I arrived in Brisbane on a very important day - 6th of December 2017, Finland’s 100th Independence Day. After much celebration with the other fellow Finn expats (apparently there’s circa 5000 Finns in NZ but as many as 50,000 in Australia!) I was in no state to fly the next day.
Unfortunately I had to take care of work and other things for the next few weeks and before I knew it it was 21st of December already and I was still stuck in Brisbane! There was no way I was going to make it to Christmas Island in time with progress like this. Something had to be done.
In the dead of the night, just before dawn, I donned my baklava (Balaclava? Pavlova? One of those things) and sneaked past the guards into the restricted section of Brisbane airport to see if there were any speedier birds available for me to get ahead.
Well what have we here…
I have no idea what this thing even was. You could still see a faded ‘US AIR FORCE’ insignia on the hull, but it looked like whoever now owned the bird had renamed it: the words ‘Heart of Gold’ were painted on the engine cowlings in black paint, barely visible.
Everything about this bird looked fast, uncompromising and decidedly 1960’s. Someone was going to get mighty pissed if I stole this bird - but I was desperate.
I hauled the nearby jet starter cart over and discreetly spooled the engines with the roaring twin Buick V-12’s of the cart. Luckily there were a couple of cans of triethylborane lying around for the ignition too. I think I probably woke up the guards when the 50-foot green flames shooting out from the exhausts instantly blew in all the windows of a nearby office block. Ah well.
Like a bat out of hell, I took off.
With the throttles firewalled, I sat at the pointy end of the black speeding bullet as she bolted through the cloud layer in what felt like only seconds.
It took me a little while to figure out the acceleration / ascent profile but once I did a shallow descent from 47k to 40k at M1.0 and unloaded the bird a little bit, whoa did she want to go! The digits on the Mach-meter kept scrolling up at a dizzying rate until I showed M3.35 on the money. Unfortunately no ground stations were available for a ground speed check…
At first I had trouble keeping the bird flying tidily - like a wild horse, she kept bucking this way and that and finding the right amount of trim was hard…but towards the end of the trip she settled to a good pace and sat at a steady attitude with little input whilst burning through stratosphere at her ridiculous speed.
I designed a complex, intricate navigation strategy I like to call “Point nose northwest until you run out of dry land”.
After I cleared the cloud banks over Brisbane, much of the first half of the journey was done in clear conditions - at 48k ft altitude any weather would be under me, of course.
A little bit of cloud cover around Tennant Creek - I had to adjust heading towards the North from circa 290 to 330, as I was too far South.
Some red lights were lit, I assumed they were there to provide a Christmas-like atmosphere.
I was approaching Darwin from the SE. I decided to come right towards the North, decelerate following the coast up and then do a descending arc over the sea, hopefully coming to a reasonably good approach position for Runway 11. The winds at sea level were 146 at 6 kts.
Beautiful view of some of the dramatic ranges running North-South underneath.
Coasting along the coast, starting to bleed speed and altitude.
On approach heading back East, about 15 miles out. I will fly past Cox Peninsula in the South on the way in. Unfortunately some haze had developed, which wasn’t going to make my visual approach as easy as I’d hoped.
Finally the runway lights emerged from the haze and I got my bearings - I was pretty badly off-centre but in a good safe fashion wrestled the bird to something resembling alignment while trying to keep the 160kts stall warning from blaring constantly.
In the end, while the approach wasn’t pretty, the touchdown was greased if well off centreline. I pulled the drag chute, stepped on the brakes and the giant black arrow obediently slowed down to a stop. Success!
I quickly hopped out of the cockpit and walked away in an outwardly relaxed fashion, whistling. What stolen Blackbird? What’s a Blackbird? That one? Nope, nossir, never heard of it.
