice Springs. By this time there are strong
active thunderstorms all around the airport. The tower is
giving us constant updates as to conditions at the airport
and what he is seeing on his radar. There are strong shifting
winds on the ground and our crew is discussing whether to
land or move away from the storm into a holding pattern to
wait it out.
A consideration is our fuel.
We have a little over an hour's supply left and there is concern
that the storm may get worse. We could turn back to Ayers
Rock but we would have a 50-knot head wind going back so that
again fuel is a concern. The decision is made to land. As
we proceed with our approach, the tower continues to advise
us of the surface wind that is increasing and shifting direction
dramatically. Now the decision is which runway to use. The
King Air 200 has never been proven to be able to land with
a crosswind exceeding 25-knots and the tower is reporting
35-knot shifting gusts. One runway (partly gravel) is first
selected but the winds again shift and another decision is
made to change runways.
The winds aloft are jostling
us around to the point that Ashley and I have now put on our
shoulder straps and are hanging on to the arms of our chairs.
There is lighting all around us now and hail has been report
by the tower. Pam is flying in the left seat and Tom is handling
the radio. As we turn for our final approach the tower advises,
"You are on your own". As we drop below 100 feet, the wind
is quartering off our nose from the right and gusting violently.
Tom is calmly calling out the air speed to Pam who has her
hands full coping with the wind. "100, 95, 120, 100, 90, 120",
Tom is continuing to relay the air speed. Touch down! It wasn't
a 'greaser' but it felt pretty good to the four of us.
Ashley and I would be told over
cocktails this evening that the real concern was wind sheer.
In situations like the one we had experienced, it is quite
common for the ground wind to be blowing in the opposite direction
from the wind 400 feet off of the ground. We were landing
into a head wind that, if it shifted around to our tail, would
reduce our lift dramatically.
We finished the refueling in
record time and began our taxi. We were anxious to get off
the ground and out of the area as soon as possible because,
after a brief reprieve, the storms were re-building. Before
we reached the end of the runway to begin our take-off roll,
some of our instrumentation began to malfunction.
After sitting at the end of the
runway for 30 minutes trying to work around the problems,
we gave up and taxied back to the terminal. We had lost our
radar and our storm scope. There was no way we could fly with
these weather conditions.
In desperation, I walked out
into the rain with my Irdium satellite telephone and called
my dear cousin, Deborah Vaden in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I needed
the home telephone number of the technician who had installed
our avionics. I obviously woke her from a sound sleep but
within a minute or so she had the number for me. I was able
to reach him but, unfortunately Deborah, he was not able to
help. With no repair facilities within 800 miles, Tom tried
in vain to fix the problems. We finally arranged for a hotel
in town and left our crippled bird alone in the rain. N982GA
was the only airplane on the tarmac.
Till next time,
Pat
p.s. It is now Sunday and we
have successfully flown to Cairns, Australia where we are
hopeful that we can find someone who can heal our bird. I
will have more in my next transmission.
Ayer's Rock
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Ugly Weather , Alice Springs
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Storm, Alice Springs
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Wounded
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