Flight Log: Punta Arenas SCCI -- Puerto Montt SCTE 09.02.2018/10.02.2018

09 February 2018, Punta Arenas — Puerto Montt:

Once again, we had to get up very early. We rose at 5 a.m., had breakfast at 6 and were picked up by our driver at 6.30. We now had the flight plan and met up with our handling agent at the entrance to Punta Arenas airfield. First of all, we had to free Marie of all her restraints because we’d collected a lot of rocks to keep the plane on the ground due to extremely strong winds. It was icy cold, but our papers were in order and we got everything required to take off.

It was almost too good to be true, particularly as we had had such an early start this time. However, when preparing and starting Marie up, it turned out that her autopilot hadn’t liked the cold and despite several reboots just didn’t want to return to normal mode. In other words, this meant preparing to cross the Andes without it and therefore a lot of hard work for the crew. Whatever we did before taking off, the autopilot just didn’t want to start. It was the first time that Marie couldn’t give the crew her all. Of all times, this had to happen during a very challenging flight over the Andes.

We were instructed to reach an altitude of 13,000 feet, approximately 4,500 m and a flight route over Argentinian airspace. Once we’d done so, sometime into the flight we realised that we’d have to ascend to emerge from the icy clouds. In the end we flew at about 160,000 feet, or about 5,300 m at an altitude where we were just over the clouds. Without an autopilot it does of course mean that you have to take the controls yourself and constantly change direction and altitude. This is quite a tiring task but of course feasible if you have full visibility. We two pilots switched over to give each other a rest. The situation was aggravated by the fact that crossing such a vast mountain range as the Andes always means significant upwash and downwash. As a result, you have to rev up the engine in the middle of the flight in order to maintain altitude at all because the plane is pulled down with the falling air mass. You also sometimes have air mass that rises very steeply and that the plane has to compensate for by keeping its nose down and gaining speed in the air to consume the energy that the air adds.

All in all it was good that we had tailwind of approx. 30 to 40 knots and sometimes flew at ground speed of 170 knots per hour. Occasionally we were able to take photos of snow-capped summits in the Andes, but we couldn’t unfortunately see a full panorama of the mountain range we were flying over. That’s a shame because the Andes are of course a challenging area for pilots to fly in. At some point we left Argentinean and flew into Chilean airspace. That was roughly the place we successfully crossed the Andes at the altitude of Lago Buenos Aires, to the west of Perito Moreno and an area that’s a huge national park. Due to the significant tailwind, we reached Puerto Montt about an hour earlier than usual and after circling a while were the second plane to land safely on runway 19. Once we’d landed, a lot of interested people from the airfield approached us, including the forefield chief with his follow-me vehicle. Our handling agent was the only person missing, possibly because we’d arrived an hour early.

We refuelled the plane and at the pumps it turned out there was a German-speaking Chilean guy with German roots who was also a taxi driver with his own taxi company. He’d heard that Germans would be landing in Puerto Montt. He helped us refuel and with our luggage and drove us to the hotel too. We thought we’d probably go on a little sightseeing tour with him the next day.

And that was the end of the day’s events, so bye for now.