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Old 10-30-2016, 02:35 AM   #1
Dave, Melbourne,Australia
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Join Date: Feb 2008
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Default Melbourne circumnavigator nearly died in Canada

I noticed this in Melbourne newspaper The Age on 26Oct2016:

http://www.theage.com.au/national/fl...26-gsaynz.html

Flying solo around the world in sea plane lands Melbourne pilot Adventurer of the Year

Michael Smith was approaching the broken western coast of Canada when he figured his long and solitary adventure — and probably his life - was ending.
Thick fog lay beneath his little plane, Southern Sun, and heavy cloud sat above. The two systems were closing fast. Suddenly, he lost visibility. He didn't know which way was up or which was down. His plane spun out of control and reached such velocity his speedo rocketed into the red, way over its maximum reading of 120 knots (222km an hour). His perspex windscreen began caving in. "I thought it was all over," Smith remembers. Frantically trying to regain control, he discerned a tiny dot through the murk. It was the sun. He levelled out of the spin and flew towards the light. And then, his chest pounding, he found beneath him the coast. Smith, of Melbourne, had been flying across the Atlantic for eight hours. He followed a river for 80 nautical miles until, within a great estuary, he came to Goose Bay airport and landed. It was, he says, the worst moment on his 210-day solo circumnavigation of the world, during which he spent 480 hours in the air, consumed 9700 litres of fuel and visited 80 cities during 2015. Such a trip might not be so unusual these days — except he did it in a tiny two-seater, single-engine amphibious plane, a SeaRey, originally designed as a hobby craft with enough fuel for a three-hour hop. The factory in Florida set it up to carry enough fuel for 13 hours, reducing cabin space to one seat. For longer flight legs he equipped the machine, which he named Southern Sun, with another fuel bladder, stretching flying time to 21 hours. He landed at airstrips and on the water, including on New York City's Hudson River. He "Huck Finned" the entire length of the Mississippi River, tying up to trees and sleeping nights bobbing on the river. "It was magical," he says. To ensure he didn't ice up during an all-night flight from the Aleutian Islands to Japan, he skimmed along at 460m — not much higher than Melbourne's Eureka Tower — the moon shining on the water below. No one had done such a journey in such a plane before. The extraordinary expedition has won for Michael Smith the 2016 Adventurer of the Year from the Australian Geographical Society, awarded at a ceremony on Thursday in Sydney. Smith, who with his wife Anne owns and operates cinemas — the Sun Theatre in Yarraville and the Sun Cinema in Bairnsdale among them - didn't plan on becoming the first pilot to circle the Earth solo in an amphibious plane. Long captured by the romance of the flying boats of the 1930s, he set out initially to retrace the old "kangaroo route" from Australia to England, and to study cinema in communities along the way. He hopped from Australia to Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, couldn't get permission to land in Burma, substituting it with Bangladesh, crossed India, dropped in to Saudi Arabia and landed at Aqaba, Jordan, because Iraq was also closed. Then it was on to Israel and several stops across Europe to Southampton, England. Along the way, he landed on Lake Como, Italy — the oldest on-water airport in the world — and had a blissful short holiday with his wife. The couple met up again in London, and Anne told him that, having got so far, he might as well continue. And so Smith flew to Ireland, Scotland, Iceland, Greenland and on to his frightening arrival in Canada. Averaging eight hours in the air at a time, he says he never got lonely. "I was actually pretty busy," he says. "I had no auto-pilot, so I had to navigate, fly the plane, check the fuel. I'd eat something every hour. I drank two or three litres of water on each flight." And yes, he never drank "out of the red bottle" — his toilet. After flying the length and width of the US, Smith planned to cross from Alaska to Russia. The weather was already against him, and he was grounded for two or three days at a time. Permission to fly over Russia never came. "I'd painted myself into a corner," he says. He flew six hours from Alaska over the Aleutian Islands and another 18 on to Japan, flying out first and storing fuel on an abandoned island, Attu, to make the trip possible. "I wouldn't do it again," Smith says. "But I wanted to get home." And home he went, via The Philippines, Indonesia and Horn Island, Australia's northernmost point. Finally, he landed on the water at Williamstown, where he was reunited with family and friends at the Royal Yacht Club of Victoria. His little plane, after all, was part yacht. Adventurer of the Year sounds barely adequate.

(The article includes Smith's around-the-world route map and photos of the plane above New York City etc.)
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