www. The Windsock is the aviation community on the web!

Our epic journey started from Lakeland, Florida on October 12th and involved 49 flying hours in a period of six days. Our routing took us north via St. Johns, Canada before the long stretch over the Atlantic Ocean. The weather was good along the way except for St. Johns where we took off at 2 am in 70 km winds and rain, heading straight over the ocean. Our destination? A small island - Santa Maria, Azores. I never thought I'd ever be so happy to see land again - after 7 hours and 41 minutes of just seeing lots of water.

The Azores group of Islands was a beautiful sight. Our next stop was Madeira, another Portuguese island. Some airline pilots greeted us with amazement. They obviously didn't know what a relatively small aircraft would be doing on an island in the middle of the Atlantic.

In the next couple of days we flew down western Africa landing in Mali and Gabon. Nothing special to report about these places except french is not one of my strong points, which made communicating a difficult thing! The hotel in Mali was somethingelse - my room made me think of the movie a "Bug's Life” However we survived! The only thing left for our journey was the flight from Gabon to Botswana, which would take us over Angola. As anyone knows these people are known for their unfriendliness and their love for shooting down aircraft. Obviously we weren’t going to take any chances so we climbed to 25 000 feet (+/- 8 km) where it was a nice and cold -14 C! This was our longest leg so far and took us 8 hours - Maun in Botswana was our destination. By this time I'd had enough of the joys of flying through Africa so after refueling we pushed onto JHB which would take another 2 hours.

What a great feeling to be home again and hear familiar accents over the aircraft radio. My first Castle Lager went down without touching sides and I realised that South Africa is not such a bad place after all. Oh yes, and if I can, I'll do it again tomorrow!

Manie Grobler