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Recent |
Ferrying
a Beech Baron to Brazil
December 14, 2009
Continued
from Part Three
More forest
than I had ever seen in my life, an endless, mind boggling
expanse of verdant green, without road, without clearing,
without any sign that man had ever touched it unrolled below me,
endless and without feature.
Late afternoon had come
and while the shadows some two miles below me had begun
lengthening, the weather had kept improving until it was
excellent. I began to dare to hope that my arrival at Macapa
would be without stress or drama, which meant in VFR weather.
Some two hundred miles out I tuned to the approach frequency for
the airport and began to listen for other traffic also inbound,
but the frequency remained silent. Finally darkness came,
suddenly and dramatically as it did in these latitudes, and
forty miles out I made a call to the tower as I begin my decent
from fourteen thousand feet. I was answered almost immediately
and I requested the weather, crossing my fingers and toes and
everything else that I could cross. The tower, bless their
heart, came back with excellent VFR conditions and soon, over
the nose of the Baron I spotted the light of the airport beacon.
This pilot's lighthouse of the sky was giving me its encouraging
flash of refuge and safety every seven seconds, and I welcomed
it like a thirsty man welcomes a cold drink of water.
I
was cleared to land while overhead the well-lighted runway and I
dropped the gear and approach flaps and did a teardrop entry to
final. As the numbers flashed underneath I chopped the power and
after almost seven hours in flight the Baron's tires touched the
earth of South America and the country of Brazil. I rolled out
through the silky night, then taxied back to the lighted ramp
area and shut down.
Sitting in the darkened Baron, I
listened to the gink and tick of the cooling engines while I
gathered my useless charts and straightened the cockpit. As I
opened the door the cool night air touched my face, and I
reflected that sometimes the better part of a flight was these
moments after arrival. That time where the airplane is silent
but you are still joined, airplane and pilot still one being and
not yet released to become separately man and machine. You sit,
feeling the completion of a hard task and the release from the
tension that has ridden with you all day. This had been such a
flight.
Tonight as always after hours in the air, the
first stop is the men's room. But this would not be just another
trip to an airport restroom. Tonight I would find out, legend or
fact, if water really does drain counter clockwise below the
equator. In the rest room I finished my post flight ablutions,
pushed the handle on the commode, watched intently and…YES,
water really does drain the opposite direction below the
equator! I am exultant. It occurs to me, having brought charts
of no use for navigation, that without the GPS I would have been
reduced to flying south, landing at any airport that I
encountered and flushing a commode to find out if I had crossed
the equator. Somehow I don't think Juan Tripp did it this way.
And
so ended my flight but not my adventure, for there were many
exciting things that awaited me in the few days I would spend in
Brazil. Meeting the generous and wonderful people that live
here, seeing a farm the size of a small country, and being in
the middle of busy and crowded Sao Paulo were a few of the
things that impressed me, but this is the story of a flight and
I won't go into detail about my stay.
During
the eight hour trip home in the back of the Delta Jetliner I had
a chance to reflect on all I had seen and done since leaving
West Virginia. It began to sink in just how far I had traveled
in the Baron, both in terms of miles and of adventures
experienced, and I felt very grateful to have had this great
journey to a new land and for all the memories that I was taking
home. |
