After over six months of heartaches and tribulations trying to get to the bottom of my CTD issues I finally seem to have a stable platform on which to conduct my second grand tour. The first was following the old Imperial Airways route from England to India in the TBM 930 and is covered in a thread elsewhere in this forum.
The TBM seems ideally suited to a long term project and so I have decided to repaint the old bird and set off to circumnavigate the globe with one or two provisos.
I am going to be using the TBM 930 with the flight improvement mod from Mugz and the improved G3000 mod from Working Title. The paint job is courtesy of Thermo69.
The trip is going to be flown using real world weather and the route will be dependent on this to some degree however I will be required to cross the Tropic of Capricorn three times, in Africa, South America and Australasia in order to to extend the overall project. I will set off from Carlisle (EGNC) and travel west to east in order to hopefully take advantage of prevailing winds. I have no firm idea of the route at this stage although initially I will fly south towards South Africa before turning back north towards the horn of Africa, crossing over into the Arabian peninsular, over to India, Malaysia, Indonesia and into Australia before turning back north up the Pacific coast of Asia. At some point I will cross over to North America, south through Central America in to South America, back through the Caribbean, up the east coast of the USA and then a trans Atlantic crossing back home.
Navigraph is installed and each leg will be planned via the in game World map unless I find myself running into navigation problems. Prior to flight planning I will obtain the wind data at the destination airport using SkyVector in order to plan the arrival however if ATIS information suggests otherwise this will be adjusted while en route. All flights will be flown IFR.
The first leg is a short hop down to Shoreham (EGKA) on the south coast. Subsequent legs may be of similar lengths or longer depending on the time available.
Skyvector suggested winds of 4kts from 350 at Shoreham which proved fairly accurate as it turned out so my planned arrival into Rwy 02 using the RNAV approach went smoothly. I should also add that using the default ATC also provided reasonable altitude change instructions. Obviously, moving forward I am prepared to disregard ATC if they begin to get a bit flakey.
Carlisle was renamed Carlisle and Lake District Airport in 2018. Since May 2009, the airport has been owned by the Esken group on a 150-year lease, expiring 2151. Between December 2014 and September 2015, a ÂŁ12 million freight distribution centre was built on the south-eastern corner of the site, which is now leased to Eddie Stobart Logistics. Stobart Group also intended to build a further warehousing and distribution hub from 2017 on land adjacent to the freight distribution centre. After financial assistance from the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership, there were plans for passenger flights from June 2018 to major tourism and business hubs including London, Dublin and Belfast but the target date was postponed. On 4 July 2019 the new terminal was officially opened, and the first scheduled passenger flights since 1993 were commenced by Loganair to London Southend, Belfast City and Dublin airports. Due to the current COVID-19 epidemic the Carlisle & Lake District Airport was closed as from the 1st of April 2020 until further notice.
As you can see the weather for the first leg of this mammoth project was perfect with the Lake District resplendent before a layer of low level broken clouds obscured much of the trip south over England. The RNAV approach worked perfectly although the glidepath bug is a little borked on the G3000. Autopilot flies the approach perfectly although the bug is all over the place. The only other bug or “feature” encountered were the landing lights which are far too bright in daylight and illuminate as if it is dark.
The leg from Carlisle to Shoreham took 1:01:27 according to my log book, turning out to be a perfect length for the first trip. The next leg will be south down the west coast of France, heading for the Iberian peninsular with the destination as yet undecided.