Flight Log: Puerto Montt SCTE -- Santiago SCTB 11.02.2018/12.02.2018/13.02.2018

11 February 2018, Flight Puerto Montt — Santiago:

We were treated to an amazing view on our flight from Puerto Montt to Santiago with the Andes on the right and the Pacific on the left. The sun of course is in the east in the mornings so that taking photos was only possible against the sun and made the pictures look blurry.

During the flight, we saw over 30 volcanoes in the Andes. It's obvious that this region between Puerto Montt and Santiago is highly volcanic with the associated risk of earthquakes. Initially our flight was pretty unspectacular and the Andes came nearer and nearer as the range got slightly closer to the coast. To the east of Santiago, we also had to land on a little airfield that’s located directly in the Andes.

About one and a half hours after we’d reached Santiago airspace, the air traffic controller told us that we weren’t to fly 1.5 nautical miles next to the air route but directly on it. Which of course we did immediately. A little while later, the controller commented that he couldn’t see our transponder signal on his screen any more. He couldn’t see our altitude or position. We replied that we couldn’t imagine that was the case because our transponder was working perfectly. He accepted this for a while. After another half an hour, he told us that we weren’t allowed to fly into Santiago airspace if he couldn’t see a transponder signal on his screen. In other words, we would have to look for another airfield to the south of the city. This did then alarm us and I checked the transponder settings again. And it turned out that the transponder had switched from “altitude” to “standby” and therefore wasn’t transmitting any signal. All attempts to change the transponder back to “on” and “altitude” were in vain. The transponder kept jumping automatically to standby. We wondered what we could do and decided the best course of action was to switch it off and on again and do a reset. I did that, but after a while the transponder jumped back to standby. However, when I pressed “on” and “alt” the transponder started to work again and the controller said, somewhat relieved, that he could see signals again and we were given permission to continue with our flight to Santiago. It wouldn’t have been a good end to our first leg if we’d been stopped in our tracks on the last 100 miles. The rest of the flight went according to schedule. At some point we left an altitude of 10,000 feet and had to fly over relatively high mountains so that our ground proximity warning system told us to “pull up, pull up” twice. However, as we had excellent visibility, there was no risk to us or the plane.

We flew along the Andes in a long curve and were eventually able to see the airfield we were aiming for. The tower guy said a friendly hello and instructed us to land on runway 19. The little airfield is called Eulogio Sanchez, but its second more local moniker is Tobalaba. The air traffic controller also said he was calling from the Tobalaba tower. We landed on Tobalaba’s runway 19 and tried to get the tower to direct us to our service station. The workshop was called Aero servicio. As we had arrived on a Sunday, we weren’t of course surprised that nobody was around in the workshop. We met the workshop supervisor, Luiz, who did in the end warm to us once Kurt had spoken to him in Spanish and let us park Marie in his hangar. We arranged to meet the next day to discuss servicing.

We met up on Monday, 12 February and encountered a whole team who didn’t think it was any problem to carry out the 100-hour maintenance on Marie and also check the autopilot and the transponder. And that drew the last flight on our first leg to a close. We were delighted.

Bye for now.