Saturday Oct 19, 2019
Leg 3
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Where to go next? I need to get up north as far as possible, and the most northerly airport known is Alert. But flying straight there is not an option: apart from the terrible weather forecasts that I found and the lack of approach charts or ILS info, it is a bit too far. There is no airport on the direct route either as far as I can find, so I will have to go around. I am not anticipating taking many passengers for this hop, it will have to be cargo only, filling the compartments to the full 330 kg limit and then maybe a single passenger in the cabin or some more cargo stuffed between the seats. This means I can stretch the range a bit.
After spending some time pondering this question, I had a dream, or vision, one night:
I woke up covered in sweat, with an existential fear that I had been living, working and flying my whole life in a fake, pixelated ‘Matrix’. I had had another of those terrible pixelated dreams. But while I was having this panic attack, I was murmuring the thing that had made an even bigger impression: “Ice Landing Strip, seventy-five-o-five-fifty-nine north, forty-two-eighteen-fifty-nine west, Ice Landing Strip, seventy-five-o-five-fifty-nine north, forty-two-eighteen-fifty-nine west, Ice …” I immediately turned on the lights and grabbed the pencil and hotel folder to scribble it down before I forgot.
As I was falling back asleep, I thought I heard a jingle, as from many brass bells, and it caused me to laugh softly, but heartily, as I fell back asleep. I am coming to Santa Claus’ town.
The morning after this jingly experience I filed a flight plan to BGTL, secretly hoping to find a sign from the great giver around the halfway point. I plugged in the coordinates into the FMS as a pilot-defined waypoint: seventy-five-o-five-fifty-nine north, forty-two-eighteen-fifty-nine west, name: ICEST
The plane was filled with 400 kg of cargo, and the fuel tanks were filled to the brim, with 1886.5 kg of fuel on board. I started the plane at 10:51 local time, and moments later I took off.
Goodbye Isafjordur!
The last I would see of the Icelandic mountains for quite a while. After this followed a short oceanic crossing, which was uneventful, and then the mountainous coast of Greenland appeared:
I was lucky to go feet dry above a multitude of glaciers:
Above Greenland, the clouds were intially low in the valleys…
But as I neared ICEST, the low clouds were gone and replaced by a high layer of overcast.
Until the moment when I got within visual range of the waypoint and started flying a search pattern. It was right around those coordinates that I encountered another strange weather phenomenon:
And no sign of a landing strip or settlement. Maybe it was all just a fever dream, and maybe it was obscured by this weird cloud screen… I will never know for sure.
Anyways, I continued on to BGTL: Thule Air Base / Pituffik Airport
I followed the MARTIN approach, with a nice DME Arc. I used the actual DME for this of course, GPS is for losers. And people who get too close to the magnetic north pole.
I was very glad to be able to land still in the sunlight, 1040 nmi from the departure airport, well within the pole circle now.
Approaching the hangars, I saw some of @Victork2 's crushes, and decided to park appropriately next to the other high-winged STOL turboprop beast.
