AROUND THE WORLD IN MUCH MORE THAN EIGHTY DAYS
On 24 November, German aviators, Karl-Heinz Zahorsky and Karl Karbach completed a four-month journey around the world in a Piper Malibu, taking in exotic locations and dealing with all manner of peculiar problems.
The most testing was surely a planned three-day visit to the supremely remote Easter Island, in the Eastern Pacific. They landed smoothly after an eight-hour flight from tiny Totegegie Airport in French Polynesia. But refuelling went far from smoothly partly because the delivery ship had to wait offshore for a week until the weather allowed the barges to unload.
During our flight around the world with my Piper Malibu N662TC RocketRoute made our flight planning really easy. Flight planning and flight plan filing even worked in very remote areas of the world such as Polynesia. We never had to change a flight plan - all our flight plans were accepted by ATC without changes.
"With fuel finally in the tanks they took off, only to be informed by the tower that they were trailing black smoke. They immediately turned back and landed, with a tailwind, to discover that kerosene was in the tanks, and now in the engine."
On an island which is only 63 square miles, and over 2000 miles from the South American mainland, to right this situation required interminable negotiation. Of course, the distant bureaucrats gloried in hierarchical condescension; as intransigent as the glowering MAOI statues for which the Island is famous.
However, the two men got their aircraft repaired and re-fuelled; jumping through the Kafkaesque hoops with kind help from the military at the airport, the German Embassy in Santiago (Chile), the Foreign Office in Germany and the Chilean Air Force. Local civvies were also sterling, using personal connections and deploying tireless efforts to help them.
Their good-natured blog is testament to the charm of Easter Islanders, the ever-replenishing allure of their strange home and the fact that you cannot keep an adventurous spirit down. “We know the MAOI stone figures and they know us… I had this feeling: I go past ONE and feel that he is alive! Then I turned with the camera really quick! And I caught him! He looked at us ... First he looks as always - but we have hardly passed when he thinks: ‘My God, are they still here?’”
Their onward flight to Chile was their 18th , out of a total of 27. They had already taken in Sri Lanka, where they featured on TV and in the newspaper, and were given a welcoming ceremony featuring a troop of Kandyan dancers in full regalia. Here they had visited Dr. Reijntje's School for the Deaf, which physicist Zahorsky has long championed, including by way of donations. Zahorsky is the founder of LaserSoft Imaging, renowned worldwide as a pioneer in scanner and digital software.
Flying around 19000 feet, the two men got to admire the planet from an unusually good vantage point in that rarity; a roomy, single-engined piston aircraft with a pressurized cabin.
Visit www.zahorsky.net for more stories.
