Back from Egypt

Now that I’m back in Germany, a few more impressions.

It wouldn’t be a true African experience if there wasn’t a pickup-truck-under-the-wing-refuel-from-jerrycan picture. Here it is.

Interesting to note my hangar neighbor who came with a beautiful Baron from the UK. He’s the son of Egypt’s first president and most influential Arab politician of the 20th century.

It’s really great to have a hangar in the desert to protect the aircraft from the sun and occasional sandblasting. It was built for a King Air which the town’s founder flew back when he was just a small billionaire. Now he’s got a Challenger which has to be parked outside. His bigger brother (owner of one of the largest mobile phone companies in the world) has two Gulfstream 650 so there is still potential to grow. Typical questions I get in Egypt about my aircraft:

- this can really fly?
- you fly in this one? Are you sure?
- is this a flying toc toc?

So that’s how people there now call my aircraft — a flying toc toc. In the Asian world they are known as tuc tuc and do bear some resemblance…

Off I took at 0600Z with an IFR flight plan to Alexandria Borg el Arab at FL120.

The routing led me to the Sinai, then across the Golf of Suez to the Cairo VOR CVO which is the central hub in Egypt overhead the main airport of Cairo and then on an airway corridor up to Nozza VOR to Alexandria.

Cairo from the air is an incredible experience. One of the largest towns in the world and you see skyscrapers right next to pyramids.

Alexandria was as professional as I got to know it — radio vectors for a visual approach saving me a lot of time. I didn’t have any headwind (highly unusual!) and was there early which caught the handling agents a bit by surprise. No marshaller, no follow me so I had to park myself between an Airbus and a Dash 8 and — I would never have believed it — I managed to do that, without a marshaller. I even managed to put the chocks under the wheel myself. Incredible experience, I thought one could never manage without 3 handling guys at least…

The turnaround took less than an hour including the obligatory “pictures in front of flying tuc tuc” session with all airport employees. Alexandria is a rather large airport which is very busy and I have a lot of respect for the quality of ATC and the service there. It really is up to European standards (north of the Alps). I still had enough fuel to make it to Crete including a comfortable 2h reserve.

I flew at FL120 in very nice weather and almost calm winds. ATC was professional and the Greek-Egyptian coordination keeps getting better every time. This time I would have been able to fly to Sitia LGST instead of Heraklion LGIR (Sitia got the sh*ttiest opening times of all airports I know) but I chose Heraklion because it really is a great GA airport and now costs the same as Sitia. Heraklion has a NOTAM saying:

LONG STAY OF GENERAL AVIATION A/C AND A/C CONDUCTING BUSINESS
FLIGHTS (AIRTAXI SEERVICES) IS NOT PERMITTED, UNLESS THERE IS 48 HRS
PRIOR NOTICE AND APPROVAL BY LGIR AIRPORT AUTHORITY.

I always email Swissport handling and tell them about my arrival. They confirm and say they have forwarded my request to the Greek CAA for permission and will report. Usually they never report back but I fly there anyway because what is a “long stay” after all? Me coming in the afternoon and leaving in the early morning? Also the GA apron is never full, now it was high season and apart from the 2 plane wrecks and the Thielert C172 used for training, there were 3 visiting aircraft, one of them a Phenom 100 with the interesting registration HB-JFK. I wouldn’t do any VFR night flying over the sea with that one… Anyway, this time I got an email that the Greek CAA has approved my request.

It always is a great feeling to see land after more than 2 hours on the Sea with no features at all.

As usual, I got the Sitia 2A arrival which leads you across the island from south to north and then west to the airport. Due to high terrain, ATC does not have a lot of flexibility but after confirming that I’m visual, they let me fly a shortcut close to terrain to the IAF. I usually ask for runway 30 which has no instrument approach but which is usually much more aligned with the wind. You fly to runway 27 and then about 10NM before the threshold, you break out to the left and fly a right traffic pattern. The terrain rises sharply there which means that you fly your pattern really really low over the terrain. That’s awesome!

After landing I refueled, the handling agent came promptly and I agreed with him to call him on the company frequency once I’m done refueling and parking the aircraft. Going from the avgas fuel station to the GA parking apron requires crossing runway 30 and apparently during the season they don’t take any chances and send a follow me car for the 20 meter trip which I did on my own several times in the past. Luckily the invoice didn’t take long this time and I was out of the airport in no time, on to my hotel. Everything appeared normal in Greece, the sun was shining, people were friendly. Only the restaurant invoice said 23% VAT which I believe was just introduced this week. Taxi drivers still don’t issue invoices.

The next morning I wanted to continue home and looking at the weather, I thought the earlier the better so I filed a flight plan for 0300Z. Airport procedures were quick, just filling out the obligatory General Declaration (Gen Dec) takes some time. I think Greece is the last country on this planet to still insist on Gendecs, even Egypt have dumped it. I wonder why they need it, including the 3 carbon copies…

A good routing which I flew at FL140 in very low wind conditions. I’ve flown this routing a couple of times and you always stick to your flight plan until Thessaloniki where they issue a DCT to the Macedonian border (which they wouldn’t call like that…). Then a direct through Macedonia and a bit of position reporting for Nis who do not have a radar until they hand you off to Belgrade where things work like at every major airport. What I really love about Belgrade is their great service attitude to GA. We are treated exactly like the airliners, they perform speed adjustments for a good flow and they tell everybody early on which position they have in the sequence (D-EXXX you are number 4 in sequence, expect radio vectors for ILS 12). Together with a 29.50 € landing + handling fee and avgas for 1 € per liter, this really makes it the best GA airport in Europe in my view. If only the problem with the long waiting times for fuel didn’t exist but I was lucky this time — about 10 minutes.

I arrived in Belgrade sooner than anticipated due to good wind conditions, the turnaround was much faster than I expected and on top of that, a 30 min departure slot was assigned to my onward flight.

So I tried to be smart and brought my flight plan forward to 15 min from the present time, hoping to get rid of the slot. As I feared, the slot came back immediately but I had moved to the end of the queue and now my slot delay was a whopping 2 hours! Looking closer at the autorouter email I saw that the slot came from Croatia and my route did go through Croatia. So now it was time to make use of a not so well known feature of autorouter: avoid country. I routed again telling it to avoid Croatia and I got an equally good route through Hungary:

The plan was filed and off I went — as expected no more CTOTs. I climbed to my standard FL150 and continued happily (although a bit tired) towards my destination. On the satellite picture I had seen some clouds in Austria along a rather long band but it was hard to say whether it was solid TCU stuff high up or blurred by a dense cirrus cloud layer above so I thought let’s find out. With 7h of fuel and in summer, there are many ways to get to the destination.

Shortly before Graz LOWZ, the stuff got pretty dense. I flew right under some of it at FL150 at around -1°C and then got into light freezing rain. That’s really annoying because 100% of it sticks to your aircraft and in case it intensifies, you have seconds until you turn into an ice cube. So I told ATC I need a northerly heading and as always in Austria you get a response along the lines “do whatever you have to do”. I climbed to FL160 as I thought that would give me a better overview of the situation and eventually managed to find a clear path. The Alps are the most challenging area for GA weather for sure.

The autorouter BOT told me that I was past the stuff now but it wasn’t really a big deal, I could see that a more easterly routing would have kept me clear and I could have gone VFR below as well. Even at FL160 and near the eastern end of the Alps, it doesn’t really look like a lot of altitude…

Once at FL160, I continued and shortly before Munich I was checking my phone again and saw an interesting email that had just come in. AIS Frankfurt had asked via AFTN to either delay or cancel my flight plan. Well, that would be kind of hard. I called FIS and asked them to contact AIS and tell them I’m overhead Munich and would like to know whether I should still delay or cancel. After landing I phoned AIS — some software problem they said, maybe caused by my bring forward (= cancel + file), cancel and file series to get rid of the Croatian slot.

You might ask why fly to Egypt more than once in small GA aircraft? Well, I have a business there and I am both sick of the Thomas Cook cattle transporter and don’t have that much opportunity to use my aircraft otherwise. It has some pros in regards to flexibility and what I can carry but isn’t the greatest example of where GA excels compared to CAT. Obviously I have to go there and make sure that the boats, the staff, the food, the beer etc. are all according to the specification…

https://www.facebook.com/oceandivacatamaran/photos_stream

Total flying time 12.5h. The aircraft performed flawlessly (obviously since I do all the maintenance myself ). With all the badmouthing of GA in Europe, I am still amazed that with an hour of planning, I can do a super smooth flight from Central Europe to Africa, only receive great service, have to do almost zero paperwork and just have a great time. So many more possibilities over here…