Voyage of the Southern Sun Read online

  For Anne, Jack and Tim

  Mum and Grandma

  Published by Black Inc.,

  an imprint of Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd

  Level 1, 221 Drummond Street

  Carlton VIC 3053, Australia

  [email protected]

  www.blackincbooks.com

  Copyright © Michael Smith and Aaron Patrick 2017

  Michael Smith and Aaron Patrick assert their right to be known as the author of this work.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior consent of the publishers.

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Smith, Michael, 1968– author.

  Voyage of the Southern Sun: an amazing solo journey around the world / Michael Smith; Aaron Patrick.

  9781863959308 (paperback)

  9781925435801 (ebook)

  Smith, Michael – Travel.

  Voyages around the world.

  Travel – Anecdotes.

  Patrick, Aaron, author.

  Cover design by Peter Long

  Text design and typesetting by Tristan Main

  Maps and illustrations: Greg Ure

  Contents

  Foreword

  Prelude

  1.The Descent

  2.The Founder

  3.Empire of the Sun

  4.Inception

  Act i

  5.Thunderbirds Are Go

  6.Wake in Fright

  7.The Year of Living Dangerously

  8.In the Heart of the Sea

  9.Catch Me If You Can

  10.A Passage to India

  11.The Viceroy’s House

  12.The Kingdom

  13.Rock the Casbah

  14.Behind the Glass

  15.Casino Royale

  16.The Flying Squad

  17.The Trip

  Act ii

  18.The Year My Voice Broke

  19.Dumb and Dumber

  20.A Good Year

  21.Midnight Sun

  22.The Village at the End of the World

  23.Saved by the Sun

  24.Canadian Bacon

  25.Sully

  26.Key Largo

  Act iii

  27.The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

  28.Call of the Wild

  29.The Odyssey

  30.Castaway

  31.The Way Back

  32.The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

  33.The Right Stuff

  34.The Terminal

  35.The Final Countdown

  36.Australia

  37.The Wizard of Oz

  38.The Way

  Credit Roll

  Post-credits Scene: Flying High

  Picture Section

  Foreword

  Legendary Australian explorer Dick Smith thinks Michael Smith was unusually optimistic to fly around the world in a plane the size of a Mini. ‘He’s lucky to be alive,’ he says.

  When Michael set off in early 2015 for London in an experimental amphibian plane, he had around 450 hours of flying experience. There are commercial pilots with more than 10,000 hours in the cockpit who wouldn’t have risked the trip, which required long flights over oceans and deserts, the likelihood of tropical monsoons and some of the most crowded airspace on the planet. Michael, an advanced beginner, wasn’t even qualified to fly by instruments. His aircraft, a Searey, was designed in Florida twenty years earlier as a cheap week-ender for lake-hopping amateur pilots.

  An engineer by training and an entrepreneur by temperament, Michael built in long-range fuel tanks and a satellite tracking system so his family and friends could follow him online, although he told almost no one about his plans. Amazingly, he didn’t install an autopilot, standard in every commercial aeroplane manufactured today, and most private ones. Probably no one has flown from Melbourne to London entirely manually for decades. Only a handful of modern adventurers have flown the whole way around without these basic technical aids.

  In an era when no part of the world is unexplored, and most records seem to have been broken, it’s perhaps hard to appreciate Michael’s achievement of becoming the first person to fly solo around the world in an amphibious plane. An indication of the difficulty of the circumnavigation is that no one had done it until Michael in 2015, a full 112 years after the birth of powered flight. The challenge is logistical, geographical and bureaucratic, in a craft by design intended for short flights. The long distances require meticulous planning and a significant financial investment. Crucially, Russia is reluctant to give foreign pilots access to its airspace, making it even harder to cross the Pacific Ocean from either direction. Using Google Earth to find an uninhabited island, Michael decided to try a never-before-taken route: from Alaska to Japan. With days to go before the weather shut out his hope of making aviation history, he set out on a flight he knew could cost him his life. Coincidentally, the first pilot to cross the Pacific was another Australian named Smith: Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, in 1928, who later died while flying from England to Australia, aged just thirty-eight.

  As a professional writer and fellow pilot, I was eager to help Michael tell his story. He was reluctant at first to describe some of his traumatic experiences, including a near crash off the Canadian coast. Eventually, he acknowledged that a faithful account had to include the good and the bad, no matter how painful or embarrassingly revealing it might be.

  This isn’t a traditional adventure story. Michael is fascinated by people, food, cinemas, landscapes, history and movies. He learned about each as he travelled around the globe. By the end of the trip he had realised what was most important to him: community. In a world that seems more troubled by the year, Michael’s discovery of the generosity of strangers and the universality of human values is inspiring to us all, aviators and others alike.

  Aaron Patrick

  July 2017

  Prelude

  ‘Everything I learned I learned from movies.’

  AUDREY HEPBURN, 1929–1993

  1.

  The Descent

  ‘Every man dies. But not every man really lives.’

  WILLIAM WALLACE, BRAVEHEART (1995)

  Contrails high in the stratosphere above me marked the routes of the regular trans-Atlantic passenger flights. Thousands of men, women and children were travelling in giant sealed tubes, entirely oblivious to me inching along beneath them. I wasn’t envious of the A380s, 747s and 777s streaking across the sky, even if their unreachable presence amplified my isolation. Eighty years earlier, only a privileged few would have been flying this route, lower and slower, and in a craft akin to my own, if a tad larger. If my plane and courage held up, I would fly into aviation history as the first person to circumnavigate the earth solo in an amphibious plane – a flying boat, in fact.

  I admired the explorers of days past, who pushed the limits of their equipment and themselves. Long before Facebook and Twitter, their triumphs only became known when – or if – they returned home. My journey was personal. I had no sponsors or publicity machine because I felt those came with a heavy price: additional stress and pressure that I wanted to avoid. I was quietly making, and paying, my own way.

  I had steered my plane, the Southern Sun, west from a long, smooth runway in Greenland’s capital city, Nuuk, on a Saturday morning in the middle of the northern summer. A semi-autonomous province of Denmark, Greenland is a cold and harsh land, effectively a mile-thick block of ice.

  Nuuk is beautifully located inside a vast harbour, well protected from the wild Atlantic seas. After arriving on the Friday, I had chec
ked into a hotel in the centre of town, quickly changed my clothes and gone out walking. The Greenlanders were warm and accommodating, and I was fascinated by the old but brightly painted and exquisitely maintained timber buildings, which were dotted among newer concrete structures built to withstand the Arctic weather. The city had one cinema, which doubled as a theatre and public meeting hall.

  I’d hoped to spend two nights in Nuuk, which would have given me a day off flying, but all airports in Greenland are closed on Sundays and I felt an inner pressure to keep going. In hindsight, this was absurd. What was the rush?

  After taking off, I headed south-west over the Atlantic Ocean. Within several minutes Greenland had disappeared behind me. All I could see was water, sky, scattered clouds and a few contrails. The air was cool and the sky clear. It was perfect weather for flying.

  I climbed to 4500 feet, high enough to clear most turbulence but still low enough to make out the white caps on the breaking waves below. It is the highest anyone is allowed to fly westbound across the Atlantic without instrument navigation. I was following what is known as Visual Flight Rules, commonly called VFR, which meant that once clear of an airport, I wasn’t being watched or directed by any air-traffic controllers. Legally, I was relying on the same equipment – a map, a watch and a compass – used by Amelia Earhart when in 1932 she became the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo, and by Charles Kingsford Smith, who in 1928 became the first person to fly from the United States to Australia. Of course, I had two huge safety advantages over Earhart and Smith: I always knew where I was, thanks to my global positioning systems (GPS) receiver, and I had a satellite tracking device with an emergency beacon that could summon help, if needed.

  Even with this modern safety equipment, though, beginner pilots like me don’t normally attempt solo round-the-world flights in planes with one engine. It’s like trying to row your way across Europe in a plywood Mirror dinghy. Oh, someone did that . . . Okay, what about: it’s like cycling across Australia on your BMX using Google Maps while wearing an old pair of thongs. You get the idea: it hadn’t been done before, because the plane just wasn’t intended for such vast distances. But she was the plane I had, and I was rather fond of her.

  My radio was a shorter-range VHF model typically used in smaller planes; it could transmit roughly 100 nautical miles, just over an hour’s flying distance. Once over the ocean, controllers were out of reach, but sometimes I could hear and make contact with the jets flying above me, depending on our relative positions and the weather. On this day the radio was silent. By mid-morning I was hundreds of nautical miles from land, and I had never felt more alone in the cockpit.

  In flying, altitude is time, and time is life. The more time you have, the safer you are. Any extra time you can stay airborne in an emergency can be pivotal. If the engine failed, I would have roughly nine minutes to glide the Southern Sun to a suitable landing site. The Sun is an amphibian, meaning she can land on the sea or the ground. If the worst happened, I wasn’t going to be scouting for empty fields or roads without power lines, the drills that had occupied me in flight school. I would radio a mayday on the emergency frequency, try to judge whether the swell would swamp the tiny plane – if that was likely to happen, I would have to get out as soon as it touched the water – and line up into the wind, so it would serve as a natural brake and cushion the Sun just before landing.

  Sitting in the cramped cockpit, I was wearing a Gore-Tex drysuit – a wetsuit crossed with wet-weather sailing gear that was designed to keep me dry and warm longer in extremely cold water. The suit’s comforting silicone scarf would ensure the icy Atlantic seawater could not get in and freeze me to death straightaway.

  Perhaps the long journey had given me a false sense of safety.

  Despite the danger, I did not feel any dread. I had chosen to be there. No one had made me do it. My fate was in my own hands. The Southern Sun had already carried me halfway around the world, along the edges of bad weather and thunderstorms, through civil wars and fuel shortages. I had flown through the night, exhausted, seen ice form on the wings and threaten to drag me out of the sky, and been intercepted by military aircraft.

  Even though I was, by any professional measure, a rookie pilot, I was becoming more and more confident. ‘I can do this,’ I told myself. Weather is usually calmer and more consistent over ocean than land. There were no mountains or hills. The Sun’s Rotax four-cylinder engine consumed twenty litres of fuel an hour, making it terrifically efficient. Even when fully loaded it was lighter than a 1960s Mini Coupé, and much less roomy. If I filled the large gasoline bladder that had replaced the co-pilot’s seat, the Sun could fly nonstop for twenty-one hours, which is longer than the huge Airbus A380.

  Like most small planes, the Sun had no weather radar. I relied on the morning weather report each day (today it had indicated good conditions, with some cloud on arrival in Canada) and on looking to the horizon for storms, as sailors have done for centuries. All I had to do was follow a compass heading of 200 degrees and I would reach my destination in around seven hours.

  Just as I had dared to hope, the flight was near perfect. The notorious North Atlantic weather had stayed away, instead offering glorious skies, little turbulence and tailwinds that propelled the Southern Sun towards the safety of North America.

  After five uneventful hours I noticed the coast bulging above the horizon. Within ten minutes a thin strip of white sand marking the beach coastline came into view. This was an isolated stretch of Canada. I could see no towns, houses or harbours. My map showed the land was predominantly flat, with some small hills. But I couldn’t see much beyond the beach because of a thick cover of cloud.

  The hard part was over. My Atlantic crossing was just over an hour away from completion, the ninety-eighth day of a historic journey that had started half a world away, in Melbourne. All I had to do was make a short flight inland to Goose Bay, a remote but beautiful city known for its mild winters and a popular airport for transatlantic flights. I planned to land, re-provision and sleep.

  As I got closer, I realised the cloud was more of a problem than I had hoped. Two bands of cloud hugged the coast and extended inland as far as I could see. One blanketed the ground, making it impossible to navigate using physical landmarks. The other started at around 2000 feet and extended to 4000 feet, just below my current altitude.

  Cloud loves land. When flying over water or sailing long distances, often the first indication of land is the cloud that builds over it. As the ground heats each day, soaking up the sun’s warmth, it sends moisture towards the heavens to form clouds.

  My morning weather report had suggested there would be broken cloud at the airport, meaning fairly heavy but with a few gaps big enough for the Sun to find its way through to the ground. But in this part of the world the weather has a habit of doing what it likes.

  I had to make an important decision. I could climb higher and fly over the cloud direct to Goose Bay, using my GPS. If there wasn’t an opening when I got there, I would have to descend through the cloud to land at the airport, something I was not altogether comfortable with. As a VFR pilot, I wasn’t meant to fly through cloud. I had no way of knowing how low it extended.

  I tried to radio the airport to ask for help. The staff there would have access to more information about the cloud cover and the safest route in. But I was 200 kilometres away from Goose Bay and no one responded. I had come so far, yet I was still so alone.

  I decided to fly between the two cloud banks at 1500 feet. I wouldn’t be able to see the ground. My electronic chart indicated I was flying over a peninsula; it would take about twenty minutes to get to Goose Bay. In a flying boat, it is common to drop down and follow a bay or river up to an airport – not only was this a safe way to fly, it also felt to me like a seaplane’s natural habitat.

  But first I needed to be able to see the land. As I flew on, the band above me seemed to be getting lower, and the cloud below higher. A vice was closing around the Sun. A few more mi
nutes and there was no doubt. There was no safe way ahead. The cloud was merging together from above and below.

  Not only was I legally not allowed to fly on through cloud, I really didn’t want to. Being in cloud is like having sheets of paper taped to the windows: all you can see is white. And if you’re not changing speed rapidly, you have no sense of motion. All you can rely on are your instruments. When you’re inside a cloud and unable to see the horizon, you can quickly become disoriented. Your sense of up and down deserts you and you can lose control of the plane very quickly. It could be falling out of the sky and you would have no idea.

  In my limited training I had been taught how to climb and descend through cloud but not how to fly along inside a cloud. That is for much more experienced instrument pilots. So I had always tried to avoid cloud on the trip, but I had flown up and down through clouds a few times. Even when I’d had time to prepare and focus on the instruments, it had been a huge relief to pop out the other side and into sunlight again.

  A statistic drilled into pilots during their training, and in countless magazine articles, is that visual pilots who inadvertently enter cloud have an average life expectancy of just thirty seconds. A cloud could literally kill me, and quickly.

  It was time for Plan B. I knew if I followed the coast about 60 kilometres south, I would reach the protected waters where Lake Melville emptied into the sea. I could then follow the shoreline, at tree-top level if necessary, up to Goose Bay Airport, which was located at the water’s edge. Taking this route would add about an hour to the trip, but it was for situations exactly like this that I always carried a few hours’ worth of spare fuel. I decided to reverse course and head back to the coast. I tipped the Sun into a gentle 180-degree turn.

  Perhaps I was tired. Maybe it was nerves. Either way, I made a mistake. Pilots sit in the left-hand side of the cockpit, and 180-degree turns should normally be made to the left so you maintain a clear view forwards, sideways and to the rear, in order to watch for other aircraft, clouds or terrain. But rather than follow my training, I did something instinctive for another vehicle. As someone who has been driving on roads in Australia and England all my life, where the driver sits in the right-hand seat, I did a right-hand U-turn straight into a cloud I hadn’t seen. All I could see was white. I was blind.