Flying both in and out of Tauranga, North Island, in poor visability this week, I perceived curiosity mounting in the minds of kiwi pilots communicating on the radio.
Air Traffic had replied to my various transmissions, eg “G-KIRK, J3 Cub out of North Shore, 15 miles north of the field........etc with the abbreviated kiwi call sign of “IRK”, not the British used abbreviation of “GRK”. Later, with me at 200 feet on “finals”, listeners both flying and on the ground, heard a transmission of “GRK” from Air Traffic now adopting the more universally used system in the world, but with the possibility of my having to ”overshoot” the “approach” and go round for another 1000 foot circuit before landing.
That would not have been a problem for me but to the listeners the ”I” before ”RK” denoted a helicopter, here in New Zealand. It was the “G” before the “RK” that I think concerned them more as it identified my aircraft as a glider.
So what else is quirky round here.... the sun! She goes round the wrong way which gets me totally confused, more whilst lost in Auckland, I might say, than in the old cub. The kiwi sun rises in the East ok but then wants to travel through North to get to the West. Weird! And then there is me trying to understand weather maps for the Tasman Sea crossing. The kiwi winds want to go round the “Highs” (Cyclones) and “Low” (Anticyclones) in quite the opposite way to what reliably goes on in England each day. So I’m off to have a bath just to see which way the water goes down the plug hole.
Then there are the maps or charts of Australasia, if you know the difference. Do you?
Australasia appears in the centre of the world map instead of being stuck out on the side. Lines of longitude converge to the bottom of the paper and so, when it is time to consider Rhum lines and lines of Great Circle, they all curve the opposite way making the “witch’s hat” look like an “ice cream”! UTC of 12 hours difference to Greenwich Mean Time, just at the time of clocks being moved from Summer Time, with the added risk of a different date on the information for flight planning, it has been a mere bagatelle for my tired old brain when I am now to calculate fuel flows, at different throttle settings for maximum range, “point of no return” or the Big One........ the calculation I learnt in 1980s, on my ATPL course at the London Polytechnic, next to the Tower of London, that really stretched my maths “o” level and physics “a” level knowledge.
What is it? Obvious, if I cannot get sufficient funds by sponsorship to fly over China and Russia to “Oshkosh by August”, then I need to go from Norfolk Island to Fiji (for Dave and Anna’s wedding on the 5th) and then on to rendezvous with at least two USS Aircraft Carriers somewhere between Hawaii and Los Angeles or a suitably flat cargo boat between Midway island and Alaska.