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| Port Hedland |
Westbound routing allows for long legs in daylight but goes with stronger headwinds. Long range equipment helps to avoid unpleasant countries and/or places without avgas (organising sufficient avgas in advance was very difficult, takes 6 months or more). Finding avgas is one thing, getting it into the fuel tanks another problem. Needed a hand driven fuel pump on four occasions.
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| Colombo |
There are only few options to cross the oceans in a single piston airplane during the winter of the northern hemisphere. Fully loaded, the P210 had 15hrs. of endurance in FL160 at 170knts, burning 65liters/hour @72%. The overall average groundspeed was 152knts resulting from winds aloft and time to climb fully loaded in high temperatures. Sometimes it may have been a few pounds more than 1814kg MTOW. Flight route calculator on http://www.landings.com/, http://worldaerodata.com/ were helpful for the initial planning.
Some countries are easy, some can be very difficult. It takes a lot of time and patience to arrange all permits by oneself. Based on previous experience (ferried the plane from South Africa in 2003) and quotes, FSI had the best package. http://www.fsint.de/ The aircraft performance data were added in their system. They provided permits, flight plans, flight logs, and weather briefing on http://www.crewbriefing.com/. This was excellent and reduced my workload on the ground. Better some time to explore than getting up in the middle of the night to chase CAA officials or debate route changes.
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| Atlantic Ocean, lonely planet |
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