South East Mail

I did the south east mail recently, a run which i used to do a lot but hadn't touched in months. Its a good run for the hours and reasonably quick. Basically covers the top eastern cattle stations of South Australia, and some in the Northern Territory. Its good as its mainly cattle stations and not communities, so the load is light and there is nearly always someone to meet you, sometimes with a coke or pie!

I will let the photos do the talking today, as there is not a whole lot to say about it. The furthest south we go is a place called Todmorten. Its reasonably close to Coober Pedy, the opal mining town in South Australia.

This is at 6:55am, Alice Springs Airport. One 210 just departed doing a Western Mailrun, the plane in front is doing the same water run i posted about a while ago. This on holding point bravo, rwy 12.

Rwy 12 at Alice Springs. It has just been recently resurfaced, but they havent grooved the surface yet, so all the jets need to use the full length to backtrack when they land.

Nothing but sand dunes and barren landscape between 2 cattle stations, Numery and Andado. This was taken at around 8am.

This is on approach into Finke. Finke is the only community that we land at on this run. You can see we have no troubles buzzing the community when we land on rwy 15. Weirdly rwy 15 is also on the 150 radial from Alice airport, so to go directly to Finke from Alice, its a slight turn after take off and a straight in approach. Finke is also the the community where people overnight on the Finke desert race, for all those into motorcycles.

Approach into New Crown Station. It's about 15nm from Finke.

Mount Dare Strip! Took me a while to actually work out where it was the first time i flew here. It used to be our refuelling stop, but not anymore for some reason. It has a weird "taxiway" at the end of the runway, which is like a dirt road that leads up to the hangar.

The weird "taxiway." This is looking back towards the runway.

Typical bush Australia type photo! Couldnt resist.

This is a photo of Lambina Station. The runway looks a lot harder to see in this photo than it actually is.

I'll leave it at that, hope you enjoy. I also posted a video on youtube of a landing at Umuwa which i spoke about last post. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFJEpZADClw