He doesn’t explain his decision making, but from the TV clips warning of a ‘bomb cyclone’ it seems he wanted to outrun even worse weather. Perhaps his hand was more or less forced by the absence of proper shelter for the plane in Kulusuk. That said, the storm was widely forecast so the question becomes: why depart Canada to Greenland at all? In any case, they made it, although flying a C182 at 700ft across the North Atlantic in that kind of wx is, shall we say, a tad adventurous. His copilot/passenger sure didn’t look too happy during the flight!
I’ve had some (lighter than this) icing in my 182 and I wouldn’t want to repeat it deliberately, although the airframe seemed to handle it fine.
Regarding proceeding at 700ft. If VFR so avoiding obstacles, are you really any more dead from an engine failure at 700ft outside of radio contact 100s of miles from the nearest rescuer than you are from 10000ft?
At 10k ft there’s time to get the raft etc ready, with luck even locate a ship to glide to. At 700ft… not so much.
Impressive
Wasn’t that much ice, was it? 😇
clearly, the title of the video was “optimised” to maximise number of views
just imagine the same content posted as “another day in a life of a ferry pilot”
Hello there!
PIC is no crazy for sure. Crazy PIC never gets near 20K PIC hours :)
Here is a second part of that journey, maybe that will give some insight of what was pulled of there :)
Best to you! Pawel
WINTER flight in a CESSNA 182 over Greenland’s ICEcap in 80kt winds
[ YT URL fixed – see here ]
The pilot is certainly not crazy, though I’m not sure which is the goal of this publicity, to produce YT clicks, or to ferry the aircraft…
Ah yeah, only watched the 1st vid, and from one pilot to another, I would humbly suggest to wear the survival suit fully zipped whilst flying at 700ft AGL over the icy ocean, lest no need to lug it along in the first place.
Oh, another thing, it might also be a clever idea to use full down elevator when taxiing downwind in such winds, even in one of those Cessna thingy…
You can tell from the pilot’s voice how extremly nervous he was on that departure.
What is astounding is how they got up to FL150 there, with so little ice.
On this flight, they didn’t wear immersion suits at all.
