The microlight fantastic – part II
Oxygen
This was by far the most difficult thing to get sorted for the flight over Everest. Our equipment requirements were quite different to those of a climber as we would be ascending relatively fast. We planned on a 2 to 2 1/2 round trip from the airstrip at Syangboche. At an altitude of 3770m (12,250ft), this is the nearest usable airfield to Everest.
The accomplished balloonist Andy Elson is one of the world’s leading experts on this type of oxygen set-up, and he provided many valuable pointers on how to put a whole system together. We were also helped a lot by Jim Kellett who is a leading dive equipment supplier. The diluter demand regulators we used are known as a ‘Type 17’ and were fitted in the British variant of the Phantom F4 fighter. The MBU 12 and MBU 23 masks were American. Quite a lot of this stuff was acquired off eBay where there’s a thriving demand from collectors of militaria.
The next problem was where to get our oxygen from. Considered ‘hazardous cargo’, shipping oxygen anywhere is extremely expensive. The best thing is to get it locally. There is one oxygen factory in Nepal, and the leader of a 2003 medical expedition gave me valuable advice about the fittings they used. I was warned that the maximum bottle pressures available were in the region of 140 Bar which was a problem for us as we needed at least 200 to get the necessary endurance out of our lightweight aluminium and carbon fibre cylinders. There are several ways of blowing yourself up when you’re messing with high pressure oxygen if you’re not careful. Luckily, Jim Kellett came to the rescue by lending us a 30 year old ex-German air force hand operated booster pump which was lubricated with glycerine. Even the Sherpas found the 60 kilogram device hard work to operate, but it did the job perfectly.
With such a varied pedigree to our survival equipment, it would have been quite a risk to have gone to Everest without really knowing whether it worked: the ‘time of useful consciousness’ at 9150m (30,000ft) is less than a minute if you’re not completely acclimatised. To do this, we went to the Italian Air Force base at Practica del Mare near Rome where they let us use all our own kit inside their hypobaric chamber. They took us all the way up to 13,100m (43,000ft), which is about as high as you can go without a space suit. The only casualty of the day was the safety officer who was there to save us if our kit failed. He fell unconscious as we made our first ascent through 4600m (15,000ft) and we had to do a ‘crash dive’ before he was seriously injured by hypoxia.
We found some other interesting problems in the Fiat wind tunnel. The hoses supplying our oxygen went as stiff as a solid bar at -40ºC, and became quite fragile. I replaced them with ordinary industrial polyurethane hoses which remained perfectly flexible.
Angelo (the hang-glider who I would be towing over Everest) was flying in a head-first ‘prone’ position in his glider. He had endless trouble with the exhaust valve freezing in his oxygen mask. This was eventually solved by getting one of the latest and greatest USAF ‘Top Gun’ masks. These have the valves quite high on the cheek, making them less likely to fill with gob and freeze up.
Flight recorders
Being able to prove where you have flown, and to what altitude, is important. I got lucky when I flew over Everest as there happened to be a large number of climbers on or near the summit that day who saw me, and we took photos of each other.
Had nobody been there, it isn’t rocket science to collect bullet-proof evidence. For years, glider pilots have used GPS-based flight recorders which also record atmospheric altitude very accurately. Most importantly, these devices produce their recording in an encrypted form which is completely impossible to fake after the attempt.
On all the record-breaking flights I’ve done in the last 10 years, I’ve carried a ‘Volkslogger’ which is about the size of two packets of cigarettes and can reliably record a fix every second for eight hours. At £700 they’re not cheap, but it depends how valuable you think your reputation is.
Cameras & Video
No expedition is complete unless you come back with decent stills and video. For a microlight this means not just having cameras at hand to take photos, but also models fixed on the machine which you can trigger remotely. I still don’t completely trust digital to work at very low temperatures so I used my faithful 35mm Nikon 301 with a 15mm lens for my Everest wing shots. For batteries you must use lithium cells which are good to -40ºC and are extremely light. Energizer make them in AA and AAA sizes.
I’ve worked with many video crews over the years and with one notable exception they’ve never really been properly prepared. For Everest I had three small handycams fixed to the machine which worked OK with a neoprene coat and a chemical hand warmer inside. However, they were relatively bulky, the people fitting them didn’t do the best job of pointing them in the right direction, and they never got them to record any intercom or radio sound which missed half the action.
These days, reasonable quality bullet cameras are available for under £100 which wire into an ordinary video camera. These can be put somewhere safe and warm. HD minicams are still way out of my budget range but something is much better than nothing.
Last but not least, always take one of those waterproof, disposable cameras with you. They’ve got big buttons for easy use with thick gloves and are incredibly simple and reliable. A friend of mine got his Everest summit shots with one of these after his two other stills cameras failed.
Falling in the sea
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve crossed the Channel. I even did a seven hour flight from Crete to Alexandria back in 1985. However these trips were nothing compared to the amount of open sea we crossed to get from London to Sydney; more than 5000 kilometres which equated to about a quarter of the whole distance.
Of course the engines we use these days are a lot more reliable than they used to be. You’re considered to be unlucky to get an engine failure with a four-stroke, whereas it was merely a question of when you would get a failure with a two-stroke. Nevertheless, it can still happen, and it doesn’t stop you hearing strange things from the engine when there’s nothing but water as far as you can see in any direction.
For the Australia trip, we always wore compact life jackets whilst over water. We also rented an emergency dinghy, and fitted it on a fairly accessible platform above the engine. Usually I carry a few small flares and an emergency beacon, and on this trip we had an Iridium satellite ‘phone in a waterproof bag as well.
For cold water, an immersion suit will at least double your ‘expected time of survival’. Reconditioned ones from the North Sea oil helicopter operations are available at a very reasonable price from SEMS Aerosafe.
Finally, I always carry a sachet of shark repellent. Whether it works or not I have no idea. It’s probably more of a placebo than anything. I decided it would probably have no effect at all on the salt water crocodiles found around the Timor Sea.
Can microlights land anywhere?
One of the defining features of a microlight is that it must be capable of a “stalling speed at the maximum weight authorised not exceeding 35 knots calibrated airspeed”. In other words it must be able to go jolly slowly. So yes, a microlight can be landed in a lot of places where other aeroplanes cannot.
When you’re doing a long flight like London to Sydney (or London to Cape Town, which I did back in the good old days before the advent of GPS or satellite ‘phones), you tend to get stuck in an international system of flight plans, clearances and other permissions which only allow you to fly from international airport to international airport via the airways in-between, along with commercial aircraft.
It is only in places (like Europe, the USA, Australia, and some parts of Africa and South America) which are used to handling small light aircraft where you can escape from this constrained system. Then you can fly between small airstrips and other open spaces without having to get a permission from someone, or talking to an air traffic controller on the radio.
On the London to Sydney trip we entered the system on the flight from Cyprus to Jordan via Lebanon and Syria, and only escaped from it when we got to Darwin in Australia. We had no option but to fly these 13,500 kilometres ‘within the system’, which meant mostly flying between very busy international airports.
It can actually be quite entertaining to taxi around a huge airport with the 747 pilots having to stand up in their seats to peer over the edge of their windows to see where you are. You do have to be careful not to get behind a jet aircraft as you would probably leave the airport rather sooner than you intended.
Most air traffic people are quite accommodating. Once they realise that if they make you do a 16 kilometre Jumbo Jet final approach then you’ll be blocking their airport up for 10 or 15 minutes, they let you fly around in circles off to the side of their airport until there’s a convenient moment for you to come in to land. In this way I can actually be a lot quicker ‘in and out’ of their runway than a normal commercial jet. Rangoon was an exception and could only do it their normal way. Against quite a strong wind on the approach, and with a number of aircraft behind me complaining about the delay, I kept the controllers free of any other traffic for nearly 20 minutes!
The downside of big airports is the security hassles, finding fuel (we use petrol rather than jet fuel), the paperwork and the sheer expense. Landing fees are usually based on weight plus number of passengers, so you would expect them to be quite low for an aircraft weighing in at 450 kilograms with full fuel and two people. Usually they look up your type of aircraft in a book; needless to say our GT450 was never there, but there is a rather smart executive jet called a G450, so we were usually handed a bill as if we were one of those and another hour would go by while we negotiated a more reasonable price. The trouble is, once you’ve landed you’re in a poor position to argue. By far the worst airport was Phuket, who wouldn’t drop below $650 for an overnight stay without hangarage. Some – like Darwin – were free, but most airports cost between $30 and $100.
We had an endurance of no more than five hours (equivalent to about 550 kilometres). You would have thought that with an early start, two flights a day would be easy. However, when we were ‘in the system’ between the Middle East and Australia, we only managed a double flight on two occasions as we normally spent the rest of the day filling out forms. Some say the British invented bureaucracy and the Indians perfected it, and I can confirm this is completely true when you fly a microlight there. Usually there were 14 forms to be filled in, mostly asking the same questions, but all for different reasons and often in different offices. It took hours every time.
Maps & GPS
I’m a little bit old-fashioned and like to have the best available map at all times. You can drop them overboard, but at least they don’t have batteries to fail. Countries where light aviation is common usually publish their own special aeronautical maps showing airports and airspace, but for everywhere else there is only the American series of Operational Navigation Charts (ONC) which cover the whole world at a scale of 1:1,000,000. For the Australia trip it turned out that the two ONC’s between Singapore and Australia were out of print and couldn’t be found anywhere, but at the last minute a friend in the Royal Air Force had them printed specially for me.
You also need to know stuff like radio frequencies which can change quite regularly. The information is provided by specialist publishers who produce updated guides every three months or so. Jeppesen is the commercial pilot’s favourite, but for a long flight like to Sydney you need a small suitcase to put all their stuff in. I favour Aerad because I needed just three airways maps and two books the size of small novels to take us the whole way.
For short flights I don’t usually bother with GPS as a navigation tool, but for the Australia flight we had a splendid Garmin GPSMAP 496 which comes with everything you could possibly need including moving maps, terrain alerts and a complete Jeppesen database of airports, beacons and airway waypoints of the whole world. It can only keep enough terrain in its memory for one-third of the world at a time so we had to reload it with some 200Mb of data in India to cover the rest of the trip. The colour screen was bright enough to see even on the sunniest day and it never did anything strange.
February 2008
This was by far the most difficult thing to get sorted for the flight over Everest. Our equipment requirements were quite different to those of a climber as we would be ascending relatively fast. We planned on a 2 to 2 1/2 round trip from the airstrip at Syangboche. At an altitude of 3770m (12,250ft), this is the nearest usable airfield to Everest.
The accomplished balloonist Andy Elson is one of the world’s leading experts on this type of oxygen set-up, and he provided many valuable pointers on how to put a whole system together. We were also helped a lot by Jim Kellett who is a leading dive equipment supplier. The diluter demand regulators we used are known as a ‘Type 17’ and were fitted in the British variant of the Phantom F4 fighter. The MBU 12 and MBU 23 masks were American. Quite a lot of this stuff was acquired off eBay where there’s a thriving demand from collectors of militaria.
The next problem was where to get our oxygen from. Considered ‘hazardous cargo’, shipping oxygen anywhere is extremely expensive. The best thing is to get it locally. There is one oxygen factory in Nepal, and the leader of a 2003 medical expedition gave me valuable advice about the fittings they used. I was warned that the maximum bottle pressures available were in the region of 140 Bar which was a problem for us as we needed at least 200 to get the necessary endurance out of our lightweight aluminium and carbon fibre cylinders. There are several ways of blowing yourself up when you’re messing with high pressure oxygen if you’re not careful. Luckily, Jim Kellett came to the rescue by lending us a 30 year old ex-German air force hand operated booster pump which was lubricated with glycerine. Even the Sherpas found the 60 kilogram device hard work to operate, but it did the job perfectly.
With such a varied pedigree to our survival equipment, it would have been quite a risk to have gone to Everest without really knowing whether it worked: the ‘time of useful consciousness’ at 9150m (30,000ft) is less than a minute if you’re not completely acclimatised. To do this, we went to the Italian Air Force base at Practica del Mare near Rome where they let us use all our own kit inside their hypobaric chamber. They took us all the way up to 13,100m (43,000ft), which is about as high as you can go without a space suit. The only casualty of the day was the safety officer who was there to save us if our kit failed. He fell unconscious as we made our first ascent through 4600m (15,000ft) and we had to do a ‘crash dive’ before he was seriously injured by hypoxia.
We found some other interesting problems in the Fiat wind tunnel. The hoses supplying our oxygen went as stiff as a solid bar at -40ºC, and became quite fragile. I replaced them with ordinary industrial polyurethane hoses which remained perfectly flexible.
Angelo (the hang-glider who I would be towing over Everest) was flying in a head-first ‘prone’ position in his glider. He had endless trouble with the exhaust valve freezing in his oxygen mask. This was eventually solved by getting one of the latest and greatest USAF ‘Top Gun’ masks. These have the valves quite high on the cheek, making them less likely to fill with gob and freeze up.
Flight recorders
Being able to prove where you have flown, and to what altitude, is important. I got lucky when I flew over Everest as there happened to be a large number of climbers on or near the summit that day who saw me, and we took photos of each other.
Had nobody been there, it isn’t rocket science to collect bullet-proof evidence. For years, glider pilots have used GPS-based flight recorders which also record atmospheric altitude very accurately. Most importantly, these devices produce their recording in an encrypted form which is completely impossible to fake after the attempt.
On all the record-breaking flights I’ve done in the last 10 years, I’ve carried a ‘Volkslogger’ which is about the size of two packets of cigarettes and can reliably record a fix every second for eight hours. At £700 they’re not cheap, but it depends how valuable you think your reputation is.
Cameras & Video
No expedition is complete unless you come back with decent stills and video. For a microlight this means not just having cameras at hand to take photos, but also models fixed on the machine which you can trigger remotely. I still don’t completely trust digital to work at very low temperatures so I used my faithful 35mm Nikon 301 with a 15mm lens for my Everest wing shots. For batteries you must use lithium cells which are good to -40ºC and are extremely light. Energizer make them in AA and AAA sizes.
I’ve worked with many video crews over the years and with one notable exception they’ve never really been properly prepared. For Everest I had three small handycams fixed to the machine which worked OK with a neoprene coat and a chemical hand warmer inside. However, they were relatively bulky, the people fitting them didn’t do the best job of pointing them in the right direction, and they never got them to record any intercom or radio sound which missed half the action.
These days, reasonable quality bullet cameras are available for under £100 which wire into an ordinary video camera. These can be put somewhere safe and warm. HD minicams are still way out of my budget range but something is much better than nothing.
Last but not least, always take one of those waterproof, disposable cameras with you. They’ve got big buttons for easy use with thick gloves and are incredibly simple and reliable. A friend of mine got his Everest summit shots with one of these after his two other stills cameras failed.
Falling in the sea
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve crossed the Channel. I even did a seven hour flight from Crete to Alexandria back in 1985. However these trips were nothing compared to the amount of open sea we crossed to get from London to Sydney; more than 5000 kilometres which equated to about a quarter of the whole distance.
Of course the engines we use these days are a lot more reliable than they used to be. You’re considered to be unlucky to get an engine failure with a four-stroke, whereas it was merely a question of when you would get a failure with a two-stroke. Nevertheless, it can still happen, and it doesn’t stop you hearing strange things from the engine when there’s nothing but water as far as you can see in any direction.
For the Australia trip, we always wore compact life jackets whilst over water. We also rented an emergency dinghy, and fitted it on a fairly accessible platform above the engine. Usually I carry a few small flares and an emergency beacon, and on this trip we had an Iridium satellite ‘phone in a waterproof bag as well.
For cold water, an immersion suit will at least double your ‘expected time of survival’. Reconditioned ones from the North Sea oil helicopter operations are available at a very reasonable price from SEMS Aerosafe.
Finally, I always carry a sachet of shark repellent. Whether it works or not I have no idea. It’s probably more of a placebo than anything. I decided it would probably have no effect at all on the salt water crocodiles found around the Timor Sea.
Can microlights land anywhere?
One of the defining features of a microlight is that it must be capable of a “stalling speed at the maximum weight authorised not exceeding 35 knots calibrated airspeed”. In other words it must be able to go jolly slowly. So yes, a microlight can be landed in a lot of places where other aeroplanes cannot.
When you’re doing a long flight like London to Sydney (or London to Cape Town, which I did back in the good old days before the advent of GPS or satellite ‘phones), you tend to get stuck in an international system of flight plans, clearances and other permissions which only allow you to fly from international airport to international airport via the airways in-between, along with commercial aircraft.
It is only in places (like Europe, the USA, Australia, and some parts of Africa and South America) which are used to handling small light aircraft where you can escape from this constrained system. Then you can fly between small airstrips and other open spaces without having to get a permission from someone, or talking to an air traffic controller on the radio.
On the London to Sydney trip we entered the system on the flight from Cyprus to Jordan via Lebanon and Syria, and only escaped from it when we got to Darwin in Australia. We had no option but to fly these 13,500 kilometres ‘within the system’, which meant mostly flying between very busy international airports.
It can actually be quite entertaining to taxi around a huge airport with the 747 pilots having to stand up in their seats to peer over the edge of their windows to see where you are. You do have to be careful not to get behind a jet aircraft as you would probably leave the airport rather sooner than you intended.
Most air traffic people are quite accommodating. Once they realise that if they make you do a 16 kilometre Jumbo Jet final approach then you’ll be blocking their airport up for 10 or 15 minutes, they let you fly around in circles off to the side of their airport until there’s a convenient moment for you to come in to land. In this way I can actually be a lot quicker ‘in and out’ of their runway than a normal commercial jet. Rangoon was an exception and could only do it their normal way. Against quite a strong wind on the approach, and with a number of aircraft behind me complaining about the delay, I kept the controllers free of any other traffic for nearly 20 minutes!
The downside of big airports is the security hassles, finding fuel (we use petrol rather than jet fuel), the paperwork and the sheer expense. Landing fees are usually based on weight plus number of passengers, so you would expect them to be quite low for an aircraft weighing in at 450 kilograms with full fuel and two people. Usually they look up your type of aircraft in a book; needless to say our GT450 was never there, but there is a rather smart executive jet called a G450, so we were usually handed a bill as if we were one of those and another hour would go by while we negotiated a more reasonable price. The trouble is, once you’ve landed you’re in a poor position to argue. By far the worst airport was Phuket, who wouldn’t drop below $650 for an overnight stay without hangarage. Some – like Darwin – were free, but most airports cost between $30 and $100.
We had an endurance of no more than five hours (equivalent to about 550 kilometres). You would have thought that with an early start, two flights a day would be easy. However, when we were ‘in the system’ between the Middle East and Australia, we only managed a double flight on two occasions as we normally spent the rest of the day filling out forms. Some say the British invented bureaucracy and the Indians perfected it, and I can confirm this is completely true when you fly a microlight there. Usually there were 14 forms to be filled in, mostly asking the same questions, but all for different reasons and often in different offices. It took hours every time.
Maps & GPS
I’m a little bit old-fashioned and like to have the best available map at all times. You can drop them overboard, but at least they don’t have batteries to fail. Countries where light aviation is common usually publish their own special aeronautical maps showing airports and airspace, but for everywhere else there is only the American series of Operational Navigation Charts (ONC) which cover the whole world at a scale of 1:1,000,000. For the Australia trip it turned out that the two ONC’s between Singapore and Australia were out of print and couldn’t be found anywhere, but at the last minute a friend in the Royal Air Force had them printed specially for me.
You also need to know stuff like radio frequencies which can change quite regularly. The information is provided by specialist publishers who produce updated guides every three months or so. Jeppesen is the commercial pilot’s favourite, but for a long flight like to Sydney you need a small suitcase to put all their stuff in. I favour Aerad because I needed just three airways maps and two books the size of small novels to take us the whole way.
For short flights I don’t usually bother with GPS as a navigation tool, but for the Australia flight we had a splendid Garmin GPSMAP 496 which comes with everything you could possibly need including moving maps, terrain alerts and a complete Jeppesen database of airports, beacons and airway waypoints of the whole world. It can only keep enough terrain in its memory for one-third of the world at a time so we had to reload it with some 200Mb of data in India to cover the rest of the trip. The colour screen was bright enough to see even on the sunniest day and it never did anything strange.
February 2008
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