Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Some new charters!

Its been a while since i have posted, and sorry for that. I have been incredibly busy working 2 jobs and seem to be constantly working or sleeping.. with the occaisional drinking and eating.
This post i will talk about a slow charter to Elcho Island in a C206. It is about 300nm, and with a headwind, it seemed to take ages. We had to take a 206 due to the heavy equipment they had for soil testing. Not sure what the reason was, but we were there for only 40 minutes before we headed back home. The return leg tailwind was much appreciated.

Anyway the trip to Elcho, goes over some of the most northern parts of the Australian continent. Probably the most northern parts, except for the Cape York and Horn Island areas in Far North Queensland. The direct route flown meant we pass near Maningrida and Milingimbi, which i have also flown to recently and will talk about in later posts.

All these areas are served by regular charter flights and RPT operations, with planes as large as the Emb. Brasilia and Metroliners. I believe Vincent Aviation operates Beech 1900's as well, but that might just be the Groote and Gove runs (2 Other places i have recently been to!) (Gove is also served by 717's that go between Darwin and Cairns).




So without boring you too much i'll go back to the usual post a bunch of pictures and talk about them.







A view from the street in Elcho that i sat for 40 minutes odd. I didn't really get many shots of Elcho itself, nor the airstrip, due to doing a straight in approach which was pretty much all over water! Next time i'm that way i'll take a photo of the relation of Elcho to the mainland.






The last 3 photos were from the very northern coast as we were flying. The pictures turned out well, and having been flying for so long around all areas that people pay a lot of money to see, i don't really appreciate nor look too hard out windows these days. But this definately made my head turn and i think some of the passengers even grabbed their cameras.
So i promise i will do another blog post sooner, that i did this one. I also went flying with a mate who visited from Sydney which was good, and got some photos of that, into Milingimbi.
Thanks for reading.

2 comments:

  1. Thanks Mike for the news and the pictures are beautiful...the sand is so white!
    Hope you're getting some R&R,
    love Helen

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  2. Elcho Island, from the air that area is some of the lovliest scenery in the nation.

    You are correct, Qld IS further north.
    The NT goes to 11deg Sth. Qld goes further, to Nine & a Quarter degrees Sth.

    There is a certain rankling among Darwinites if I call them "Southerners". (Reactions vary from prickly disbelief through to scrambling for an atlas to prove me wrong)

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