June 10 — Ilulissat, Greenland to Keflavik, Iceland
Flying high over the ice and the icing
Things didn’t look good Wednesday morning. Then, around noon, they improved dramatically. Instead of checking back into my hotel for an additional day, I headed for the airport.
The plan was to fly over the clouds over the ice cap. The weather forecast showed there would be no ice if I got high enough, presumably because I’d be above the tops, but also possibly because it would be too cold for ice to form. Below -15 to -20 degrees Celsius, the moisture in the clouds is already in the form of ice crystals and therefore won’t cling to the airplane’s wings.
Leaving a foreign airport is never as easy as leaving a US one, and though I didn’t have to wait more than an hour to be fueled as I did in Thunder Bay, it took time for the line people to figure out how to plug in their fueling equipment to fuel my plane.
I also had to make a trip to the tower to pay the landing and parking fees. You don’t do this in the United States, but in the rest of the world the people in the control tower act as airport administrators as well as controllers. It’s fun to get to meet them and chat with them, but it does take time, and the fees are often high so the whole thing isn’t as much fun as it would otherwise be.
I can’t blame anybody else for what happened next, though. About 10 minutes after takeoff I realized I had done something stupid. I was planning to fly at 17,000 feet (technically, flight level 170, which is the altitude that would be 17,000 feet if sea level pressure were standard, which is 29.92 inches of mercury), but the air up there is so thin that I needed to breathing more highly concentrated oxygen through a cannula, that two-pronged tube that you’ve seen in hospitals or hospital TV shows. My air compressor and cannula were in the baggage compartment, too far back for me to reach them. So I flew back to Ilulissat, landed, taxied to the ramp, exited the cabin but, without even stepping on the ground, retrieved my oxygen compressor from the baggage compartment, and got back in to re-start the flight.
The rest of the flight went well. The videos below show a couple of the highlights. Over much of the ice cap, there were so many clouds below me I couldn’t see anything. I asked for permission to stop at flight level 160 (about 16,000 feet) to get a bit better performance. The engine, unlike me, can’t breathe compressed air through a cannula, and it starts to figuratively wheeze a bit when it gets up that high.
I had planned to fly to Reykjavik Domestic Airport, which despite its name accepts international flights. It’s a short walk into town and also has a hotel right at the airport, plus it sells avgas. But it closes at 11 p.m., and I was getting in just after midnight, so I had to land at Keflavik, the airport used by the international airliners. A handler gave me a ride to the nearby town of Keflavik so I could check into a hotel.
Here’s what it looks like to fly over the ice fjord leaving Ilulissat headed east over the ice cap.
Flying over the ice cap, the layer of clouds below is the only thing that prevents the surface from being uniformly white; the dark patches you see are shadows from the clouds. In 2003, there was an overcast layer above me, so there were no shadows, and there was no blue sky to form a horizon against the white. Yes, it was more than a bit unnerving.