Page 10 - Nov23

Short final into Heraklion,
uncomfortable to stare at a gauge that bounces around when you’ve been flying for five hours. So, we did what seasoned ferry pilots are really good at doing: calculate, monitor and hope. I bet I punched numbers in my calculator 30 times on that leg, coming up every time with the same predicted landing fuel, so we pressed on.
The landing at LGIR was unevent- ful and we were then able to ac- curately calculate the volume of the fuel tanks by monitoring the refueling. The right tank read per- fectly accurate and the left tank was within 4 gallons of the right. For tank volumes of nearly 200 gal- lons each that are only 8 inches deep, that’s pretty accurate mea- suring. We then had an accurate data point at the lower fuel levels, giving us confidence for the longer legs that were upcoming over Africa. Within 45 minutes we were leav- ing Greece and flying to Hurghada, Egypt (HEGN).
We landed on the immensely long RWY 35R at HEGN and soon were dealing with another round of security. Thanks to our handlers and our pilot status, we were marched to the front of a line of about 200 people waiting to get through the long security line.
After leaving Egypt we had four more stops, with 4-5 hours of flying between each stop. We estimated 17 hours of flying to get from HEGN to South Africa in the King Air. There are a lot of places in Africa to avoid, and we picked our route down the east side because the west side of Africa is rife with corruption and the threat of extortion. We felt it safer to fly around war-torn Sudan than to fly through Mali, Nigeria or the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The flight route from Hurghada
to Djibouti was southbound over the Red Sea, but in a zig-zagging course amongst international boundaries that made fuel calculations less ac- curate. We spoke with many differ- ent controllers, all with different ideas of the best routing through ›
Greece (LGIR), located on the Island of Crete.
I like this particular autothrottle feature very much: The ability for conservative pilots to set lower climb and cruise ITT limits ...”
and went to bed with the sun still high in the sky at 10 p.m.
Departing Luxembourg (ELLX) for Heraklion, Greece (LGIR, on the Island of Crete), was refreshing, not only because we were leaving the oppressive security of ELLX, but two beautiful parts of the world were below us: the Swiss Alps and the Aegean Sea.
Of course, with older aircraft not everything works perfectly all the time. On this B100, the left propeller was likely not perfectly balanced (annoying, but not dangerous), there was a green ALT light on the autopilot that would not illuminate (more annoying), and the fuel gauges were off at certain levels. It was the
8 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
fuel gauges that concerned me on the way to Greece.
The right fuel gauge was grossly inaccurate when full, it bounced around at the mid-quantities, and we had no idea what it would read when the tanks were near empty. The left tank had read perfectly so far, but we had not flown the gauges to less than 700 pounds/side yet and had no idea how accurate it would read at the lower quantity range.
We had 1,250 nautical miles of flying between ELLX and LGIR, five and a half hours of flight time with forecast winds, and we expected to land with about 400 pounds of fuel on each side (allowing more than an hour margin). It is woefully
NOVEMBER 2023