The winds were forecast to be more in our favor for this day, and they proved to be so initially. Climbing up to 12,000 feet we picked up a good 14 knots. The weather was clear as Honolulu slipped out of sight behind us, and the Pacific looked pretty calm.
The Garmin gave us a continuous picture of our progress. When we ranged the screen all the way out to 2,000 miles (its maximum), the effect was discouraging, as the little airplane symbol seemed to be not moving at all.
Off on the horizon to our south we began seeing the evidences of the tropics as we moved into an area of monsoon weather. By the time we were a few hours away, we were in and out of rain showers, and getting reports from Majuro – “ceiling and visibility OK.” Fifteen minutes out we were still in heavy cloud and rain, so I programmed the instrument approach to runway 25 at Majuro.
As we descended on our final approach, the town came and went from view through the rain and cloud. The Garmin’s synthetic vision gave a representation of where we could expect to see the runway when we broke out. Then when we were about a mile out, the runway came into view. Breaking out on an instrument approach is an everyday event for an instrument pilot, but with nothing but ocean on both sides, this was a new one for me. Had the weather proven too bad, we would have had an hour and a quarter flight to get to the next available landing site at Kwajalein.
On the ground well before sunset, we refueled the wing tanks and the ferry tank in the rain, in preparation for our final day into Port Moresby, PNG. The monsoon blew and fussed all night, but calmed down significantly by morning.
No comments:
Post a Comment