The long way back home

On the second day of our two-day trip to Brisbane we started with a clockwise flight around Brisbane and a VFR transit of both Brisbane and Gold Coast control zones before heading back to Sydney inland via Armidale.

We took off at Archerfield on 28R and tracked northbound via the Indooroopilly Bridge, which only comes into view when one is nearly overhead it. Not too good for a tracking point, especially considering that the Centenary Bridge downstream becomes visible a lot earlier, and is an inbound reporting point. Confusing the two may have consequences.

The locals know to aim for the southern tip of Mount Coot-Tha first when flying northbound out of Archerfield and also know to stick to the hill side in order to avoid violating the nearby Brisbane CTA. From then we aimed for Lake Samson, then Deception Bay via Beachmere.

Making a radio call on 118.8 at Beachmere at 1500ft brought back lots of memories of learning to fly at Redcliffe Aero Club. Back then, flying from Redcliffe to the training area at Bribie Island felt like a cross-country flight.

Near Redcliffe we got a clearance through Brisbane CTR via Sandgate Pier, Brisbane control tower and Manly Boat Harbour at 1500ft. Flying over a large airport is always a treat. A couple of airliners took off under us on runway 19, such as this Virgin Blue 737 in the photo above.

We left the CTR and tracked to Gold Coast via Jacobs Well VOR. After that we used the VFR lane across Gold Coast CTR southbound, with Chris flying and myself navigating. I had never flow it before, and I'm not sure I'd like to do it for the first time on my own. There are plenty of navigation fixes to visually identify and things happen rather fast. The lane offers great views of the Gold Coast cluster of high-rise buildings as well as the Gold Coast hinterland.

After Stotts Island we tracked for Lismore, climbing carefully under the Gold Coast CTA steps. Clouds prevented us from climbing as high as we wanted to, and the controller cancelled flight following since he could no longer see us on his scope as we crossed the ranges.

From Lismore we navigated by dead reckoning to Tenterfield. Or at least we tried to. At some point we found ourselves not entirely sure of our position. Although the GPS had no moving map, it could still give us latitude and longitude though. I was nearly finished fixing our position on the paper map when the kind controller asked us if we were still going to Tenterfield as planned, because we were tracking west and Tenterfield was 12 miles to the south. We took the hint and followed the valley south.

Lenticular clouds were forming over the ranges, the result of wind blowing sufficiently hard across the ranges and creating mountain waves. Better stay above them. The few little puffs in the foreground are regular cumulus, the lenticular clouds are right behind and below the wingtip.

From there we tracked for Glenn Innes in the New England Highlands, the largest elevated area of land in Australia. Flying over it, it is easy to forget that the vast expanse of land below sits well above 3000ft. Glen Innes airport above was used as a base for firefighting operations last December during bushfires in the Northern Tablelands area.

The little black dots on the photo above are cows on their way to or from the watering holes. This scene reminded me of a very funny encounter Sylvia once had with cows near a VOR in the UK.

Approaching Armidale we joined the circuit downwind for 05 and Chris landed us there after 3.2 hours, which concluded the longest leg of the whole trip. The temperature on the ground was rather chilly. It reminded me of spending Easter week-end in a cottage in nearby Walcha last year. Great area, lovely people but rather cold.

We stretched our legs, had a bit to eat and visited the bathrooms in the terminal. Passengers were waiting for a QantasLink flight to Sydney. Would we make it out of Armidale before the Dash-8 arrived? After? More details in the next episode.

The local refueler topped up our tanks with fresh AVGAS. With the mixture on full rich, the fuel consumption in the Archer is about 42 litres an hour. Even though we leaned the mixture to rich-of-peak in cruise, I would be surprised if we burned less than one hundred litres on that 3.2 hour leg. There's no fuel flow meter or totaliser on the Archer.

Since we hired the airplane "wet", i.e. with fuel included, I had to surrender the fuel receipts to the club in order to get a refund, and forgot to write down how much we burned. Which is probably just as good, I would hate to know what the carbon footprint of that week-end was. Being environment-conscious and everything though, we walked to the pub and back in Brisbane on Saturday night. This must compensate for the carbon (and the lead) oxides released in the atmosphere in some way.

We swapped seats for the final leg back to Sydney. This time I was in the left seat and Chris in the right seat. It's true that sharing flying duties means one gets double the experience for the same amount of money, but the flip side of the coin is that one also gets double as tired. But I'm not complaining.

Coffs Harbour to Brisbane Archerfield

The second leg of our trip from Sydney to Brisbane took us from Coffs Harbour to Brisbane Archerfield in 2.4 hours. All still without a functioning GPS. This was a bit of an aviation homecoming for me since I learned to fly in Brisbane but moved to Sydney soon after I got my PPL, and this was my first time flying back in a GA aircraft.

We departed Coffs on runway 21 in-between two arrivals: a Virgin Blue 737 and a QantasLink Q400 who was asked to extend his downwind leg to accommodate our departure.

We made a right turn and the photo below, taken on the crosswind leg, illustrates quite well what I described in the previous post: runway 10/28 is difficult to spot when coming from the south, and can momentarily be confused with that oblique taxiway. That's runway 03/21 in the foreground, the photo is looking to the north.

Soon after we left Class D airspace and tracked for Grafton. We could no longer follow the coast since our planned track took us inland in order to avoid Evans Head airspace. Navigation became a little bit harder than keeping Australia on the left as we did on the first leg. We flew IFR (I Follow Roads) to Casino, which we identified by the runway orientation and the horseshoe lagoon, which I had already spotted once from a higher altitude.

From then to the Lismore NDB, then to Byron Bay lighthouse. Byron Bay is not too difficult to find since it is the easternmost point on the Australian continent. Chris identified the lighthouse from as far away as Lismore. The photo below is my smiling self in a left turn over Byron Bay township. Notice the overhead row of switches on the Archer III, which gives it that airliner feel. The switch that's off is the fuel pump.

At Byron Bay we requested flight following because we would be flying over tiger country soon and wanted to make double sure we did not violate any controlled airspace, with Gold Coast CTA steps nearby and later on approaching Archerfield and Brisbane. And also of course ATC provided us with an extra pair of eyes, pointing traffic that we may not be able to see flying west near the end of the day. All good reasons to request flight following. And it's free.

We tracked via Nimbin TV Towers, which offered superb views of Mount Warning. Nimbin is the unofficial weed growing and smoking capital of Australia and is famous for its annual MardiGrass festival. Mount Warning is the first point of Australia to receive sun rays in the morning, even before Byron Bay which is more to the east but at sea level.

We tracked via the Laravale VOR and ATC was very helpful pointing traffic out to us. We called inbound for Archerfield at Park Ridge water tower and followed a Cessna inbound. I ended up too high and too fast for runway 28 and was instructed to join upwind instead of landing.

After a short left-hand circuit on 28L we were cleared to land on 28R. We touched down at the first taxiway and exited at the next one. The landing was slightly left of the centreline. I have since manufactured the following excuse: I did it deliberately so that the picture would look right on the video that Chris was shooting from the right seat.

The ground controller provided us with detailed taxi instructions to a grass area where we could tie the aircraft down for the night. We shut down near the biggest single-engine biplane in the world, the Antonov AN-2.

We refuelled, cancelled SARTIME and took a cab to our hotel. This was a long day with 4.8 hours in the air. A lot of work, but very rewarding work. We managed to increase our store of experience without having to draw from our store of luck.

Dennis, our student pilot passenger got a taste of what a long cross-country flight is like. He assured us that the whole flight decupled his motivation to get his PPL. Very soon, with knowledge fresh in his mind, he will be able to look back at this flight and list the mistakes we made.

Keeping Australia on the left

Remember how I mentioned in a previous post a plan to fly from Sydney to Brisbane and back over Queen's Birthday week-end, and also remarked on how things in aviation have a habit of not going according to plan? Both prophecies came to pass.

The Arrow we had booked became unserviceable the day before our planned departure. The trim cable had snapped, and a replacement part wouldn't be available before the next Tuesday. Which left us without an airplane.

Ed (let him win the next AOPA Sweepstakes, his weight & balance always come 5kg under MTWO and his weather forecasts always read CAVOK), who had planned to fly with us part of the way in another airplane displayed the most amazing generosity and let us have the Archer VH-SFR for two days. Our three-day trip was shortened to two days, but we had an airplane!

With three blokes onboard, a little bit of baggage and full tanks we were about 5 kilos under maximum take-off weight when our wheels left runway 29R shortly before 9AM.

A few minutes into the flight I could see Chris repeatedly press the CLR button on the Garmin 430. Whatever the level of details selected, the moving map would only show the coastline and major roads, but no airspace at all. We restarted the unit and a message came up saying it couldn't read the Jeppesen memory card. We swapped memory slots, same story. The GPS could give us our position, track and ground speed, but didn't know any airport, waypoint or airspace. Great.

So this all turned into a week-end of visual navigation supplemented by the use of NDBs and VORs. This gave us the measure of all the bad habits we had developed relying on the GPS, so in the end I would say these 10.4 hours of hard work were also a great educational experience. It felt like a long PPL navigation exercise.

We enlisted all the help we could find, which meant following roads, applying large buffers to make sure we were not violating controlled airspace, and requesting flight following from ATC.

They say an image is worth a thousand words, so a video is probably worth one million words.

I had recently purchased a suction camera mount and was eager to try it. The good news is, it works great and provides a very solid seal with the window. The inevitable problem though is that the vibrations of the airplane reach the camera, much more so than when the camera is handheld or held on top of the soft padding on the dashboard, such as when filming a landing.

Despite having a built-in stabilisation feature, the footage captured by the camera was so shaky as to be absolutely unusable. Moving the suction pad to the bottom corner of the window, or leaving my hand on the camera while filming removed some of the shake, but not enough.

Fortunately Vegas Movie Studio, now comes with a very powerful image stabilisation feature that removed nearly all the shake. On the downside, the wing now seems to move in weird ways in front of a smooth landscape, while previously the landscape was shaking in all directions while the wing was reasonably stationary. I guess you can't have it both ways.

We flew via Patonga, Nobbys Head, followed the coastal VFR lane at 500ft around Newcastle as we had done once before, then continued on to Old Bar, Camden Haven, Port Macquarie, Kempsey and Macksville before landing at Coffs Harbour. I could have added overlays for identifying those places on the video, but I felt lazy, so this is left as an exercise for the reader.

We flew through some light showers of rain north of Newcastle, then the weather became progressively better, allowing us to climb up to 5500ft before descending to Coffs where Chris landed VH-SFR on runway 29 in a stiff crosswind.

Even though the GPS had packed in, navigation wasn't too much of an issue since it consisted in keeping the ocean to our right and the big landmass called Australia to our left. We called Coffs Tower inbound at Macksville and were given a clearance over land while another traffic was tracking in the opposite direction over water. The wind was favouring runway 21, but this would have given us a very long taxi to the AVGAS fuel pump, so we decided to go for the much shorter runway 28 instead.

This photo was taken when flying a left base leg for 28, which looks very much like a downwind leg for 21. Runway 28 comes into view quite late in the approach because of a slight rise in the terrain to the south of it. To add to the confusion, taxiway E3-E5 is the old runway 19, just without runway markings.

We landed, attended to the necessary biological functions, had a little look around in search of the refueller, found him in his little cubby house of an office, refuelled the aircraft and had a bite to eat. We swapped seats for the second leg: I took the left seat for the leg to Brisbane, with Dennis was in the back and Chris in the front right seat as radio man and navigator. All the details in the next episode.

Thanks everyone for your kind donations after I posted about my participation in the Oxfam Trailwalker fundraiser! The readers of this blog have already contributed $100, congratulations! More information on our team page here.

The Sydney VFR Lane of Entry, on foot and under 48 hours

Together with three friends from work I decided to participate in the 100km Oxfam Trailwalker Sydney in order to raise funds for Oxfam to fight poverty and injustice around the world. This is a 100km bushwalking race to be completed under 48 hours, sleep (or lack thereof) included, in teams of four.

This will be my first time participating in a so-called extreme sporting event. I'm very excited about it and I hope you will be able to support our team and Oxfam.

If you feel like contributing to a good cause (and get it back on tax if you're living in Australia), you can donate to Oxfam on behalf of our team here. If you've ever learnt anything useful on this blog and wondered how to show your appreciation, here's your opportunity!

We called our team the Mountain Devils after the flower of a beautiful native scrub that can be found in numerous places along the track. The track itself starts near Brooklyn Bridge (the start of the southbound VFR lane to Bankstown) and ends in Mosman, right under the flightpath of the Harbour Scenic One procedure.

So far we have walked the entire track once in three training sessions of 30, 30 and 40 kilometres respectively. The next training session will be 50km long and will start with a night section where we'll test our headlamps and try not to get lost in the Australian bush in the dark. The hardest thing with this track is going from water level to the top of the hill down the water level again many, many, many times as you can see on the track profile below.

Oxfam works in more than 26 countries around the world including Indigenous Australia. By raising money for Oxfam Australia we can all make a tremendous difference to the lives of some of the world’s most disadvantaged people. The event began in 1981 as a military exercise for the elite Queen's Gurkha Signals Regiment in Hong Kong, and has since grown into one of the world's leading sporting challenges. Oxfam Trailwalker is a global event, taking place annually in New Zealand, UK, Hong Kong and Japan.

If you would like to find out more or donate on behalf of our team please visit

http://www2.oxfam.org.au/trailwalker/Sydney/team/363

All donations, however small, are deeply and sincerely appreciated!

The photo above, taken from the back seat of Archer VH-SFR on our way to Brisbane recently, shows the area where the first couple of sections of the race will take place. That's a lot of hills to climb and a lot of creeks to cross to get to the finish line!

I hope you will forgive this departure from the usual theme of this blog in the name of a good cause. Our usual aviation programme will resume shortly.

More info on June 3rd Class D changes

A week into the new Class D rules at former GAAP airports, here are some useful bits of information I gleaned around the web. I haven't flown under the new rules yet, but that should be fixed very soon, more on that further below.

CASA released an updated version of the Sydney Basin Visual Pilot Guide. The 78-page document contains detailed information for safely navigating the airspace around Sydney under the VFR. This includes flying in and out of Bankstown and Camden which are now Class D aerodromes, the Victor 1 and Harbour Scenic procedures as well as tips on avoiding violations of controlled airspace.

The June edition of From the Tower, the newsletter from the kind ATC folks at Bankstown Tower, has a map of the manoeuvring area at Bankstown that I mentioned in the previous blog post, which can also be found on the official website of the airport. The newsletter also contains very useful examples of typical radio calls at Bankstown on the ground and in the air under the new Class D rules. And, as icing on the cake, they used Schoies airplanes and parking areas as examples!

A few changes to the Bankstown procedures as published in ERSA on June 3rd are available through NOTAMs. Pilots now need to report on downwind, and establish contact with ground after landing and clearing all runways, not just monitor ground as stated in ERSA. If you need to know more, you certainly know where to find NOTAMs too.

I flew a short dual flight last week to regain recency in the Arrow. We went to Camden via Mayfield, did a few circuits and came back even before the morning surface inversion disappeared: we could still see smoke plumes from local factories rise a little and then go flat.

Apart from that over the last few weeks I have been preparing for an exciting flying trip over the coming Queen's Birthday week-end: from Sydney to Brisbane and back in Arrow VH-SFJ, together with two other Schoies pilots. With a bit of luck we may even make it to Fraser Island for some very scenic flying.

We had a planning session in a meeting room where I work that was really successful. The 450NM journey from Sydney to Brisbane fits within four VTC charts, which when put end to end almost cover the entire length of this table.

Ed had brought in his laptop with Command Flight Planner, an awesome Australian flight planning software. With the flight planner on the video projector and all the maps on the table, this normally boring corporate meeting room took the allure of a RAAF briefing room. Or so we liked to believe.

Pizzas and Coke were brought in to sustain the intense cerebral activity. The plan so far is on day one to fly coastal from Sydney to Archerfield, the GAAP Class D aerodrome of Brisbane, with a stop in Coffs Harbour, fly to Fraser Island and back to Brisbane on day two, this time overnighting at Redcliffe aerodrome, and hopefully fly back to Sydney inland on day three.

That's the plan, and of course things won't go completely according to plan, which is always half the fun as long as you have a backup plan or two. Whatever happens you'll read about it either here or in the newspapers. :-)

Changes to Australian airspace on June 3rd

On June 3rd, a number of changes to Australian airspace classification as well as operations at non-towered aerodromes will come into effect. Whatever one may think of the changes themselves, the communication campaign run by CASA was quite impressive and, I like to believe, effective.

I read the briefing package sent to me by CASA, I attended the workshop at Bankstown and I used the online training package. I even listened to Peter Gibson, corporate communication manager at CASA, explain the changes on the always excellent Plane Crazy Down Under podcast. And I noticed the big flashing sign at the main entrance of Bankstown airport on my way to the pilot shop.

So, what are these changes about? In short, GAAP aerodromes will become Class D aerodromes, but not the Class D as we know it, a new kind of Class D that's modelled on the FAA Class D, not the ICAO Class D. This despite the fact that one of the stated goals of the changes was stronger ICAO compliance. Go figure. And airports already in Class D will of course switch to the new Class D.

So we'll end up with three types of aerodromes instead of the current four: Class C where separation is provided by ATC through radar identification, Class D where separation is provided by ATC in a purely procedural manner, and non-towered aerodromes in Class G where pilots provide their own separation using the good old see and avoid principle.

Except that see and avoid becomes alerted see and avoid since the carriage and use of a radio at all certified, registered and military aerodromes becomes compulsory on June 3rd.

In former GAAP aerodromes, taxi clearances will now be required, but only for taxiing in the so-called maneuvering area, which contains the taxiways in direct proximity to the runways and the run-up bays. No need for a clearance to move an aircraft from one end of the apron to the other for refuelling for example.

Going from GAAP to the new Class D, VMC criteria for vertical cloud clearance are increased from clear of cloud to at least 500ft below clouds and 1000ft above. This may have major consequences for circuit operations since it is not uncommon to have good visibility with ceilings below 1500ft. Will ATC instruct pilots to fly circuits at 800ft if the cloud base is at 1300ft? Or not issue clearances for circuits at all and only allow VFR pilots to arrive or leave the control zone under Special VFR? The CASA and Airservices Australia representatives at the workshop made it clear that they will be monitoring the impact of the changes closely and may issue amendments or fine-tune local procedures at certain aerodromes using NOTAMs.

The main changes at non-towered aerodromes concern circuit entry and altitude. We are now allowed, although this is not recommended, to join the circuit on base. The larger changes are about circuit altitudes: GA aircraft remain at 1000ft AGL, but ultralight with a cruise speed under 55 knots need to fly 500ft circuits, while faster airplanes, with cruise speeds above 150kt , typically turboprops such as the SAAB 340, will be flying 1500ft circuits.

I'm curious to see how this will work out in practice. I mean, whichever altitude they fly a circuit at, all aircraft need to get down to ground level eventually. Will we be safer with different types of aircraft at different speeds and different altitudes, but with the added risk of descending or climbing through someone else's circuit altitude? At least with everybody at the same altitude faster aircraft could safely overtake slower ones.

One side-effect of this rule is that overfly altitude will mechanically move from 1500ft AGL up to 2000ft AGL if turboprops may be around. Spotting the windsock suddenly became a lot harder. There is an interesting bit of information found in the CAAP 166-1(0) which states that aerodromes with runways lengths below 1400m are unlikely to receive turboprop traffic, hence overfly can take place as in the past at 1500ft.

I realise I haven't been blogging too much recently, mostly because I didn't do too much flying, and the flying I did, although extremely enjoyable, was not terribly blogworthy. But that's all going to change soon with a planned endorsement to fly the glass cockpit DA40 that the club just put online, and a very exciting trip to Brisbane in Piper Arrow VH-SFJ planned for Queen's Birthday week-end with a few other Schofields Flying Club pilots.

Which will give us plenty of opportunities to try out the new Class D procedures at Bankstown, Coffs Harbour, Archerfield and Sunshine Coast. And hopefully also visit a few non-towered aerodromes on the way. More blogging to come, more photos and hopefully a few new videos thanks a set of camera mounts I offered myself as a birthday gift. Stay tuned!

Spot the airfield: Casino

Birds do it. Bees do it. Even pilots with over 10,000 hours do it! Let's play spot the airfield again. This time on a flight from Sydney to Brisbane in a Qantas Boeing 767-300. Our track took us right over the town of Casino in Northern NSW, just south of the Queensland border.

The horseshoe-shaped lake on the right-hand side of the airport is called Horseshoe Lagoon. Casino being about 30 nautical miles from the ocean, I reckon calling this pond a lagoon is a stretch of the imagination. Global warming may prove them right eventually though.

The main runway is 10/28, with a strip for gliders right next to it. I mean, not a parallel grass runway, the glider strip is adjacent to the runway and form part of the same runway surface, the limit of which is marked by just one set of gable markers.

Casino is named after its sister city of Cassino in Italy. No significant gambling activities there, which didn't prevent a facetious person at Airservices Australia from assigning the name GAMBL to a nearby IFR waypoint.

The airfield being uncertified it does not receive any RPT traffic, the locals go to nearby Lismore to catch up a Rex flight to Sydney.

The Casino region is a big cattle farming area. With the Casino Beef Week only a few weeks away, this is as good a reason as any other for a cross-country flight. For a very tasty $100+ burger, straight from the producer!