Friday Oct 11, 2019
Leg 2
previous report | teaser shot for this one | next report
The next leg on the way to Santa took me to another of the Nordic (but not Scandinavian!) countries: Iceland!
(Here’s some Icelandic music to listen to while you read this report)
I picked a destination airport in the northwest of the country, which probably carries the @BeachAV8R seal of approval: Ísafjörður Airport
Starting this leg in VR (with my new virtual nav charts tablet), I finally appreciate all the attention to detail that went into the cabin of this aircraft: I usually find this exorbitant and unnecessary. In VR, however, it really adds to the immersion.
Look at those prop spinners while we’re taking off from Vagar. For this leg, I dialed X-Plane time back from real-world time by one hour so I took off around 16:30. This leaves me with the required 480 nm / 220 knots =~ slightly over 2 hours needed until sunset.
Most of the route is over sea and clouds again, sticking to FL150 for the unpressurized cabin.
I did have one little mishap, where I was wondering why I hadn’t found any fuel boost pumps after switching on all of the electrical system, internal and external lights, and heating. Turns out they are on the separate fuel panel. I discovered this at cruise altitude, where I had enough energy to buy me the time needed for the fuel boost pumps to fill the feeder tanks.
The mountains of Iceland are coming into view.
The route from the Faroer Islands to northwest Iceland has me flying very close to Hvannadalshnúkur, Iceland’s highest peak, which itself is located on the largest ice cap in Europe, Vatnajökull. It is the largest both in volume and area, and there are about 30 outlet glaciers flowing from it.
I was happy to just get a glimpse of the peak in the dying light of the sun.
I was very lucky to leave behind all the cloud cover above the northwestern fjords of Iceland. I had carefully planned the approach and was setting everything up to fly it by radio, trying to ignore the GPS as much as possible. The easiest way to set the switches on the GPS to VLOC and check the frequencies is when still in 2D, using the pop-up panel.
The thing is that when I switched to VR, the pop-up panel was still on my monitor and thus is a part of all the screenshots I took during this wonderful sunset approach and landing into Ísafjörður.
There really are a lot of screenshots, and you can choose (I couldn’t) if you want to see the full picture (unedited) or the ones where I removed the parts of the image on the right, below the pop-up panel. They obviously look a lot better, but you are missing the right part of what I was seeing there, so that’s why I included both underneath the next spoiler tags.
Same but edited to remove the 2D G530 popup from the VR screenshots
The typical Nordic red adorns the main hangar
After landing, and shutting down the engines, I just sat there, enjoying the empty cabin that still smelled of the Vikings I had just brought up here, watching the last light slowly fade behind the mountains. Oh how I missed those mountains in ‘le plat pays’.
And how I love VR. I’ll drink an Icelandish whisky to @PaulRix tomorrow!
