Trip report - South Africa 10/29-11/10

Peter wrote:

Were you not slightly nervous about flying such an old wreck in such a desolate area?

Cherokee 140’s are the probably least expensive airplanes to own and fly which have the advantage that just about every airplane mechanic can fix whatever is needed to continue flying. The O320 is next to bullet proof and they have preciously few systems and other costly items which can go wrong.

I almost bought this one before I found my Mooney and would have happily flown it VFR only had I known that my dream of longer trips would evaporate due to time constraints.

This one was in a rather sorry shape but nicely equipped with 2 axis AP (Piper Autocontrol II plus S-Tec 30Alt), LR tanks and a Nav/Com, DME and Mode C. For VFR this is totally enough, even tough by now she would feature a Trigg TT31 for Mode S and probably been added a GNS430 for 8.33 and a VFR Aspen to get GPSS for the AP. But most VFR folks would simply take a tablett with Easy VFR or Sky Demon and be done with it.

The 140, if properly done up, will fly 2 adults with bags or 3 1/2 without (no baggage compartment) cruising at around 100 kts @ 25 LPH. As opposed to a lot of other planes, it will take grass and uneven runways without any problem. And due to the fact that it carries 48 USG of Avgas, it has a quite decent range. They can get the Mogas STC, which is very useful and many have a mod for 160 hp instead of 150, which makes for better performance.

this one ran at about 95 kts @ 60%.

Considering that you can realistically get one of those for 10-20k Euros, it offers a lot of flying for very few money. And I’d be much more wary of a more modern airplane in these regions… a lot more can break which not everyone who ever worked on an airplane can fix.

The same goes of course for the Cherokee 180, which is one of the best load carriers to this day and will master most even short runways. For a Safari like this I’d prefer the one with the O360 engine.

Hi and thanks for that fascinating report. One question – how well did SD perform depicting airspace?

Peter wrote:

Were you not slightly nervous about flying such an old wreck in such a desolate area?

That aircraft doesn’t look like a wreck to me. It looks perfectly well presented, of course we can’t know its maintenance history, but a simple aircraft like a Cherokee 140 isn’t hard to maintain to a standard where it’ll be reliable.

Thanks for making the effort to post that! I really enjoyed it!

Grear photos and report. I have some relatives from SA and we’ve often discussed how the landscape is similar to many areas of the US. But the wildlife is somewhat different!

In that kind of environment, a simple plane with a non-injected O-320 is indeed a very good choice. You don’t need avionics. The Cherokee looks good in its original paint scheme too, a nice old bird doing good work.

Thanks very much for posting. It looks like a fantastic trip

It takes a lot of work to process a lot of photos, especially if multiple people took pics and their cameras are set to different times, and it’s even more fun if pics are taken with phones which set themselves to the local time

I have a little prog called Jpgtime.exe which makes it very easy to change multiple files’ time stamps, especially if mostly it is in 1hr increments. I also change the EXIF with it at the same time. But one still needs to know whose camera was set to what time…

The limiting factor on picture quality is the type and condition of the windows.

Great report Arne; very scenic

Thanks for posting it.

Were you not slightly nervous about flying such an old wreck in such a desolate area?