Wednesday Oct 23, 2019
Leg 4
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The most northern permanently inhabited place on earth. As far as we know, that is. CFS Alert, my destination.
I hope to see Santa Claus there, I have so many questions and I need answers. Mostly of the why variety.
Sorry for the shitty pictures last time, Victork2, here are some more shots of the big beautiful planes as I taxi out. Light conditions aren’t getting better for the next few months though!
However, I am being professional this time. I waited a few days for the mist to clear and the ceilings to rise to a few thousand feet at the destination.
I have been messing with the HSI and LOC, and found out why it didn’t work as I was expecting: while the HSI heading is magnetic, the localizer must be set to the true radial or runway direction.
There are no approach charts available for CYLT, but I made my own: I will fly a GPS direct from Thule, then change my heading 40 nmi before the airport, picking up a 20 nmi DME arc around the ULT VOR station until I am on radial 093 magnetic. In this way, I can fly the approach completely over water / ice caps, thus safely evading terrain. Since the ceilings are above 3,000 feet, I should be able to land visually from finals. As for VNAV, terrain shouldn’t be above 9,000 feet anywhere in Nunavut (this region of Canada), so I descend to 10,000 feet at the 40 nm point, and start the slow descent to 2,500 feet at that point.
Waypoints are placed on the 20 nmi DME arc for visualising the flight path only.
A few rays of sunlight crest the horizon: although the sun itself stays out of our view, its light hits some particles high in the air, who decide to share a little of the light with us. This dull glow is still more sunlight than we will get for the next few weeks.
Take-off at 19:15 local time is uneventful, as is most of the trip.
A purple-ish night sky at 10 in the morning, and a cozily lit dark panel stuffed with classic six-packs and engine gauges.
The clouds get less dense up north, and we can see the coastline that we are following, as expected.
Actually flying that DME arc at 110 knots, all dirtied up, took a lot more patience than I thought. A few times, I got my hopes up and started to close in on the beacon when I thought I saw the airport, but of course, it was just some ships and an oil platform. 20 nmi is a long distance. Eventually, I did it though.
Ships off the coast of Alert? Isn’t this supposed to be an ice cap around this time of year? And is that a carrier?
On short final
Found a parking spot
Shutdown at 11:21 local time.
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