Vuelo con comunicación en español hacia El Calafate

November 28, 2011

it’s nice to be the captain…

…close to Alaska…

approaching EL CALAFATE

Much to our regret we had to leave Juan Bisi behind. He needed to attend a wedding in Buenos Aires. As far as we know it was not his own wedding.

Before we said good bye to him, he piloted us in a very professional way through Customs and arranged for our airport clearance.

The nights had been rather cool and in spite of the fact that we disconnected our batteries at every stop, we did not succeed to start up the turbine. We used GPU [ground power unit] and our problem was quickly resolved.

The flight took only two hours but this time the aircontrollers, once we left the Ushuaia radio, really were unable to speak more than two words of English. Fortunately Alex was standby on the extra headset in the cabin and could give us some help in understanding of ATC and the tower in El Calafate. Another USA pilot was less lucky not speaking
a n y  Spanish. He must have managed to land in the end, but we really must (and will) protest against this unprofessional air traffic control. A fatal accident is never far away.

Once we arrived in El Calafate, we really wondered if we arrived at the right place. Wide landscapes, ice cold lakes with small icebergs, land land land and land.

Sophie had invited herself with Claudie, une amie d’une amie en France, who once worked here as a guide and now is the French consul in El Calafate. She gave us local information about the land, the people and the glaciers when visiting her house. We met her new fiancé and four of his 27 grandchildern.

Today we visited the Perito Moreno glacier. It was very very impressive. We looked in amazement to this glacier, followed by a boat tour and a two hours trip/climb over a suitable part of it.

flowers and ice…

Perito Moreno Glacier

Ice men…

Ice world…

…salute…

bye bye Perito Moreno

Though it was a great experience we, the pilots, are eager to get flying again. The next three days without any stop longer than half a day and a night.

Hopefully the a/c batteries will be nice to us. Meantime Urs started looking for a new one. Our personal batteries are fully laden.

Though we are now on the same latitude as mv SUOMIGRACHT we will be unable to fly over the ship, since the Argentine controllers will not let us cross the Andes mountains for no good reason. Just for the fun of it I will call Captain Ruud Boukes tomorrow with the Iridium phone on board +88 1622469983

Tomorrow we fly to Mendoza, famous for it’s wines.

Just for the record: today whe are at 50% of our trip in days i.e. 21 of the scheduled 42. At the same time we covered 42% of our entire trip in Nautical Miles i.e. 8.072 of the scheduled 19.000

Will be continued.