When my boss told me, “We have a possible trip to India,” I was ambivalent about the prospect. I had been to a few exotic places around the world when I worked for a larger flight department, but I was with a smaller operation now. We went to Europe only occasionally. I would be doing my own dispatching. Of course, we would use a handling agent, but for the most part all the decisions would be mine.
I had some trouble accepting the idea of a flight department the size of ours going to India, but I started planning the trip half-heartedly. I began gathering information, looking at a world map, trying to figure out how to get there, where to stop for gas along the way and where to change crews.
I felt a new sense of urgency when I learned that the trip was definite. The few pieces of paper I had collected in a file folder soon expanded to fill a notebook.
All countries, of course, like to know if you are flying over their airspace, but some require that you get an overflight permit. After a few weeks most of the permits were done, and I filed the numbers in my notebook. Some of the numbers were 25 or 30 characters long with slashes, dashes and parenthetical matter. After all the planning was done the notebook was about an inch-and-a-half thick.
I considered riding the winds east to get home, but when I tried to run a flight plan northeast through China with our flight-planning service, I would get the message “unable routing.” When I looked at a chart, I realized the reason for the message: there are not many airways north of the Himalayas. Since we were going to Bangalore, India, we decided to fly through London and Istanbul. The passengers wanted to return from Delhi, after a stop in Mumbai (used to be Bombay), so we planned to return home through Moscow and Keflavik, Iceland.
Our crew left the U.S. in a snowstorm on Wednesday night, flying by airline to position in London. The flight wasn’t bad, but we had to wait around for about two hours to get our bags, because they were frozen in the baggage compartment.
We met the airplane, a Falcon 900, on Friday night at London Stansted Airport and took off for India, with a planned fuel stop in Istanbul, about three-and-a-half hours away. We flew across France, with its 8.33 MHz spacing, into Eastern Europe. I still get a little anxious crossing the old Iron Curtain. I grew up with all that governmentally induced fear from the 1960s, and I spent several years in the Air Force waiting to fly over and blow them all up.
On the way in to Istanbul, we heard approach give other airplanes direct to some fix they couldn’t find, so we had every chart and plate ready to go, but we couldn’t find it either. They finally gave us direct to the first fix on our flight plan.
Istanbul was a little dark and rainy, but the refueling went pretty quickly. The one setback was that we had to wait about 10 minutes for a fire truck, which is required there if passengers stay on board during refueling. From previous arrivals there, I was expecting a lot of official people with all sorts of questions and forms to fill out, but I guess they weren’t that interested at 1 a.m. The handler was the only person there, and he was happy with just a few general declarations.
A Tense Landing in India
We took off again, headed through Iran on our way to Pakistan. Controllers there seemed a little hostile, but it was early on Saturday morning. After a while Pakistan Control asked us for our Indian landing permit number. Before our departure, we had had numerous communications with the handlers in India and the U.S., but there had been no mention of an Indian permit number.
My partner said, “Yes, we have permission to land in India.” There was a long pause, and they said, “We need your Indian permit number.”
How could we have missed that detail? The last time I crossed the Pakistan/Indian border–five years ago–they wouldn’t answer the radios, but they never asked for a permit number. The airplane was new, and the satellite phone had not been installed yet, so we couldn’t call anyone.
Could AFIS save us? I made sure the sat links were turned on and fired off a message to the U.S. handler. “We need an Indian permit number immediately.” I practically pushed the transmit button through the center console about 50 times. The “request received” light came on. That helped a little, but Pakistan was still demanding the number. We kept saying, “Stand by, we’ll have it shortly,” not knowing whether we really had one or not.
After about 10 minutes, the “message received” light came on, and there it was, a huge, complicated number. We read it off, and the controllers handed us off to India.
We arrived in Bangalore two hours later. Bangalore is a major military field, but the military doesn’t seem to mind sharing it. We opened the door expecting to be attacked by the mosquitoes some of our pre-departure information warned about but instead were met by only a warm breeze. The handler came on board and welcomed us to India.
I signed a few forms. If you are going to more than one place in India you have to import the aircraft into the country. It’s a little scary, but so far we haven’t received any letters saying the government of India or an Indian aircraft broker now owns our airplane.
The Trip Home
After a few days, it was time to return home. The handler recommended a fuel stop in Moscow. I had been to Russia twice before, and both times I was impressed by how smart everyone was. I left both times thinking we were lucky they had Communism holding them back all those years, so I wasn’t worried about stopping there.
However, I was worried about all the “-stans” we would have to cross to get there. I checked all the paperwork one more time. The dates and numbers all seemed correct, so we launched from Delhi early on a Friday morning.
Pakistan took our handoff from India as if we were old friends. We crossed the Himalayas and transitioned into Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan–and metric altimetry. The system used to be pretty intimidating, but with the new systems you just push one button and everything converts. At first, it’s a little awkward saying “Level, Flight Level 179 meters,” but you get used to it pretty quickly.
I tried to familiarize myself with as many of the fixes on the flight plan as possible, but we would sometimes look at each other and ask, “Was that gobble-de-gook intersection we were cleared to?” Once a controller lost his patience with our inability to understand him, but mostly we were able to figure out where they wanted us to go.
As we approached Moscow the sky was a bright cloudless blue and the ground was snow white. Of course they use QFE altimetry, so we set our altimeters to zero when we touched the runway. That didn’t matter much since it was so bright and they cleared us for a visual way out.
The controllers seemed a little more relaxed on the west side of Moscow. We crossed into Finland and said good-bye to the East. The four-hour leg to Iceland was pretty easy. Our relief crew met us there, and we rode the rest of the way home in the aft cabin. We finally pulled up to our hangar about 22 hours after checking out of our hotel in Delhi, about 16 hours of flying time, and it was still just Friday afternoon. It was sometime Saturday morning in India.
I have to admit that over the years I have suffered from airline pilot envy. I picked the wrong airline 25 years ago (bad luck). When airline pilot friends told me about the giant house they just bought or the incredible vacation they just took, or all the scheduled time off they had, I tried not to let it bother me, but it did.
When I talk to my airline pilot friends now I realize they might have missed the journey. Their worries were about pensions, what to do with all of their time off and other airline political intrigue. My worries were about buying the airplane, maintaining it, writing many operations manuals, CAT II manuals and other details. Sometimes it was a lot of hard, boring work.
But the trip to India taught me the hard work was worth it. I didn’t miss a single detail of the journey.
